Re: tonal language

On Friday, January 7, 2005, at 10:25 , Philip Newton wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Jan 2005 11:53:46 -0800, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 08:55:54AM -0300, Pablo Flores wrote:
[snip]
>> Yep, exactly. It also happens frequently in my L1, in words such is
>> _gina_ "child". Speakers like myself don't even know what the original
>> syllables stood for anymore, it's become an unanalysable unit.
>
> Or Mandarin zhi1zhu1 "spider" or hu2die2 "butterfly"? I've seen the
> individual characters glossed as "spider" and "butterfly",
> respectively, but do they ever occur separately, or with any other
> character than their "companion"? I can imagine that those are (at
> least synchronically) unanalysable, two-syllable words.
They are also _diachronically_ unanalyzable, two-syllable words. There are
a handful of such words, such as:
pi2pa "four stringed plucked instrument"
pi2pa "loquat tree" (These two words are homophones)
qing1ting2 "dragon-fly"
gan3lan3 "olive"
pu2tao "grapes"
ge1da "a boil"
Pu2sa4 "Bodhisattva"
he2shang "(Buddist) priest"
bo1li "grass"
hu2tong "lane"

and, I believe, a few others.

> (Not sure whether they can even be called bimorphemic nowadays.)
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. It is only the traditional written
language that adopted the fiction of treating them as two 'quasi-morphemes'
, each with the same meaning  :)

Ray
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