Re: tonal language
| From: | H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 1:35 |
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On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 07:45:18AM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
[...]
> They are also _diachronically_ unanalyzable, two-syllable words. There are
> a handful of such words, such as:
[...]
> bo1li "grass"
Surely you mean "glass"?
[...]
> They are not and never have been - they are all monomorphemic disyllabic
> words. They were borrowed at a very early date and the origin of most is
> either not known or is hypothetical.
Were they borrowed, or were they actually indigenous words that have
always been disyllabic?
> It is only the traditional written language that adopted the fiction
> of treating them as two 'quasi-morphemes' , each with the same
> meaning :)
[...]
Yeah, Chinese writing has the tendency to push the hypothetical ideal
of one syllable per word a tad too far.
T
--
Spaghetti code may be tangly, but lasagna code is just cheesy.
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