Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary


[Sorry that this is processed too late. But I suppose at
least a part of my answer is not redundant.]

Lee Sau Dan wrote:

Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

[snip]

Right. But come to think about it: what is a "word"?

That's what I asked Daniels in a post (about his specific
definition that he implicitly employed in a previous post).

[snip]
Why must one word in English always map to one word in Chinese? Why
are you judging the word-boundary of Chinese using word-boundary
information from English? Once more: what is a "word"?

I never said anything of the "necesssity" of a one-to-one
mapping of words between any two languages. But in a
translation, the ensemble of entities in one language
is certainly mapped to the ensemble of entities in another
language, if the translation is done right. Characters in
Chinese are printed with (certain amount of) separating spaces
just like English (orthographic) words are printed with
separating spaces. This is a fact that most people here
certainly know, I presume. But I don't see how/why that
could cause you to give the above remark which I don't
precisely understand. As to the question "what is a word?",
see above and also a post I posted earlier several hours
ago answering Daniels.

French: "pommes de terre" <--> English: "apples". 3 words vs. 1 word.
There must be something wrong?

French: "la coupe du monde" translates to English "World Cup". 2
words vs. 4 words. Anything wrong?

Nothing wrong, at least in my opinion. Again see my post
mentioned above.

M. K. Shen

.

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