Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary



Richard Herring wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes

First, are you questioning the correctness of bilingual
dictionaries?

No, I'm saying your argument is a particularly silly one.

(However, I would indeed doubt the adequacy of any general-purpose dictionary, bilingual or not, to define a technical term. And bilingual dictionaries introduce a whole new set of problems.)

So you insist to use the term "grammar" in the sense used
by the grammarians themselves, i.e. a scientifically exact,
genuine and comprehensive terminology employed in that
field of study. Do I understand you correctly here? See
end of this post.

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,

Your knowledge is inadequate. False friends can occur in scientific terminology just as anywhere else.

without
exception in exact correspondence, when their spelling
"evidently" correspond (of course in many cases they are not
exactly "identical" ASCII strings).

Your first problem is that "grammar" is not exclusively a scientific term. In everyday use it means (a) anything to do with rules about language as perceived by a non-linguist, (b) a kind of textbook giving a potted description of a language.

See above and end of this post.

[snip]
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.

Now you're being even sillier, asking me to prove a universal negative. The onus of proof is on you. Do you really think the average scientific text contains declarations about all the things it *doesn't* refer to?

(That would immediately stop any further
argumention on this point.)

I doubt it. This is Usenet.

However, (pace the wikiphobes) you could look at the wikipedia page for "grammar", which will tell you it comprises phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. That page contains no occurrences of the word "orthography" (or even "writing system"), even to explain why it doesn't.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar

Picking a couple at random, for other examples of online grammar references you might look at the English Glossary of Grammar Terms,
http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary.html
or the Internet Grammar of English
http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary.html

from which it's equally conspicuously absent.

Or find plenty more definitions by typing "define:grammar" into Google.

Since you even disqualify the explanation by good dictionaries,
e.g. the huge 20-volume "The Oxford English Dictionary", what
lead you think that the people (many are anonymous) who wrote
these web pages on the internet could give explanations for
which one should have more "trust", given the known fact that
plenty of stuffs on the internet are of questionable nature,
this being a direct consequence of the fact that "anybody"
can publish anything at his will without scrutiny by
professional reviewers?

[snip]
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.
A more plausible explanation is that your personal definition of "Chinese orthographic word" is inadequate.

Take any monolingual Chinese dictionary. The main entries
of it are single characters. These are called "tze". Examples
of them are those denoting sun, man, mountain, water, etc. etc.
"tze" is translated by all Chinese-English dictionaries
I know of to "word". So "tze" is clearly a "Chinese
orthographic word" (with the definition of "word" here being
"tze" in the sense of Chinese-English dictionaries). Is that
clear to you?

Thus there is a "necessity" to do more compounding,
if the same expressivity is to be achieved.

In the same way that there's a "necessity" to combine syllables to make English or German words.

Certainly, otherwise there wouldn't be "body building" etc.
But since the vocabulary of Chinese is smaller, one needs
to create a comparatively larger number of the compound
words in order that the expressivity of Chinese could be
comparable to that of English (otherwise some English
concepts wouldn't have been able to be translated to
Chinese). This is a simple combinatorial argument.

(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)?

It's _your_ phrase. If you can't remember what you were talking about, you can't expect me to fill in the gaps.

Oh, I only "guessed" that you could have referred to that.
Now, I never said anything of the sort that one language is
easier to "use" than the other. I only said earlier that
Chinese is "deemed" (stipulated, mostly without actually
trying out by those who say so) by quite some people to
be more difficult to "learn" than English. But note anyway
"use" is different from "learn" ("use" is the application
after one has "learned"). So what's your point in the above?
Do you also find fault with my second statement above (with
the word "learn"), like someone else did in the group?
If yes, please say it clearly (i.e. with some words of
your opinion and not simply a "yes"), for maybe I could
(though not sure currently) dig up some quotes in the
literature to support my statement. (Note that I only
said of the opions of "others" about learning Chinese.
I never said whether in my "own" opinion Chinese is
difficult or easy to learn (by myself). In fact, being
a native in Chinese, I can't give any sufficiently
"objective" opinion on that issue.)

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.

That's a complete non-sequitur, but your conclusion is wrong anyway. You can't use X without first proving that it exists.

What's really meant by "orthographic words" in English?
Aren't these what one finds in books those character
strings that are separated from one another by spaces?
Now in Chinese, such strings that are separated by
spaces happen to consist of one single chacter each
(i.e. a special case of the general string concept).
Therefore "an orthographic word" in Chinese is simply
one Chinese character.

Let me now go back to the beginning of the present post.
In a follow-up to Wordingham yesterday I wrote:

....... I happened by chance to come across
a book title that clearly indicates that orthography is a part
of grammar (I have never yet seen the book itself though):

P. Jouon, T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew:
v. 1, pt. 1. Orthography and phonetics; pt. 2. Morphology;
v. 2, pt. 3. Syntax.
Pontifical Biblical Institute Press, 2003.

Do you agree that this clearly shows that even in the
terminologies used by the grammarians themselves orthography
is part of grammar?

M. K. Shen

.

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