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

On Jun 22, 4:03 am, Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.s...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
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.

Thanks for the explanation. Allow me to ask yet another related
question. The pair of characters in Chinese have each, in the majority
of cases, individually a meaning (that can be looked up in dictionary)
and sensibly combine to form the meaning of the pair. On the other
hand, it seems to me that in languages like English the composition
of meaning of a word from those of its morphemes is, in comparison,
less frequently practically possible. For example, for kitchen the
2 Chinese charaters tell of a room for cooking, but I am at a lost
to get the meaning of the word kitchen from its components. Am I
wrong because of my ignorance of the English etymology or the said
phenomenon is someting particular of Chinese?

I have no reason to suspect that "kitchen" is not monomorphemic. Maybe
someone who bothers to look up the etymology will discover
differently.

There are several words in English that could be paraphrased as "room
for cooking," including "galley." The meaning of even a Chinese word
is not predictable from, only indicated by, the meanings of its
components.
.

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