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The Way of Chinese Language

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Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#51

Post by intertextuality »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #48
intertextuality wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is in Korean or Chinese you need to do it with all nouns that you're counting, unlike English which only reserves it for measuring mass nouns or clarifying between nouns, etc. They way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts.

> The way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts. That would be a good argument, except that the way they function isn't different.

The way they function is completely different.

English: measure certain mass nouns or classify certain nouns. Not used for counting every noun.

Korean: Always used, regardless if they measure or clarify. Six dogs, three months, two papers, four volumes, one bowl, ten things all use counters. Always.

The difference is night and day.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#52

Post by KennyCason »

prairiedogg wrote: post #32
namelosw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not. Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating". There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" mea…

Not a native Chinese speaker, but I am a proficient speaker of Chinese as a second language. No dog in this fight except to mention that "天真" does have a "sum of its parts" aspect for me. I sometimes think of it in relation to the Chinese word for "congenital" (天生, tiānshēng). In the case of congenital, the 天 (tiān) part is better translated as "heaven", "God", "fate" or "nature", and for me, carries aspects of all o…

Completely agree. This is the same kind of understanding that I get when reading these words. I rarely have to translate ChineseEnglish, and instead just use them naturally in everyday conversation (wife is Chinese and that’s our method of conversation). As such if you asked me to translate 天真 for example, I would have to spend a few seconds to think of the word “naive”, I would instead come up with a long descriptive English sentence similar to what you did as I feel it better captures the essence of what I’m thinking when speaking Chinese. I think it’s subtle things like this that are important to remember when attempting to gain mastery in a foreign language. I also find it interesting how different languages/cultures evolve to convey similar ideas through such different means.

Something else I find is when speaking to many of my Chinese in-laws I regularly get various stories and explanations for words and phrases. Sometimes they are straight forward and sometimes there are literary or historical references that I would have never been able to derive on my own. :)

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#53

Post by thaumasiotes »

intertextuality wrote: post #51
thaumasiotes wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The way they function is also different, so I would treat them as separate grammatical concepts. That would be a good argument, except that the way they function isn't different.

The way they function is completely different. English: measure certain mass nouns or classify certain nouns. Not used for counting every noun. Korean: Always used, regardless if they measure or clarify. Six dogs, three months, two papers, four volumes, one bowl, ten things all use counters. Always. The difference is night and day.

The fact that they are used for all nouns [1] in Chinese / Korean and only one of the two classes of nouns in English is not a difference in the way they are used or the function they perform. It is a difference in which nouns require their use. They have identical grammar and meaning. There is no reason to consider them distinct phenomena; they are one and the same.

[1] Certain things that you might think of as a noun based on English are, in Chinese, measure words which do not measure a noun. For example, 天 "day" and 次 "time" (as in "it happened three times") are syntactically measure words, but it is not possible to follow them with a noun that they notionally measure. This isn't really distinguishable from saying that all English count nouns are really measure words.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#54

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #27
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"

English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".

Given that 'I don't know' isn't a lexical item but a phrase composed of at least four lexical items, I'm not quite sure what you have in mind.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#55

Post by schoen »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #26
schoen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey mean…

> We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of [施氏食獅史] To be fair, there is no equivalent of 施氏食獅史 in Chinese either. The text is written in classical Chinese and is not intelligible when read aloud. Obviously, the pronunciation of classical Chinese was different.

> is not intelligible when read aloud

In that case I should definitely not use that as an example of this point! Thanks. :-)

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#56

Post by xiaomai »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #45
adrianN wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper di…

Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently? I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding. I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.

I can read a few thousand characters (I pick up new characters by adding flashcards (using Anki) when reading novels written in Chinese). At this point I rarely encounter characters I can't read (but there are frequently words I don't know).

I can only write a handful of characters (probably less than 100?).

I probably would get the characters mixed up less frequently if I practiced writing them, but I don't think I would have been able to learn so many if I was doing that.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#57

Post by natch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #20
natch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There aren’t pairs... That is quite a claim. Off the top of my head: digest, digest regress, regress contract, contract implant, implant etc.

That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"

No, you’re talking about a different thing.

Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather than being a pervasive feature of the language.

But feel free to call the thing I’m talking about whatever you want. But calling it “stress” doesn’t make it the same thing as the kind of stress that you were talking about with your example sentences.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#58

Post by natch »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #27
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"

English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".

That can be said in many different ways, so it’s not clear what you mean.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#59

Post by natch »

natch wrote: post #57
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"

No, you’re talking about a different thing. Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather…

Compare:

Did HE contract the disease?

Did he CONTRACT the disease?

In each of these sentences, if you pronounce “contract” as it were a noun describing a legal agreement, you are going to sound somewhat off. Same with the other words listed.

Well, that is, unless you and your listeners don’t know how to pronounce “contract” differently in each usage. But again this is only one of the examples.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#60

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

natch wrote: post #57
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"

No, you’re talking about a different thing. Each of the listed words can also have stress applied, or not, in different ways and still be differentiated by the “tone” as it would be called in Chinese. I’m not calling it tone since we don’t really have a word for it other than “pronunciation” but it’s essentially the same thing as what is happening in Chinese with tones, albeit with a very limited set of cases rather…

Ok, terminology is getting in the way, perhaps.

I'm assuming your word-pairs are supposed to be examples of differences in pronunciation of the 'verb' vs the 'noun'. Or did you have something else in mind?

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