The reform of linguistics

damn this is a overlooked topic. I'm a Chinese and when the first time I touch English I feel every word is so long, like what we have in Chinese that every digital has only one syllable whereas in English 6 of them have more one, when i talk about English learning with my friend I always complain Eng is so ineffeicient complared to Chinese but we still have to learn it.

 hey, Su Cheng Zhong, can you tell me the PP value of some other popular language, say, French, German, Japanese, Korean? Eapecially Korean I heard they say it's the closest to perfection, is it because of this or they just brag?

Anonymous wrote:

Chinese languages require tones due to the poverty of their phoneme set. English cannot and has no need or value in tones.

The number of phonemes in a language has nothing to do with whether it has developed tones. Spanish (a non-tonal language) and Mandarin Chinese (a tonal language) have roughly the same number of phonemes, as do English (a non-tonal language) and Vietnamese (a tonal language). Further, even the way that syllables can be formed is not significant. A typical Chinese syllable is CV or CVC where the final C is /n/ or /ng/; this is a pattern common to many non-tonal languages. Finally, the fact that Chinese is a tonal language does not stop it from having a very large number of homophones, so that the tones are only partly helpful in distinguishing meaning.

It should also be noted that the phonology of a language has no bearing on its richness or subtlety or its abilty to express ideas.

Forbes wrote:

Further, even the way that syllables can be formed is not significant. A typical Chinese syllable is CV or CVC where the final C is /n/ or /ng/; this is a pattern common to many non-tonal languages.

Anonymous wrote:

Although Chinese syllable structure is as you suggest, this is completely different from the importance of word structure. Words in Chinese are composed of a single syllable, whereas words in English and Spanish can be composed of a large number of syllables. This distinction is significant when it comes to the necessity of tones.

I am at something of a disadvantage as I do not know Chinese, only what I have read about it. I always used to read that Chinese was monosyllabic, but apparently this is a misconception. I recently had occasion to discuss the question of tones with a linguistics expert and he said that I needed to get away from the idea that tones were that important in distinguishing meaning in Chinese, although they naturally play a part; context is equally important. It also seems that it is not the degree of homophony in a language that gives rise to the need for tones, but rather that when tones arise, homophony may develop. The following is cut and pasted from a Wikipedia article on Chinese morphology:

Chinese morphology is strictly bound to a set number of syllables with a fairly rigid construction which are the morphemes, the smallest building blocks, of the language. Some of these single-syllable morphemes can stand alone as individual words, but contrary to what is often claimed, Chinese is not a monosyllabic language. Most words in the modern Chinese spoken varieties are in fact multisyllabic, consisting of more than one morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more.

The confusion arises in how one thinks about the language. In the Chinese writing system, each individual single-syllable morpheme corresponds to a single character, referred to as a zì (字). Most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì, but this view is not entirely accurate. Many words are multisyllabic, and are composed of more than one zì. This composition is what is known as a cí (词/詞), and more closely resembles the traditional Western definition of a word. However, the concept of cí was historically a technical linguistic term that until only the past century, the average Chinese speaker was not aware of. Even today, most Chinese speakers think of words as being zì. This can be illustrated in the following Mandarin Chinese sentence (romanized using pinyin):

Jīguāng, zhè liang ge zì shì shénme yìsi?

激光, 這兩個字是甚麼意思?

激光, 这两个字是什么意思?

The sentence literally translates to, "Jī 激 and guāng 光, these two zì 字, what do they mean?" However, the more natural English translation would probably be, "Laser, this word, what does it mean?" Even though jīguāng 激光 is a single word, speakers tend to think of its constituents as being separate (Ramsey, 1987).

Old Chinese and Middle Chinese had many more monosyllabic words due to greater variability in possible sounds. The modern Chinese varieties lost many of these sound distinctions, leading to homonyms in words that were once distinct. Multisyllabic words arose in order to compensate for this loss. Most natively derived multisyllabic words still feature these original monosyllabic morpheme roots. Many Chinese morphemes still have associated meaning, even though many of them no longer can stand alone as individual words. This situation is analogous to the use of the English prefix pre-. Even though pre- can never stand alone by itself as an individual word, it is commonly understood by English speakers to mean "before," such as in the words predawn, previous, and premonition.

Taking the previous example, jīguāng, jī and guāng literally mean "stimulated light," resulting in the meaning, "laser." However, jī is never found as a single word by itself, because there are too many other morphemes that are also pronounced in the same way. For instance, the morphemes that correspond to the meanings "chicken" 雞/鸡, "machine" 機/机, "basic" 基, "hit" 擊/击, "hunger" 饑/饥, and "sum" 積/积 are also pronounced jī in Mandarin. It is only in the context of other morphemes that an exact meaning of a zì can be known. In certain ways, the logographic writing system helps to reinforce meaning in zì that are homophonous, since even though several morphemes may be pronounced the same way, they are written using different characters. Continuing with the example, we have:

For this reason, it is very common for Mandarin speakers to put characters in context as a natural part of conversation. For example, when telling each other their names (which are often rare, or at least non-colloquial, combinations of zì), Mandarin speakers often state which words their names are found in. As a specific example, a speakers might say 名字叫嘉英，嘉陵江的嘉，英國的英 Míngzi jiào Jiāyīng, Jiālíngjiāng de jiā, Yīngguó de yīng "My name is Jiāyīng, the Jia of Jialing River and the Ying in England."

The problem of homonyms also exists but is less severe in southern Chinese varieties like Cantonese and Taiwanese, which preserved more of the rimes of Middle Chinese. For instance, the previous examples of jī for "stimulated," "chicken," and "machine" have distinct pronunciations in Cantonese (romanized using jyutping): gik1, gai1, and gei1, respectively. For this reason, southern varieties tend to employ fewer multisyllabic words.

There are a few morphemes in Chinese, many of them loanwords, that consist of more than one syllable. These words cannot be further divided into single-syllable meaningful units, however in writing each syllable is still written as separate zì. One example is the word for "spider," zhīzhū, which is written as 蜘蛛. Even in this case, Chinese tend to try to make some kind of meaning out of the constituent syllables. For this reason, the two characters 蜘 and 蛛 each have an associated meaning of "spider" when seen alone as individual characters. When spoken though, they can never occur apart.

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The point I made about context can be demonstrated by taking an example from French. The syllable /o/ can be written:

ô = oh

au = to the

eau = water

haut = high

The meanings are so disparate that confusion is rarely going to be possible, though I am sure it is possible to construct artificial examples. I am sure the same sort of thing happens in Chinese. (I accept that there are cases where tones are absolutely vital to distinguish meaning - the most commonly cited example being the words for "buy" and "sell".)

Homophones are perhaps more common in English than we sometimes realise. I used one in the previous sentence: cited; we also have: sited and sighted. The point is often lost as not all homophones are homographs.

As suggested above, the number of possible words is perhaps not so limited after all

I am not quite clear how you disagree with me.