Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary



Richard Herring wrote:

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

Richard Herring wrote:

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

Compounding, as such, is of course one mechanism. I
illustrated that in English one could distinguish, if one
likes, three different types of compounding in writing. If
I don't err, there are certain grammatical conventions

Can you cite them?


Sorry, no. But in an analogous case, namely German, I
could give a reference, namely the well-known "Duden".
(There is a section there entitled "Zusammen- und
Getrenntschreibung").

-schreibung. It's about orthography.

I am sorry to say that you evidently get the general
convention (call it rule or whatever) for German writing
wrong in the present case.


governing which type of compounding one may use in a given
situation.

I think you'll find it's more down to the passage of time than grammatical convention. It takes time for people to feel sufficiently comfortable with a new English compound to write it with no separators. The only place I can think of where an orthographic rule might apply is the use of hyphens to avoid ambiguity when a two-word compound is used as a modifier (see this sentence for an example). Even that isn't absolute, hence absurdities like a "fine toothcomb".

(Thus one has e.g. "body-line" but not "bodyline".)

Only used in the fixed phrase "body-line bowling", a technical term from cricket, so there's nothing much driving it to change into a single orthographic word.


Isn't what you said above about the hypen a grammatical
convention?


It's an orthographic convention. Is orthography part of grammar?

As a layman I used to think that orthography belongs to the
realm of study of scholars that I call "grammarians". If
that's wrong, is it very critical to the point that I original
brought out concerning compounding (in English and Chinese)?


Maybe it should instead be called style
convention or something else, I don't know. But that's
not essential to my point, I suppose.

Whether there is something to drive certain aspects of
the evolution of English doesn't concern the fact that
one can formally distinguish three different types of
compounding in English.


In _written_ English. And your "three types" are no more than different historical stages in the acceptance of a new compound. (Or even historical fashions - did you know that at one time "London Road" was written "London-road" ?)

O.k. Languages evovle as we all know. But the fact remains
that in the written form of English one can formally
distinguish three different types of compounding (and that
in Chinese there is only one type). This is currently so
and is likely to stay in my conviction.


The use or non-use of spaces and hyphens to denote this process is just an arbitrary orthographic convention, of no interest to users of the spoken language.


I am not quite sure of that. If there is a space, then
a speaker would be allowed to put in a more or less long
pause there, while, if there is no space (nor hyphen),
he would be at least rather constrained in attempting to
do so.

So the orthography reflects the prosody. It doesn't dictate it.


Of course one is in principle entirely free to pronounce
a word or a sentence in any way one "wants" (that's
certainly also one aspect of "freedom of speech") but,
in order to make one's speech easily understandable by
others, one should generally use a certain pause at the
place where there is a space if the sentence were written
instead of being spoken in my view.


Then your view has it backwards.

(Concerning "liaison"
see what I wrote in my previous post.)

Anyway, in colloquial German, one normally employs
a fairly distinctive pause after pronouncing each word,

One employs, or the hearer perceives? And (bearing in mind that German puts a glottal stop before some vowels), is the pause really after, or before, each word?

Let me put it in another way: it is "normally" a bit easier
for a hearer to segment a sentence heard into the constituent
words, if the language is German, as compared to French.
Anyway, that's my own impression and also that of many of
my friends who, like me, are non-native to both German and
French.

So different languages have different characteristic speech rhythms etc. That doesn't say anything very profound about "words".

I am a layman and know very little about the science of
phonetics. But the currect debate is about writing systems
and so one could anyway restrict oneself to the written
forms of the two languages in my view (in particular,
comparing the English orthographic word with the "tze"
in Chinese).

M. K. Shen

.

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