Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

The vast majority of Chinese characters are composed of two parts, the
phonetic part and the semantic (or "radical") part. Traditionally there
are exactly 214 radicals, but other analyses lead to slightly different
totals. There are around 600 different phonetic components, but they
aren't so neatly codified.

The phonetic components very accurately represent the sounds of the
morphemes denoted by the characters -- 2000 years ago when they were
codified. Since then the language has changed, the script hasn't, so it
doesn't match the sounds of the modern language any better than English
or Korean spelling match their sounds.

Thank you for the above.

If this is all new to you, then you've never read so much as an
encyclopedia article about Chinese or Chinese writing. Shame on you.

"Logogram" means 'word-writing'; since "words" in Chinese tend to be
bisyllabic and written with two characters, in almost every case each
contributing to the meaning of the word, it's better to call Chinese
writing "morphographic," i.e. each character representing a morpheme,
but "logographic" is certainly the normal term for Chinese writing.

There is a Chinese character, referred to below as "tze" (since
it sounds like that, but I don't know the correct official
phonetic transcription), that in Chinese-English dictionary
commonly translates to the English word "word". A sentence
consisting of 10 Chinese characters is said to have 10 "tze"
in Chinese. From what you wrote above I understand that a
"word" in Chinese in your definition may consist of one or
more "tze", thus differing from the dictionary connotion. But
this apparently wouldn't matter, since definitions can be
different and yours is to be preferred for linguistic reasons,
I presume.

However, there seems to be a problem nevertheless. The
common Chinese translation of "liver disease" consists of
two Chinese characters (two "tze"), with the first denoting
liver and the second denoting desease (each of them could
also be employed singly with their respective meaning in
some proper context). Now, if these two characters in
Chinese are considered together to be one single "word",
shouldn't the corresponding English "liver disease" also be
considered as one single "word" instead of two words? It's
quite possible that I have gravely misunderstood you. Could
you kindly give an example illustrating your point? Thanks.

(a) You don't know anything about Chinese -- even less than I do,
evidently.

(b) Why should English be analyzed in terms of Chinese, any more than it
should be analyzed in terms of Latin?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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