Re: tonal language

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:
> > 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.
>
> 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. (Not sure
whether they can even be called bimorphemic nowadays.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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