Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

Mok-Kong Shen wrote:

Oliver Cromm wrote:

If compounding is a linguistic phenomenon, most linguist would argue
that different writing conventions alone don't constitute evidence that
there are different types of compounding. In the case in question, I'd
say there aren't any differences. A <tea pot> and a <teapot> are the
same word written in different ways.

Suppose an existing vocabulary in a certain language has
only the words for "tea" and "pot" but not a designation
for teapot, then one is likely to come up either with
"tea pot" or "teapot". One of these would enter into the
enlarged vocabulary (hence become a dictionary entry),
but not both, right?

No, beacuse they're the same word, it is possible that more than one way
of writing this word could be mentioned in a dictionary, under the same
headword.

Writing system is an established subfield of the sciences
of languages. So what's wrong, if discussions are said
to be concerning writing systems?

Even so, writing alone constitutes very weak linguistic evidence.

I was only saying that it is not illegitimate to say
e.g. that a discussion currently concerns only writing
systems. No more, nor less.

That would tell me that you're not interested in concrete languages like
Chinese or English.

In that case I should mention that there are several other ways to
graphically represent complex terms, for example - just staying with the
Latin alphabet - using an apostrophy as in <that's>, <aujourd'hui> or a
slash, like <and/or> or <marketing/PR>, using capitalization <MultiVan>,
quotes, parentheses and others. And since you're not talking about
concrete languages, you are free to invent your own ways as well.

Now are these all different types of compounding for you? Go ahead. But
it would be clearer not to use a linguistic term like "compounding",
rather say "joining" or something, because it's not a linguistic
distinction.

"Telephone" also consist of two morphemes. It is different from "body
building" in that the constituents "tele" and possibly "phone" are not
words in their own right ("phone" as an independent word is the
shortened form of "telephone" and not contained in words like
"anglophone" or "phonograph"). Therefore, "telephone" has to be written
without space. This is the only rule that I can give with certainty
about English writing.

Why then one doesn't find "bodybuilding" in a dictionary?

I said that in the above paragraph. In the case of "telephone", there's
a reason for this way of writing, with "body building", it is
convention.

Still, there is ample linguistic evidence that the compounding mechanism
that creates "Canada Child Tax Benefit" is essentially the same that
produces German "Kindersteuerfreibetrag".

Essentially the same, sure. Formally, however, one can
distinguish on the textual level the three types of
compounding.

Or more than three, see above.

Since, if a dictionary has a compound word,
it is given in the form of one of these types (never in
all three), only that form should be considered the
correct one in the current language, right?

Your position leads to consequences that are ridiculous to me, like that
in the recent German spelling reform, a lot of "words of the German
language" have been "banned" (because now only the form written as two
orthographic words is considered correct writing), and, conversely, some
new words have been invented. I say that the language hasn't changed,
because the writing is just a graphical representation, and if all
English-speaking people agree to use Chinese characters to write English
from next year on, it would still be English, with or without hyphens.
If the English word "teapot" is written 茶瓶, is it still one word or two
words or two tze or what?

Given that, the status of multi-"tze" terms is equally unclear.

Is there any convention to write Chinese with spaces for some purpose?
In Japanese, there is: in children's books. And many researchers would
agree that what is separated by spaces in this case roughly corresponds
to the best definition of a Japanese "word".

Example:
Children's book: たろうが　とうきょうに　いった。
Conventional writing:　 太郎が東京に行った。
Conventional transciption: Tarô ga Tôkyô ni itta.
To indicate the "words" in the above: Tarô-ga Tôkyô-ni itta.
[...]

I don't yet quite understand your point concerning spaces.
In Chinese printed text, each character is separated from its
neighbours with a (tiny) space. But this is in principle
similar to the case that English words in printing are
separated by spaces, isn't it?

I have only two interpretations for your answer, both of which are not
favorable to you. Either you are so convinced of your pet theory that
you refuse to understand what I'm talking about, or you really haven't
noticed yet that English (and other languages written in similar
alphabets) has a two-level representation, with letters, roughly
representing phonemes, separated by (not necessarily rectangular) tiny
spaces, and words, sequences of letters, separated by bigger spaces. It
is thus not obvious to which kind of spaces the spaces between Chinese
characters correspond, or if they have a fundamentally different nature
from both.

More to the point, I explained - maybe not clearly enough - that in
Japanese, the space between, say 昨 and 日 in 昨日 doesn't have the same
linguistic status as the space between, 日 and 見 in the sequence 映画、昨日見た,
because this could, if one chose to employ such a writing system, be
spaced as

　　映画　昨日　見た

but never as

　　映画昨　日見た

The latter would be contrary to Japanese language; even the
pronunciation of 昨 and 日 can only be derived by seeing them as neighbors
in connection. Actually, 昨 and 日 don't have a pronunciation in this
sentence, only the combination 昨日 has. The two characters clearly
represent one word in Japanese.

One can ask the same questions for intransparent terms in Chinese, best
for illustration look at some technical term imported from Japanese,
like 政治.

Referring to an example previously given by me, telephone
is translated to two "tze" meaning "electricity" and
"talk". Could one who has never used nor heard of that
modern means of communication really capture the right
meaning from these two "tze" alone? That's evidently
highly questionable.

That's why I said its meaning should be explained in a monolingual
dictionary. Whether it would consitute a headword or not is a matter of
taste and convention. I believe that in most bilingual dictionaries, it
would be entered as a headword.

Further I indicated that one seems to have more freedom in doing
compounding in German than in the few other languages I happen to
know a bit, which I think is true.

Not as much as the writing convention makes you believe. I'd say there
is little systematical difference between German and English in this
respect, but a difference in usage: in German, it is more natural to use
compound terms in everyday language, and to make new ones up on the
spot.

Well, "more natural" would mean having greater chance of
being accepted by the natives of a language as an item
belonging to the vocabulary of the language in my view.

I'm sure any native speaker of English, on first reading "child tax
benefit", considers it a legitimate part of the language. What you call
"vocabulary" is again your choice. Germans don't enter "Fischrestaurant"
in a dictionary any more than "italienisches Restaurant", and
spontaneous coinages are normally not considered part of the vocabulary
of the language, rather as the utilization of one of the means of the
language to combine elements, besides inflection, derivation and syntax.
--
Oliver Cromm
kotoba-nante iranai / yuka-ni korogaru-dake
言葉なんて要らない　　床に転がるだけ
Shigesato Itoi/Akiko Yano: The Stew
.

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