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Re: tonal language

From:Pablo Flores <pablodavidflores@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 4, 2005, 11:55
On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 12:42:48 -0800, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...> wrote:
> It's a common misconception that tone and tone alone is responsible > for determining the meaning of words in Mandarin (or other Sinitic > langs). The fact is that *many* different words may actually share the > same syllable with the same tone. How they are differentiated is based > on context and also with word-groups which, while analysable, don't > occur in isolation (except in poetry---but Chinese poetry tends to > stretch the theoretical ideal of one syllable per word a bit too far).
Could you give examples? I became very interested in this kind of thing some time ago, and I'm even more interested now that I'm studying Japanese (speaking of ripping off other natlangs). Is there a name for that phenomenon, when you avoid ambiguity by compounding? I mean for example, Japanese has Chinese-borrowed _seimei_ and _jinsei_ for "life" (slightly different meanings), where _sei_ (Unicode 0x751F) alone already means "life" (or "birth") -- but it has a gazillion homophones, so it gets _mei_ (Unicode 0x547D) "fate, destiny, life, appoint" or _jin_ (Unicode 0x4EBA) "person" as a kind of specifier. I understand many words in modern Mandarin are bimorphemic like this too, for the same reason. --Pablo

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H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>