Re: Easy as ABG

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Peter> You seem to be forgetting that you speak Chinese perfectly,
Peter> so you already know the word that the unknown characters
Peter> represent. And if you had lived 2000 years ago they
Peter> wouldn't be HINTS. They would be pronunciations.

No. They would still be HINTS. As I mentioned above, the choice of
the phonetic hint only agrees with the pronunciation of the character
up to the final as well as the point of aspiration of the initial.
This holds for very very old Chinese, too. The tone of the HINTS
usually do not match the tone of the character. And the manner of
articulation usually do not match, either.

So, they're still HINTS.


>> By contrast, if I come across an unknown German word, provided
>> that it is not a loan from other languages, I can easily tell
>> how to pronounce it -- with 99% confidence. That's because
>> German spelling provides pretty (not 100%, though) precise
>> phonological information. That's a big difference with the
>> Chinese script.

Peter> So does English, for anyone who speaks English perfectly.

And come across words like "aisle", "Greenwich", "island", etc.?


--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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