Re: Thoughts on Word building

Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> writes:
>>I'm wondering whether Latin might not be more suited to Kanji than
>>English, if only because there would (it seems to me) be fewer eroded
>>and  degraded parts of words to have to wonder about. For that matter,
>>what  about the failed but IMO brilliant-at-least-in-concept IAL
>>Glossa? That's  got good, robust compounding elements that combine
>>logically, or at least  the mechanics of it are logical in that they
>>have no sandhi that I recall.
>
>
> I thought about trying this for German, but never did. :-) Further, my
> idea was to write the inflectional endings in a different script just
> like in Japanese or Korean.  I never really started, though.  I think
> I've seen a Wiki somewhere where a project of this kind is started.  I
> rembember it had some 50 entries or so and indeed decomposed Latin
> loans in English (but not exclusively these words) into Kanji.
I've attempted to do this sort of thing with English a couple of times,
using (once) kana and (another time) zhuyin fuhao (aka bopomofo) for the
English affixes and words like "the". I didn't get very far, since I
don't know either Latin or Chinese characters very well, but here's one
attempt at writing "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog":

ㄐㄜ速褐狐跳ㄙㄡㄩㄦㄐㄜ怠犬。

ㄐㄜ	th-e
速	quick
褐	brown
狐	fox
跳ㄙ	jump-s
ㄡㄩㄦ	o-v-er
ㄐㄜ	th-e
怠	lazy
犬	dog

Words like "quick", "brown", and "fox" work out without much trouble.
"Jumps" requires an inflection, but the character for initial s- can be
adapted as a plural suffix. You can use the same character (such as 一)
to represent Latin and Greek roots (mono-, uni-), and put them together
to form words like "unicorn" 一角 and "pentagon" 五角. (Note the same
character is used for "horn", "corner", "angle".) But you start running
into trouble with words like "squirrel" that don't have a convenient
Chinese or Japanese equivalent (Chinese has a two-character 松鼠, but
this would be read as "pine rat" in English; Japanese has 栗鼠 "chestnut
rat"). So you either end up with two-character combinations that have to
be read as a unit (like Japanese 今日 "kyou" or 下手 "heta"), or spell
out the word as zhuyin fuhao (ㄙㄎㄨㄦㄌ). After a while you begin to
see how the Japanese writing system got that way.

I tried to adapt Chinese characters for writing one of my own languages,
Kirezagi (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/kirezagi.html), with similar
results. Kirezagi has a lot of compounds like "muňai" for "tiger" (mui
"cat" + ňai "fire") and "timui" for "owl" (ti "bird" + mui "cat"), which
work out well using Chinese characters. I also picked out specific
Chinese characters to use for inflections, like 現 for present tense and
後 for past tense. But at the time I didn't have any convenient way of
typing Chinese or Japanese characters, so that project didn't get very far.

> The transparency of the compounds written in Chinese must really be a
> help in understanding one's own language.  Especially for Japanese and
> Koreans etc. who have a lot of Chinese loans, which become clear by
> how they are written.  I even read in a Chinese forum that people
> whose mothertongue is Shanghainese had this 'aha!' when they learned
> to write, because some compounds (non-loans! native ones!) was already
> heavily fused and unanalysable from spoken language alone.
I've found that learning to read Japanese words can in some cases make
them easier to remember, or at least to draw attention to unexpected
similarities between words like "kana" 仮名 (characters of the Japanese
syllabary) and "namae" 名前 (name). For actually learning to read the
words, I've had better luck learning each word as a unit, rather than
learning individual characters and then learning how the characters are
combined to form words. For instance, I'll recognize 大丈夫 as
"daizyoubu" ("okay", "all right", "safe"), but I don't easily recognize
the individual characters in other contexts except for 大 ("big"), and
the meaning of "big" doesn't help me recognize "daizyoubu".

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