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
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?

First, are you questioning the correctness of bilingual
dictionaries? Yes, we all know that in general translations
can't be perfect, and there are expressions in one language
that could only be translated in another in some "unnatural"
ways. But scientific terms, are, to my knowledge, without
exception in exact correspondence, when their spelling
"evidently" correspond (of course in many cases they are not
exactly "identical" ASCII strings).

Second, scientific books generally deal with under diverse
chapter headings materials that do "belong" to the field
indicated by the book title.

Let me perhaps do it better the other way round: Please
kindly give one quote from a scientific reference showing
that orthography "doesn't" belong to grammar, thus confirming
your claim. (That would immediately stop any further
argumention on this point.)

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.

[snip]
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.

Fine.

[snip]

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.

What I wrote are essentially these: (1) These languages all
have the compounding mechanism. (2) From the form in writing,
Chinese has only one of the three types that one can discern
in English. This is because the other two types are printing
"technically" infeasible. (This point is actually not of
big significance. I just mentioned it for completeness.)
(3) Chinese seems to make more intensive use of compounding
than English. A plausible explanation of mine is that the
vocabulary (in terms of orthographic words, i.e. the main
dictionary entries) of Chinese is smaller than that of
English. Thus there is a "necessity" to do more compounding,
if the same expressivity is to be achieved. (4) German in
my personal view seems to allow more freedom to do
compounding than English and Chinese.

Do your phrase "relative ease" refer to (4)? If yes, we
could certainly continue to argue a bit on that. (I am not
sure that I would finally win. But note anyway that that was
something I mentioned in passing and I could have actually
omitted (4) without affecting my original argument.)

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

Of course not. What do you think _general_ means?

I am happy that your answer is "of course not", thus
providing sense to my using a "variable" X.

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.

Only if you apply two different definitions of "word"
to two different languages in the same argumentation,
i.e. what I called inconsistency of (implicitly used)
definitions.

M. K. Shen

.

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