Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
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.

What would be a "right" translation of hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
(fear of long words) to Chinese and is there a Chinese term (such as the
English word "term") which would indicate that it is a translation of a
single English word rather than a translation of a noun clause? In other
words, can you say in Chinese, "!@#$ @#%% $#%#" is the Putonghua term for
the English word hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia"?

Characters in
Chinese are printed with (certain amount of) separating spaces
just like English (orthographic) words are printed with
separating spaces.

Does a sentence have equally spaced characters or are some spaces wider than
others?

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.

.

Relevant Pages