Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

Richard Herring wrote:

In message <87wtastigk.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Lee Sau Dan
<danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
"Richard" == Richard Herring <junk@[127.0.0.1]> writes:

Richard> Well, that won't take long. Many (most?) Chinese
Richard> characters are patently not ideographic, since they are
Richard> composed from pairs of other characters, of which one
Richard> hints at the semantics and the other at the
Richard> pronunciation.

You could treat such a character as a whole unit, and ignore the
phonetic hints. Then, it's an ideograph, right?

You could treat an English word written using the Roman alphabet as a
whole word, and ignore the phonetic hints. Then, it's an ideograph,
right?

A logogram, actually. If I ever acquired a frequency list of English
vocabulary, I could discover exactly the spelling of how many words must
be learned individually; I like to say 3000 to show that it's exactly
the same as the basic Chinese character list.

I wonder whether there's a grammatical way of putting the first clause
of the second sentence. "exactly how many words the spelling of which."
Yuck.

Because it -- as a
whole -- conveys a meaning!

(Because it -- as a whole -- conveys a meaning!)

If that's your definition of ideograph, it's pretty much vacuous.

Distant, and no cigar -- that's a logogram, since the characters/English
written words convey words, not meanings.

(The meaning usually has nothing to do
with the phonetically-hinting part, anyway.)

If that were so, why do you need to write the phonetic as well as the
radical?

Touchy, touchy. (I read this reply before doing my own.)

What about the case in which Japanese borrows such a character, and
use it to write Japanese-native words bearing the same meaning? The
phonetic hint is not applicable in that case.

By that argument, all written loanwords, regardless of writing system,
must be ideographs if they come from a language sufficiently different
that either the etymology or the phonology is opaque.

And that character can
suddenly become an ideograph?

Not by any reasonable definition of the word.

(An aside - as Japanese borrows so many Western words that have native
synonyms, have they started giving kun readings to words written in
romaji yet? ;-)

Considering what's written on most T-shirts that are ostensibly in
Japanese English, I suspect so.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary
    ... Richard> characters are patently not ideographic, ... Then, it's an ideograph, right? ... You could treat an English word written using the Roman alphabet as a whole word, and ignore the phonetic hints. ...
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  • Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary
    ... >> the phonetic hints. ... Then, it's an ideograph, right? ... Richard> If that were so, why do you need to write the phonetic as ... Because it's then an integral part of the character. ...
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  • Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary
    ... Richard> Well, that won't take long. ... Richard> characters are patently not ideographic, ... Then, it's an ideograph, right? ... (The meaning usually has nothing to do ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary
    ... >> Nor do I have to map a Japanese Kanji to a word when I read ... tie it up with any words -- whether Chinese words or Japanese ones. ... A logograph can be used ideographically, and an ideograph can be used ... do not the characters represent chinese ...
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  • Re: Chinese character & pinyin frequency analysis
    ... It now searches one's fonts for characters not in the font you are using, so that problem has *now* largely gone away. ... It wasn't a problem with Chinese characters, though Windows Vista apparently includes some horrible bodges to get round the TrueType limit of 64K glyphs per font. ... Richard> entities) to check the interpretation of control-like ... This, if I want to mix Thai, Lao, Khmer and Latin-1, I would normally switch between four different keyboard layouts. ...
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