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Re: tonal language

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 1:35
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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Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>