Re: Has it been tried to represent tones with punctuation ...

On Jun 21, 11:31 am, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Atkinson wrote:

[skip]

It may well be the case that Chinese on average expresses the same
amount of information in less syllables of text than English does, but
this certainly doesn't follow from the number of possible syllables in
each of the languages.  The expansion due to tones in Chinese is more
than compensated by that due to English having more initials and many
many more finals than Chinese.

Allow me to express a point which I till now wonder because I don't
quite understand. Normally 4000 Chinese characters are in my view
very sufficient for normal use (I had seen claim of 1000). But
in English that number of words wouldn't suffice, if I don't err.
Why is that?

Because Chinese characters do not represent "words."

If we simplify and say that every Chinese word is represented by
exactly two characters, then the 3000 characters that comprise maybe
99.5% of all characters in running text (the figures are 2400 for 99%
and 3800 for 99.9%) provide for nine million words, which is more than
ten times the number of words in the biggest unabridged dictionaries
of English.

A normal person's normal vocabulary (in any language) is somewhere
around 25,000 - 30,000 lexical items.
.

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