Re: How many years dedicated to characters learning in China ?


Colin Fine wrote:
LEE Sau Dan wrote:
"Colin" == Colin Fine <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Colin> LEE Sau Dan wrote:
>>>>>>> "Peter" == Peter T Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>
Peter> You're not likely to encounter a character that _isn't_ a
Peter> radical + phonetic that you didn't learn in school in the
Peter> first few years.
>> I don't think so. Many basic and frequently occurring
>> characters aren't radical + phonetic. Many of them are
>> pictorial or indicative. e.g. characters for "one", "two",
>> "three", "sun"/"day", "moon"/"month", "up", "down", "forest",
>> "fish", "cow", ...
>>
>>
Colin> You've ignored Peter's caveat: "that you didn't learn in
Colin> school in the first few years".

I did. We had lessons in kindergarten, during which we learn how to
read/write characters for very common objects. (e.g. "sun", "moon",
"sky", "ground", "man", etc.) We also had dictations.


I think we're at cross purposes, perhaps because Peter's syntax is a bit
convoluted.

Hey!

I said what I meant and I meant what I said.

His remark can be rephrased as: "You're not likely to encounter a
character that _isn't_ a radical + phonetic, except for some that you
will have learnt in school in the first few years", and I don't think
you disagree.

No -- that suggests that the non-composite characters are rare in text
(rare as tokens). What is true is that they are rare in dictionaries
(as types),. but since they are semantically very basic they are on the
one hand likely to be quite common, and on the other, taught early in
one's schooling.

Indeed, the presence of so many simple characters in the first few
lessons might give rise to the misconception among
Chinese-speaker/readers that _all_ characters are pictures. (I have
several books that make pictures out of composite characters, as
mnemonics; but they have nothing to do with the origin of the
character.)

Note also that this conforms with the observation that the most common
items are more likely to be exceptional in some way (e.g., preserving
old forms or alternations that are gone or unproductive generally). We
saw examples in the discussion of OBI characters getting differentiated
into any number of characters to specify semantic refinements.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: How many years dedicated to characters learning in China ?
    ... Peter> radical + phonetic that you didn't learn in school in the ... The actual problem seems to me that the radical+phonetic characters ... unreadability of binary formats. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Letters with **three** cases?
    ... > Colin> Because people think they're the same (in some useful sense ... But it is necessary to know when the letters are characters, ... However, filenames are strings of characters, with few limits. ... To me, brought up in English, case sensitivity is ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Problem with the strip string method
    ... Colin J. Williams wrote: ... The chars argument is a string specifying the set of characters to be removed. ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • Re: How many years dedicated to characters learning in China ?
    ... Peter> I said what I meant and I meant what I said. ... >> that you will have learnt in school in the first few years", ... Peter> rare in text. ... the presence of so many simple characters in the ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Hello
    ... Colin E. wrote: ... you shell hackers and your bloatware. ... A *real* coder ... would have done that in under 80 characters. ...
    (rec.juggling)