Anonymous wrote:

Forbes wrote: The Phoenecian alphabet was in use for 1000 years and found to be adequate for writing Phoenecian; indeed the same system is still used today to write Arabic and Hebrew, although they do show some vowels and have the means (not in regular use) to show all vowels. I am under the impression that the system for writing vowels in Hebrew was artificially constructed as a learning tool, and for this reason it is not in common use.

I believe you are correct.

Anonymous wrote:

The system works because they are all Semitic languages in which the important lexical information is carried by the consonants. I do not think that this is correct. The vowels convey critical information. However, the organization of words is such that a given consonant construction makes the vowel construction apparent, such that it typically need not be marked explicityly. There are exceptions, such that a couple of consonants are used to mark the required vowels.

Obviously vowels are important. What I am saying is that the vowels are readily supplied by a (knowledgeable) reader, and I think that is what you are saying.

The Arabic alphabet consists of 28 consonants. Of theses, alif, which has no fixed value, is also used to represent /a:/; ya can represent both /j/ and /i:/; waw can represent both /w/ and /u:/.* The short vowels are not represented, except when writing the Quran and texts intended for beginners. It is only possible to read Arabic when you know the grammar (whether you have learned it or know it intuitively); if you do not know the language you cannot supply the missing vowels. Although the parallel is not exact, it is rather like English written in Pitman's shorthand. This means that the system presents difficulties for learners, but it should be remembered that English orthography is also difficult to master, though for different reasons.

*It is interesting to note a parallel with Latin where /i/ and /j/ were both represented by <i> and /u/ and /w/ were both represented by <u>.

As I have said, I do not know Chinese and am therefore not in a position to take the argument much further forward. However, the following six websites insist that Modern Chinese is not monosyllabic:

Have you encountered no sites that you respect that consider Chinese to be monosyllabic?

Googled for Chinese and polysyllabic!

I think that the idea that Chinese is polysyllabic is motivated by an attempt to impose English grammar on Chinese, thereby ignoring that which is Chinese. Do you think that Chinese could just as easily have chosen to use an alphabet, or that they could just as easily adopt one now? Do you think that Chinese is written using ideographs merely by accident of history? Do you think that Chinese is not based on ideographs?

All the books I read years ago insisted that Chinese was monosyllabic. It is only comparatively recently that I have encountered the idea that this is not the case. I think that when Westerners first encountered Chinese they found it so different that they immediately realised that they could not explain it in terms of any Indo-European grammar, or if they tried I expect they soon gave up. As for today, even a first year linguistics student would not attempt to explain Chinese other than in its own terms. Since linguists do not try to explain other aspects of Chinese using "traditional" grammatical concepts it is difficult to see why they would single out the issue of whether the language is monosyllabic and somehow deliberately come to a perverse conclusion.

Assume there is language where the word for "insect" is "pi". We can definitely say that it is a monosyllabic word. If the word is "pi/to" (I write it with the slash to avoid having to write either "pi to" or "pito") then we need to look at the elements. If we find that "pi" means "six" and "to" means "leg", then we can argue that in that language the idea of "insect" is represented by two words, though some may prefer to categorise it as a compound word. However, if we find that neither "pi" nor "to" exist as separate words we are forced to conclude that "pi/to" is a disyllabic word and that the language cannot be monosyllabic. We may also wish to come to that conclusion if we find there is a word "pi" meaning "water jug" and a word "to" meaning "judgment", since we would be hard pressed to argue that the two elements were in any way connected with the idea of an insect, just as in English we would not argue that "insect" was a compound of the words "in" and "sect". The question is therefore: if such an exercise is carried out with Chinese, what is the result? I cannot carry out the exercise myself as I do not know Chinese. However, if I am to believe what I read, others who do know Chinese have conducted the exercise and come to the conclusion that it is not monosyllabic.

I don't think I want to get into a discussion about Chinese writing.

Unfortunately, when people consider a language as different as Chinese, they often try to force Chinese into identical grammatical categories.

See my comments above.

I think that it would be difficlt to expect that the idea of morphemes was developed by people who speak only Chinese. Don't you?

Well, someone who speaks a language which he believes to be monosyllabic would not find the idea concept useful.

Obviously. We are now back to my claim about the paucity of the phoneme set. English has multisyllabic words. Chinese does not. Therefore, Chinese phonemes are insufficient in spoken speech. The fewer the phonemes in a given Chinese language, the greater the number of tones that developed to assist in providing distinctions.

We obviously disagree about whether or not Chinese is monosyllabic. I am unable, through lack of knowledge, to dispute what you say about the correlation between the number of phonemes and the number of tones in any given Chinese language. However, Vietnamese has more phonemes than Mandarin and also more tones, so whilst what you say  (i.e. the lower the number of phonemes the higher the number of tones)  may be true for Chinese languages, it is certainly not true when Mandarin is compared to Vietnamese.

You seem to be ignoring the point I made about context playing its part in determining the meaning of a word.

We have words such as "starfish" and "catfish" in English. These are considered to be single words, although they are each composed of two different  words. In Chinese, all so-called polysyllabic words, combine words in this manner. This does not make them single words in Chinese. I do not accept the arguments by your citations, for example De Francis, that because the word cat alone and not followed by the word fish will lead to misunderstanding, it is therefore somehow acceptable to claim that the combination "star fish" constitutes a single word in Chinese.

You have illustrated admirably the problem in using the word "word". This is why linguists prefer to use "morpheme". The "ordinary" reader will consider "starfish" to be one word simply because it is written as one word. Linguists, ignoring the written convention, will simply say that it is two morphemes. Just as the way English is written leads to the belief that "starfish" is "one word", so the reader of Chinese thinks of every sign as representing a word.