Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

In message <e99g02$raa$01$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Richard Herring wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
Richard Herring wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes
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.

Eh? I wasn't writing German. I extracted part of a word to make a point in English. The rules of German orthography don't apply.

So what's that point exactly? (That the context is orthography
is certainly known.)
That the "grammatical conventions" you cited are arbitrary orthographic conventions, of course.

Does that imply that orthography doesn't belong to grammar?
Anyway, that's also what you claimed previously. (See below.
I haven't snipped that stuff.) Let me use an example to
show that that's false. In M. Riegel et al., Grammaire
méthodique du francais, Paris 1994 (ISBN 2 13 053959 9),
the 3rd chapter is entitled "L'orthographe francaise".
So you are clearly wrong anyway.

Argument from foreign book titles is even sillier than argumentum ad dictionariam. What makes you think that there's a precise one-to-one translation between French "grammaire" and "orthographe" and English "grammar" and "orthography"? Why do you assume that a book labelled "grammar" or "grammaire" is not allowed to refer to related topics as well?

[...]


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".

That's a species of pedantic pedagogue, so it probably does :-(

See above.

<whoosh>


If
that's wrong, is it very critical

It's imprecise and suggests that you aren't maintaining a clear distinction between language and writing system.

Writing system is an established subfield of the sciences
of languages. So what's wrong, if discussions are said
to be concerning writing systems?
What's wrong is that you are putting the cart before the horse by attributing a property of the language to its writing system, and trying to draw conclusions about the language from the writing system.

What is written or printed certainly concerns "writing system"
in my view. If not, why is the word "writing" there?

Of course it does. That's not the point.

to the point that I original
brought out concerning compounding (in English and Chinese)?

What _was_ the point? You seem to have lost it.


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).
You have it backwards. In both _spoken_ languages there is a mechanism called compounding that combines certain _spoken_ words into compound words. The orthography has a convention (or more than one) for representing this. It reflects the compounding process; it doesn't define it.

In so far as one has to be conform to that convention in
writing/printing, it doesn't matter how you "look" at the
process. On the textual level anyway, one can distinguish
three types of results of compounding.

Yes, if you really wish to maintain such a pointless distinction. So what?

That's what I
claimed previously in the present context. No more, nor less.

No. More, actually. You were be using your "three types" to make some kind of argument about the relative ease of forming compounds in English, Chinese and German.


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.
No. You're begging the question by assuming that it's possible to define X in a way that works for all languages.

But are there "general" linguistic terminologies
applicable to English but not to Chinese?

Of course not. What do you think _general_ means?

Note also
that for purposes of my arguments in a couple of
previous posts, it suffices that X above can be
substituted with "word",

It has already been explained to you that it can't.

even if there do exist other
general linguistic terms that are not applicable to
both languages.

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. Since there are lots of (conceptual)
definitions of "word" and (from some past discussions)
there appears to be a poteential risk of inconsistent
application of definitions (i.e. "implicitly" using one
definition of X for English, while using another implicit
definition of X for Chinese in one and the same discussion),
So in fact you're well aware of what's wrong with your X above.

See above.


--
Richard Herring
.

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