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The Way of Chinese Language

thevivekpandey.github.io

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Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#81

Post by gmb2k1 »

namelosw wrote: post #23
theli0nheart wrote: post #5

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…

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…

Essen does not mean "eating" in this context.

You mixed up the word "Essen" (meal, food) with the word "Essen" (noun of the word "essen" [to eat]), which means eating.

So translated word for word, "Mittagessen" also means "noon meal".

Edit: You could go one step further and make it "mid day meal".

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#82

Post by natch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #79
natch wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL! You are asking the right person, because I used to work on both Chinese and English speech recognition systems, including the first large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system to deal well with Chinese tones. I can say they are essentially the same phenomenon under the hood, although linguists haven't grappled with this reality yet apparently. However, I don't have any more evidence than you do, just m…

Yeah, so I work a bit on both sides (though not on sound stuff), on theoretical things and on getting algorithms to do useful things with language, and so (to follow through with the Jelinek quote) I will point out that getting the performance of your speech recogniser to go up doesn't mean that you gain any understanding of the underlying phenomenon. So Mandarin lexical tone and English lexical stress are quite clea…

Again, stress is different. In the contract example the all-caps is the stress. The other part, which we resort to accents to indicate, is what in Chinese is called tone.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#83

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

natch wrote: post #82
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so I work a bit on both sides (though not on sound stuff), on theoretical things and on getting algorithms to do useful things with language, and so (to follow through with the Jelinek quote) I will point out that getting the performance of your speech recogniser to go up doesn't mean that you gain any understanding of the underlying phenomenon. So Mandarin lexical tone and English lexical stress are quite clea…

Again, stress is different. In the contract example the all-caps is the stress. The other part, which we resort to accents to indicate, is what in Chinese is called tone.

Okay - it's confusing because what you're using accents to indicate is usually referred to as 'stress' in English, and what you're using all-caps for is usually 'emphasis' or 'focus prosody' or the like. I'm very interested in the ALLCAPS phenomenon, but I think it's largely irrelevant here (other than being acoustically similar to Mandarin tone).

So, the áccent thing, is acoustically different from Mandarin tone. So, using the digest example:

a. dígest (such as a compilation of summaries)

b. digést (such as a creature processing food to extract nutrition from it)

The (a) one is usually realised as /ˈdaɪdʒɛst/, while the (b) one as /dəˈdʒɛst/. So not only does the first syllable in (a) have a different vowel than in (b), but first syllable in (b) will have a drastically shorter duration than the first syllable of (a). These acoustic correlates in English are very different from what occurs with tone in Mandarin, which doesn't affect syllable duration or vowel quality in the same fashion. You can visualise the acoustic wave-forms of the accent-thing in English and compare it against the acoustic wave-forms of the tone-thing in Mandarin and see that they involve different acoustic properties. (So no need for any linguistic theory etc.)

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#84

Post by natch »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #83
natch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, stress is different. In the contract example the all-caps is the stress. The other part, which we resort to accents to indicate, is what in Chinese is called tone.

Okay - it's confusing because what you're using accents to indicate is usually referred to as 'stress' in English, and what you're using all-caps for is usually 'emphasis' or 'focus prosody' or the like. I'm very interested in the ALLCAPS phenomenon, but I think it's largely irrelevant here (other than being acoustically similar to Mandarin tone). So, the áccent thing, is acoustically different from Mandarin tone. So…

I guess you’re not well versed with mandarin. Those accents are tone marks, at least in the context of talking about Chinese tones or tones akin to Chinese tones.

But... you introduced the accents first in this conversation! So you get to decide what you meant by them.

I guess we can’t communicate since were using a different language. Learn how pinyin works with tone markers and then we can talk.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#85

Post by [deleted] »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #83
natch wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, stress is different. In the contract example the all-caps is the stress. The other part, which we resort to accents to indicate, is what in Chinese is called tone.

Okay - it's confusing because what you're using accents to indicate is usually referred to as 'stress' in English, and what you're using all-caps for is usually 'emphasis' or 'focus prosody' or the like. I'm very interested in the ALLCAPS phenomenon, but I think it's largely irrelevant here (other than being acoustically similar to Mandarin tone). So, the áccent thing, is acoustically different from Mandarin tone. So…

[deleted]

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#86

Post by chagel »

Happy Chinese New Year!

I cannot stop helping myself to share a Chinese quiz to you for celebrating our new year - please use 20 different Chinese words to express “I” or “me”.

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