Re: Transmission of meaning

On Tue, 24 Oct 2006 13:11:04 +1000, Ben Finney
<bignose+hates-spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> posted the following:

Chris Kern <chriskern99@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> posted:
Whereas with the Chinese characters, one can see a cluster of them
and have absolutely no clue how it is pronounced in the target
language, and yet (if one is already familiar with those particular
characters) a meaning is immediately present in one's mind.

But this is only because they were borrowed into Japan with the same
meaning.

Yes. And in the process, their meaning survived so well that, even
though their pronunciation is vastly changed, a learner of either
language can see the characters and know the meaning.

It's not because of the orthography, though, it's because the words
were borrowed as well as the characters.

Let's say the characters had only been borrowed to represent Japanese
native words, and that there had been no large-scale borrowing of
Chinese vocabulary. So 天 would have been assigned to some native
Japanese word meaning "heaven", and 気 would have been assigned to
some native Japanese word meaning "spirit" -- but the combination 天気
was not in the Japanese language. Now if you saw 天気 in Chinese
writing, you would know the meanings of the two characters and they
would mean the same thing in Chinese, but you would not be able to
decipher the meaning of the word.

It is true that there is a much closer resemblance in form between the
Chinese 天気 and Japanese 天気 because they're exactly the same, but
there are many words that differ by a character or two but can still
be deciphered, and a lot of words that are totally different. I think
this mirrors the situation in European languages if you know English.
Some of the words are exactly the same. Others are different, but you
can still figure out what they mean because they use common
Latin/Greek roots or they have been borrowed into English in a mangled
form. Many of the words, though, are incomprehensible without
studying the language.

So in short what I'm trying to say is that yes, having a reading
knowledge of Japanese does help you decipher some Chinese words.
However, this is not a property specific to the Chinese characters.

-Chris
.

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