Re: tonal language
| From: | Pablo Flores <pablodavidflores@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 4, 2005, 11:55 |
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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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