Spoken Chinese is weak in speech sounds because the language is monosyllabic. That is, each word has only one syllable.
The article goes on to talk about the small number of distinct syllables and the use of tones to add more sounds. This of course puzzled me, because I couldn't figure out how one could have a functional language with 400+ sounds, multiplied up to 1600 or so with tones. I pictued the need ot pick one of the 1600 sounds for each new word that comes into existence. Of course, this turns out to be an incorrect description of the spoken language, although I didn't really understand that until I started learning the language.
So if the World Book's description is incorrect, what is the truth? Well, a lot of Chinese words do have only one syllable. This makes for a lot of homonyms. There are also a lot of multisyllable words. An example would be zha4meng3, or grasshopper. Neither zha4 or meng3 mean anything on their own. In between are compound words, such as du2lun2che1 or unicycle. Du2lun2che1 is litterally "single-wheel-vehicle". Unicycle is derived from Latin and litterally means one-wheel. So are English and Chinese really that different. Most English words have root components, they just tend to come from Latin or French and they may be more than one syllable long. A lot of what makes Chinese appear monosyllabic is lack of loan words to mask the compound nature of the words.
A final reason why Chinese is not monosyllabic is that a lot of characters cannot be used as standalone words. A surprising example is hai2, which has a root meaning of "child". You cannot say "Wo3 you3 yi4 ge hai2". You must say "Wo3 you3 yi4 ge hai2zi" or ""Wo3 you3 yi4 ge xiao3hai2".
Now, it would be wrong to say that Chinese is constructed just like English. While many words in both languages are built from root parts, Chinese has a more limited set of components to draw from and the building blocks are more obvious than in English. Even so, though, to call Chinese monosyllabic is an oversimplifcations.
3 comments:
But a text in chinese is succession of characters, each character is monosyllabic, and each character has a meaning.
Some words are combinaison of two or more characters, to avoid confusion in oral.
For those who wants to learn chinese, a good website: Chinese-Tools.com
What I was writing about was the World Book article that said that each word has only one syllable. This is just plain not true. Take, for example,自行车, the word for bicycle. It has three syllables but is one word. There is no way to say "bicycle" in one syllable. There are lots of words like this that contradict what the World Book said.
Your statement "Some words are combinaison of two or more characters, to avoid confusion in oral." is exactly why Chinese is not monosyllabic. It is impossible to have hundreds of thousands of words mapped to just 1600 different sounds. Each one-syllable word would have hundreds of meanings and it would be nearly impossible to know which meaning applies.
There is, then weak monosyllabism, the idea that each character isn't actually a word, but a unit of meaning. I wasn't familiar with this interpretation when I wrote this blog posting, but it does make some sense. The only thing is that some syllables just don't mean anything. I gave the example of 蚱蜢 in the posting. Neither character means anything. About 11% of the characters are like this in that they do not have any independent meaning. So in the majority of cases syllables do mean something even if they can't stand as words on their own, but there are still a lot of exceptions. Saying that Chinese is monosyllabic is just too strong of a statement and the term is misleading.
Hi.. Thanks for supporting chinese by mentioning its not monosyllabic.
As it has over 2600 characters and can be used for different meaning.
I thinks its great to Learn Chinese Online with using tutors and other multimedia devices.
Post a Comment