Re: Invention of the Alphabet

Greg Lee <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Des Small <des.small@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > LSD! Your point is not a point, since it is false.
>
> > PTD's yardstick was that one criterion for Chinese wordiness would be
> > the headwords in the CHINESE TO ENGLISH side of a Chinese-English
> > dictionary.
>
> > For your comparison with English words to make sense, the only honest
> > thing to do would be to consider the ENGLISH TO SOMETHING side of an
> > English-Something dictionary.
>
> > Of the dictionaries to hand (Collins Gem French-English,
> > Langenscheidts Universal Wörterbuch Englisch-Deutsch, Berlitz
> > Dutch-English, Norsted's Engelska Fickordbok), none - not a single
> > one! - has an entry for "train station" under "train" in the English
> > to Foreign side.
>
> > But presumably this wasn't what you meant anyway, since your Usenet
> > debating technique hardly gives the impression that you value honesty
> > highly.
>
> > Des
> > supposes it's good arguing training, at least
>
> But English "train station" is a compound word, so the appropriateness
> of the yardstick as LSD applied it is confirmed.

Not as he actually applied it, of course. I'm not sure whether he was
claiming that looking up "gare" and finding "train station" implied
(by Peter's argument) that "train station" was one word (the data
exists, but the argument wasn't that) or that looking up "train
station" and finding "gare" implied that "train station" was one word
(which fails for lack of any such entry, even if you happen to have
other grounds to reach the same conclusion).

I'll leave it to Peter to argue about how many words "train station"
actually is if he wants to, but my position is closer to the one
Harlan implied (and which LSD duly ritually misunderstood in turn):
independent of the question of whether sequences of elements in
langwidges which use freeish compounding is a "word" (call this a
"morphological word" for the time being) there is also the question of
whether such a compound as a whole has achieved a level of
non-transparency in terms of the meaning of its components that it
requires an independent entry in the lexicon (for which a dictionary
can act as a reasonable proxy): call this, in turn, a "lexical word".

Regardless of the morphological decomposeability of "cupboard", as
Harlan remarked, it has to have a lexical entry of its own; many
Chinese "compound" words, it has been alleged, have acquired a similar
degree indecomposeability, and it is not unparsimonious to call them
"words" (in the lexical sense) too.

A sufficiently tenacious Chinese chauviniste could still argue that
these were _idioms_ rather than words, composed by syntax rather than
morphology. I have no dog in that fight, and I'm Not Even Going
There, although I certainly think I know where a suitably tenacious
chauviniste could be found if you happen to want to pursue the matter.

Des
cannot, in good faith, recommend it
.

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