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Languages ranked based on irregularities? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes  Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 25 of 29 28 June 2012 at 11:05pm | IP Logged | ||
yes, it's not quite productive char. I think it's used only in a word 叵测 - unpredictable but I forgot about other form of negating 'can', namely 无法, but Ithink it's use may be formal. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4667 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 26 of 29 29 June 2012 at 5:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Lugubert, you are right about Chinese classifiers. However, I’d like to take issue with the idea that Chinese exhibits “morphological regularity.”
Besides the –men plural suffix on pronouns, does Chinese have any morphology at all? Or perhaps it has some derivational rather than inflectional morphology? Let’s compare it with some other, rather similar languages. The native word stock of Thai is largely monosyllabic (although words borrowed from Pali/Sanskrit and Khmer are not.) However, Thai does have two prefixes that turn verbs or adjectives into abstract nouns, kaan- and khwaam-, as in kaanluak(tang) “election” from luak(tang) to elect, khwaamklua “fear n.” from klua “afraid”. But Chinese doesn’t seem to have a productive equivalent. I wonder to what extent we can understand the process of forming two-syllable words in Chinese as "morphological". Correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem regular at all, different monosyllables combine together in seemingly random ways to form new words. Often the order doesn’t matter either. Learning vocabulary for Chinese is very time-consuming for this reason. Since there don’t seem to be clear derivational processes for word formation, voila “irregularity.” I am uncomfortable with saying that since Chinese has practically no morphology, ergo it’s very regular. Especially when the OP innocently suggests that it should be easy to learn for this reason. The really pernicious step in this tortured chain of rationalization is as follows: if the Chinese language should be easy but people still are not able to learn it, this must be due to the writing system, so we need to convince the Chinese to abandon characters to accommodate us. Victor Mair’s posts at Language Log are interesting to read in this regard. Edited by viedums on 29 June 2012 at 5:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lugubert Heptaglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6868 days ago 186 posts - 235 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, EnglishC2, German, Dutch, French Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 27 of 29 29 June 2012 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | ||
Very good points! I immediately retract on regularity. Come to think of it, saying that Chinese morphology is regular is like saying that atheism is a religion or not collecting stamps is a hobby. I didn't think of creating polysyllables as a morphology feature. Perhaps I should. There are "suffixes" that as a second part of a disyllabic word signify an occupation etc. 作家 zuòjiā (work-family) = writer, 画家 huàjiā (paint-family) painter; 服务员 fúwùyuán (serve-business-personnel) = waiter, 打字员 dǎzìyuán (hit-character-personnel) typist. And one could argue that the use of plural -men is irregular, or at least restricted. Not to speak of the suffix -r... Sometimes it looks like a noun creating particle (画-画儿: paint-picture), other times it seems to be a matter of personal choice or just a Beijing preference. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4667 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 28 of 29 30 June 2012 at 4:05am | IP Logged | ||
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There is also -法 “way of doing” in 看法 kanfa “way of looking, opinion”, 說法 shuofa “way of speaking, expression” etc. But one Chinese grammar I consulted (Yip and Rimmington) doesn’t treat combinations with 家 or 法 any differently from straight compounds like 汽車, 火車, 自行車 (car, train, bicycle). This makes sense if you want to approach Chinese on its own terms.
Yes, -兒appears to produce nouns, but speakers in places like Taiwan rarely or never use it. I believe it’s an areal feature phonetically, ie the sound is present in northern languages like Mongolian, but generally isn’t found in Southeast Asian languages. It would be interesting if we could show that Mandarin picked up the –er via contact with its northern neighbors – anyone have an idea? I don’t want to sound too harsh about comparing languages based on how regular they are. In certain cases it can work – for instance, it shouldn’t be too controversial to say that Finnish is more regular than Estonian, or Indonesian more regular than Tagalog. But can anything come of asking whether Finnish or Indonesian is more regular? They just work differently, it’s truly apples and oranges. Edit: some interesting comments on what makes Mandarin difficult here: Learning Mandarin, whatever it takes Edited by viedums on 30 June 2012 at 6:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| viedums Hexaglot Senior Member Thailand Joined 4667 days ago 327 posts - 528 votes Speaks: Latvian, English*, German, Mandarin, Thai, French Studies: Vietnamese | Message 29 of 29 05 July 2012 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Actually it looks like both 兒 and 子 began as diminutive suffixes (in the sense of ‘son’ or offspring) and were then generalized (according to Schuessler’s Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, citing Norman.)
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