Re: tonal language

On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 08:55:54AM -0300, Pablo Flores wrote:
> 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?
Here are some Mandarin examples, off the top of my head:

_qian2 tu2_ - future, prospect. You can't really break this one down.

_ming4 ling4_ - command, order. I don't think this one can be broken
down either.

_fang1 zhou1_ - a large ship, used to translate Noah's ark in the
Chinese translation of the Bible. IIRC, _zhou1_ is an archaic term
meaning "ship"; but nowadays if you say _zhou1_ in isolation, people
will think you're saying "nation" or "province" (such as in _guang3
zhou1_, the province).

_tai4 yang2_ - the sun. IIRC, _yang2_ is the "yang" of "yin & yang"
fame, but in isolation it wouldn't refer to the sun. (At least, not in
common speech.)


> 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.
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.


T

--
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. -- P. Erdos

Reply