Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

The point was that in both English and Chinese there is
a mechnism named compounding that combines certain orthographic
words (the English words as one finds in the form of dictionary
entries and the Chinese "tze" also as one finds in the form
of dictionary entries) into "compound words" (I don't know
the exact scientific denotation of this). An example I gave
for English is "body building", an example I gave for
Chinese is the translation of "telephone" that consists of
two "tse". In translating any linguistic unit of any size
(let's call it X) from English to Chinese or vice versa,
the general mapping is, I like to stress, many-to-many. Let's
consider a new example. "reinforced concrete" in English is
translated to five "tze" in Chinese. If one considers
"reinforced concrete" to be an X, then it is evident that
the sequence of the said five "tze" must also be an X
linguistically.

Wrong! Your very own example of "pomme de terre" disproves this: the
French term is transparently analyzable into 'apple of earth', but
English "potato" is unanalyzably monomorphemic. They are absolutely not
the same X.

Whether one's personal choice of the
denotation for X happens to be "word" or something else
doesn't really matter in this aspect of comparison of the
two languages.

.

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