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Homophones in isolating languages | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Asian Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5574 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 9 of 9 27 October 2009 at 7:28am | IP Logged |
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That's a rather contrived example though. I bet you that a native Chinese encountering
that for the first time would be amazed as you or I. You can even do similar things with European languages (beyond the obvious tongue twisters): "Noon rings out. A wasp, making an ominous sound, a sound akin to a klaxon or a tocsin, flits about. Augustus, who has had a bad night, sits up blinking and purblind. Oh what was that word (is his thought) that ran through my brain all night, that idiotic word that, hard as I'd try to pun it down, was always just an inch or two out of my grasp - fowl or foul or Vow or Voyal? - a word which, by association, brought into play an incongruous mass and magma of nouns, idioms, slogans and sayings, a confusing, amorphous outpouring which I sought in vain to control or turn off but which wound around my mind a whirlwind of a cord, a whiplash of a cord, a cord that would split again and again, would knit again and again, of words without communication or any possibility of combination, words without pronunciation, signification or transcription but out of which, notwithstanding, was brought forth a flux, a continuous, compact and lucid flow: an intuition, a vacillating frisson of illumination as if caught in a flash of lightning or in a mist abruptly rising to unshroud an obvious sign - but a sign, alas, that would last an instant only to vanish for good." -"A void" by Gilbert Adair I leave it up to you to discern what's being demonstrated here. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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