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Re: Sidestepping Spelling Reform - Monosyllabic Characters

From:Steve Cooney <stevencooney@...>
Date:Wednesday, February 4, 2004, 18:05
--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:

> Indeed, we might (as Mark Rosenfelder suggests at > http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm) use the > same character for > the -cuit in both circuit and biscuit (perhaps a > derivative of "kit"), > though there's of course no real connection between > them.
I took a look. I like the direction that is going in, but disagree that phonetics play any role whatsoever in a yingzi-type experiment. We could conduct an experiment here, if we like - substituting some elementary English words with Chinese. Learning their meaning alone is valid - which is the reason for the direction I'm pushing - namely rethinking the charachter designs, that people like Mark can play with them.
> But what a weird word, "icicle"! "Ice" + OE _gicel_ > 'icicle'. > "Ice icicle."
Not weird at all: Ici(Icy="of ice")-cle (Barnacle, Monacle)
> Chinese has picked up quite a number of unanalyzable > multisyllabic words, > though, from _hudie_ 'butterfly' and _bu'ershuwike_ > 'Bolshevik', which > are loans, to _mamahuhu_ 'so-so' and _dongxi_ > 'thing', which are > written "horse-horse-tiger-tiger" and "east-west" > respectively, but > these are puns, not true etymologies.
Yes. They are local (colloquial) idioms, and in the case of dongxi-loan charachters mess things up. Its interesting to think about idioms, though, and which ones are the most universal. -S Steven Cooney www.symbolproject.org (moving to new software this week) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/

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Steve Cooney <stevencooney@...>Common World Idioms
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