The reform of linguistics

I have got to the stage where I am not sure excatly what it is that we are argiung about, other than whether or not Chinese is monsyllabic. Perhaps you could explain again waht the basic points are that you wish to make.

My basic point is that Chinese is monosyllabic, and that contentions that it is not are attempts to make sense of Chinese grammar from a non-Chinese standpoint. I do not consider such attempts or contentions are useful.

The trouble I have with that is that no modern linguist attempts to describe one language in the terms of another. Any recent description of Chinese I have read does not do it when it talks about other aspects of the language and I am left puzzling as to why whether or not the language is monosyllabic should be the exception to the rule.

I believe that it is so, and I think that this is critical to understanding Chinese well. I wonder why you insist that it is not, considering your lack of direct evidence.

As a person who does not understand Chinese, and who perhaps has no desire or goal in learning Chinese, I can certainly recognize why you might consider it to be unimportant. Given that, I wonder why you would have come to developp an opinion.

I wonder on what basis you make this claim.

Although not many people would perhaps think of it that way, learning any language is a question of learning what syllable should follow another to express something. Whether the individual syllables form words or not is not important. What is important is getting the right syllables in the right order.

I specifically did not say that. I said something similar to the point that the number of distinct vocalizations that constitute words is far less in Chinese. Therefore, each of these vocalizations must constitute a far greater number of words, and context becomes far more important than in languages such as English.

I am glad we agree that context is more important (that is to say comes up more often) in Chinese than in English. However, there are perhaps more homophones in English than people realise.

You are reading more into it that exists.

None of the words are written as disyllables. In Chinese, certain words require or prefer the accompanyment of pairing words. It is common in pinyin to write such pairs without an intervening space. In China, it is also common to introduce no spaces at all in the string of pinyin. Notice that many of these are duplications. In English, we might say "ho ho". We might change this to "ho ho ho". Would you call this extra emphasis to constitute a distinct word, such that ho ho and ho ho ho are two distinct English words?

I was simply going by the fact that I find forms such as "hónglíng". If you say that this is two monosyllabic words written together then I do not think I am going to be able to argue with you, though I wonder why they are written together.

I don't really believe that you read this. If so, you should really be careful about what you believe. Your cherry-picked example notwithstanding, how can you consider this more monosyllabic than Chinese? Many words in English of Germanic origina are monosyllabic. How can you consider that the ability to construct an entire sentence of such words is somehow evidence that you can generalize to the entire language?

Well, I did read it. I do not of course believe everything I read. I think the point was made that it is everyday English that is being talked about. I did not say or try to prove that everyday English is monosyllabic, as it clearly is not. That very long passages can be constructed using only monosyllabic words is nevertheless quite interesting, even if a passage is, on examination, contrived. I did not make any generalisation about English, only pointed out its tendency (and it is no more than a tendency) to be monosyllabic in everyday speech. I did not cherry-pick the passage I quoted, it was genuinely chosen at random – OK I admit that my eyes first fell on Aldous Huxley, so I have remedied that and picked up "Brave New World" and opened it at random. Here is a passage that is not dialogue.

"A few drops fell, and suddenly the drums broke out again into a panic of hurrying notes; there was a great shout. The dancers rushed forward, picked up the snakes and ran out of the square. Men, women, children, all the crowd ran after them. A minute later the square was empty, only the boy remained, prone where he had fallen, quite still. Three old women came out of one of the houses, and with some difficulty lifted him and carried him in."

According to my calculation 80% of the words are monosyllabic. It is also instructive to note that the number of syllables (approximately 115) does not exceed the number of morphemes (approximately 100) by that much. This is not scientific, but I hope it proves a point.

I think that the reason that you say this is that you do not understand Chinese. Are you aware that Chinese has only a single tense, the present tense? Do you now think speakers of Chinese simple for not having a past or future tense? If you do not understand a langauge, then you cannot understand how and why they do not necessary need all of the features that your langauge has.

I was aware that Chinese verb has no tenses (I read it!). I do not of course think that this makes the speakers of Chinese simple, any more than I think that the lack of classifiers in English makes the speakers of English simple. It is a common misconception amongst people who speak a language with tenses and only speak that language or have not given the matter that much thought, that people who speak a language without tenses are unable to speak about, and therefore not conceive, past and future time and accordingly must be simple.

At school I studied French, Spanish, Russian and Latin. Each of these languages is different from the other and from English in varying degrees, but not so different that they present any tremendous conceptual hurdles for a native speaker of English to overcome. Nevertheless, they are sufficiently different for me to have realised that what one language deems necessary to express another language may not, and that what one language can express another may be incapable of expressing. Later in life this was emphasised when I looked into some non-Indo-European languages such as Arabic, Malay, Japanese and Thai. Each of these languages belongs to a different language family and are as different from each other as each is different from English. What I came to realise is the astonishing variety in the way something can be said.

I should perhaps have explained what I meant by a "truly monosyllabic language". I meant a language where every entity is expressed by a single syllable and any possible syllable expresses a single entity. If Chinese is like that I should be astonished.

There is a natural tendency for the native speakers of a language to believe that it is special. Whilst every language is unique, no language is more "special" than another. For whatever reason, the speakers of Chinese seem to believe that what they feel to be special about their language derives, at least in part, from its being monosyllabic. I do not believe that to be the case. I fully and freely admit that I believe this without having any first hand knowledge of Chinese and perhaps I ought really not to express an opinion on the matter.

Can we nevertheless agree?

1. It is possible to express complex ideas in English at length using only monosyllabic words, even if the language may be somewhat contrived.

2. Some entities can only be articulated in Chinese by uttering more than one syllable

.

Forbes wrote:

Can we nevertheless agree? 2. Some entities can only be articulated in Chinese by uttering more than one syllable

I think that's true of just about any language, Forbes. In reality, it's not possible to express every possible thing in the world in one syllable, unless we keep coining new words to keep up with the times.

Again, it comes down to the definition of what we mean by "monosyllable".  Chinese is monosyllable to me because I can look up every "monosyllable character" in the dictionary and you'll find an explanation for the "word".  The fact that the characters can be combined to form new meanings is no different from the way other languages work.

May I suggest we put the Chinese discussion to rest and use another language as an example?

Cheers.

Are all morphemes in Chinese free morphemes?

I'm not a linguist, but I'd say they mostly are.  A linguist may be able to find exceptions, perhaps, but...

My English-Chinese dictionaries only contain free morphemes (perhaps not to confuse ESl speakers like me).

Forbes wrote:

Please refer here http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html

I'm no linguist, but I'd say Chinese relies on context for tenses, since we don't "inflect".