Re: Easy as ABG
- From: "John Atkinson" <johnacko@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:19:49 GMT
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote ...
> Lee Sau Dan wrote:
>>
>> >>>>> "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.
>
> Uh, they didn't have tones back then. They had final consonants.
So what? The fact that that two words have different tones today
corresponds (with occasional exceptions) to the corresponding Old Chinese
words having different final consonants (or different vowels, or something).
Near-homophones that differ only by tone today were rarely exact homophones
in OC. (OTOH, many words that are exact homophones today weren't in OC.)
LSD's statement is accurate for all periods if you replace his word "tone"
by something like "tone and its predecessors".
John.
.
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