Re: Chinese 'Dialects'

From: David Brandon Thomas (vaelynphi_at_aol.comZOT)
Date: 08/24/04 

Date: 24 Aug 2004 20:26:01 GMT

In article <m3d61gol8m.fsf@mika.informatik.uni-freiburg.de>, LEE Sau Dan
<danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> writes:

>>>>>> "David" == David Brandon Thomas <vaelynphi@aol.comZOT> writes:
>
> >> Thai is a fairly agglutination free language, perhaps, the
> >> purest one.
>
>These are called "isolating" languages. Chinese is often quoted as a
>"typical" isolating language. Maybe, you can give me arguments for
>why Thai is "purer" than Vietnamese and the various Chinese languages?

Thanks for cutting out the identification of the author of these lines; I did
not write them, yet you appear to be addressing me about them.

Or was that you talking?

> >> I converse periodically with an educated Thai but
> >> she cannot tell me anything about the earlier history of her
> >> language. I questioned her pointedly on the subject. From what
> >> she said it was also obvious that their perception of tense,
> >> including the past tense is not as acute as that of
> >> Europeans. The language simply does not care about it.
>
>That's typical for isolating languages. They don't care about tense,
>case, gender, plurality, etc. Why do you need to care about these
>things, when they're irrelevant to a discussion?

To say they don't 'care' about these things is rather naïve. They simply have
another way of expressing them. All languages have a tendency to leave out
irrelevant information and reinforce what is intended in a phrase. That, say,
Chinese leaves out explicit tense or aspect markers sometimes, or Japanese
rarely uses person, is an artifact produced when the languages' grammars don't
require these things formally. If anything, this is usually cultural, not
linguistic.

As for the Thai woman in question, her inability to understand what she was
being questioned about would not necessarily indicate an inability to
understand time discretely; she may merely be misunderstanding the question.

> >> It is a treat to listen to her speech. She places an adverb at
> >> the start of an English sentence as a warning that the rest of
> >> the sentence will concern with the past or future tense and
> >> then proceeds explaining the past or future event in the
> >> present tense. It is superbly confusing. Sometimes the warning,
> >> such as an adverb for instance, seems to get lost or forgotten.
>
> David> Would you mind supplying some colorful examples?
>
>Maybe, something like:
> yesterday, I buy car; tomorrow, I drive car go work

Obvious examples, but not colorful.

>--
>Lee Sau Dan +Z05biGVm-
>~{@nJX6X~}
>
>E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
>Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee

 - Vae
"You are here to learn the mysteries of Kung Fu, not linguistics. If you can't
understand me, I will communicate with you like I would a dog. When I yell,
when I point, when I beat you with my stick!" {Pai Mei}

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