Re: Thoughts on Word building

Hi!

Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...> writes:
> On Wed, 07 Dec 2005 21:05:01 -0500, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:
>
> > But the meanings of the compounds will be learned individually, just
> > like the meanings of the English words "compose", "dispose",
> > "impose",  etc. (does it really help in learning the meanings of
> > these words that  they all share the root "pose"?)
>
> Well, if you know that "pose" means "place (v)", it helps. At least,
> it  helps me. I never could get the hang of "invoke" vs "evoke" until
> I  cottoned the connection to "vocare".
>
> 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.

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.

Exactly the way you describe, I still find Latin or Greek words I
suddenly understand compositionally by identifying a stem.  If they
were written in a Kanji style writing system, I'd have understood them
much earlier, of course.

A Korean told me that many from the the younger generation lose this
insight now, because Hanja aren't used much anymore.  He found it very
sad that this heritage is lost (and so did I) -- Korean has a vast
amount of loans from Chinese.

**Henrik

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