Re: tonal language
| From: | Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Tuesday, January 11, 2005, 18:40 |
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On Tuesday, January 11, 2005, at 01:35 , H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 07:45:18AM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
> [...]
>> They are also _diachronically_ unanalyzable, two-syllable words. There
>> are
>> a handful of such words, such as:
> [...]
>> bo1li "grass"
>
> Surely you mean "glass"?
OOPS!! Yes, I did.
>
> [...]
>> 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.
>
> Were they borrowed, or were they actually indigenous words that have
> always been disyllabic?
Who knows? I think it is certain tha some, for example Pu2sa4 (Bodhisattva)
, are borrowings, but - as I said - the origin of many of these words are
either unknown or hypothetical.
>> It is only the traditional written language that adopted the fiction
>> of treating them as two 'quasi-morphemes' , each with the same
>> meaning :)
> [...]
>
> Yeah, Chinese writing has the tendency to push the hypothetical ideal
> of one syllable per word a tad too far.
Yep.
Ray
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