Re: Divergent Scripts

Taylor Family scripsit:

> There are very few characters
> in Chinese that act in a fashion similar to the English morpheme '-er' or
> '-ness'.  Most, if
> not all, Chinese characters have an attached meaning, and can stand on their
> own as a "word".
Well, consider as an obvious example, -guo in Zhongguo (China).  This
undoubtedly means "country" and is found as the second syllable of
many country names.  But it can't stand alone (probably because it
would be too ambiguous).  To say "country" by itself, one must use
the compound guojia.  Modern standard Mandarin has an awful lot of these.

> Thus, most of the two character "words" in Chinese are compounds like the
> English word 'blackboard'.
> I guess the real problem lies in whether we consider 'black' and 'board' to
> be morphemes of the word
> 'blackboard', or whether we consider them to be two separate words
> Either way,
> while I think that Chinese is moving along a continuum from 'logographic' to
> 'morpho-syllabic', it has yet to reach its final destination.
I think we can agree on that!

--
A mosquito cried out in his pain,               John Cowan
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