zompist bboard

I'm making my way thru my volume of modern Chinese grammar, and am, as usual, amazed by how different it is from IE.

Since I can't seem to find some of these features in any conlang, I can't resist posting some tidbits. I hope that these ideas will get out into the conlang community and create more variety among the many IE-like conlangs.

MORPHEMES
90%+ of all Chinese morphemes are monosyllabic. Very very few are more than one syllable long.
Consequently, all these morphemes overloads the Chinese phonetic system and results in a large amount of homophones:

yi4 "advantage"
yi4 "meaning"
yi4 "translate"
yi4 "easy"
yi4 "artistic skill"
yi4 "hundred billion"
yi4 "strangle"
yi4 "Ytterbium"
etc.

However, this poses no problems for the Chinese-speakers, since most of these are morphemes, not words. Very few of these morphemes can stand alone as words. This is like English morphemes "-er", "-volve" and "anti-".
(The only morpheme in the list that can function as a standalone word is, in fact, "Ytterbium".)

WORDS
A few words are monosyllabic. In this case they are single, standalone morphemes. e.g.
ren2 "person"
tiao4 "jump"
yi4 "Ytterbium"

A vast majority of words, however, are disyllabic, made up of morphemes bound to each other:
zhen4 "press"(v.) + ding4 "firm" (adj.) ---> zhen4ding4 "calm, cool" (adj.)
kai1 "open" (v.) + guan1 "close" (v.) ---> kai1guan1 "light switch" (n.)
and two more very non-IE examples:
peng2 "friend" + you3 "friend" ---> peng2you3 "friend"
lao3 "old" + ying1 "eagle" ---> lao3ying1 "eagle"
You see, there's such an obsession with disyllabic morphemes that Chinese starts tacking on unnecessary syllables to fill the ranks up.

trisyllabic words usually form in the pattern 2+1: a disyllabic word gets another morpheme.
tou4ming2 "transparent" + du4 "degree" ---> tou4ming2du4 "transparency"

Finally, quadrisyllabic words are another oddity. The category is the exclusive home to idiomatic expressions:
hua4she2tian1zu2 "extraneous, unnecessary" < made from draw+snake+add+feet
san1xin1er4yi4 "inattentive" < made from three+hearts+two+minds

Both examples above are words (adjectives, in fact), made by idiomatic combination of morphemes. They are not like English idioms, which are phrases made from idiomatic combinations of words. And these idiomatic combinations occur mostly in quadrisyllabic words.

METER

The huge obsession with disyllabic words results in a very "rhythmic" language. This becomes very apparent in descriptive literature, which tends to use a lot of "big words".
E.g.

Ren2sheng3 shi qing1chen2 chong1chu1 long2zi4 de fei1ge1.

Morphemes:
person-life be clear-morning dash-out cage-diminu adjmark fly-pigeon.

Words:
life be earlymorning dash-out cage adjmark pigeon.

"Life is the pigeon flying out of her cage in the morning."

Meter:
2 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 2

The meter is very much "dadum dadum dadum". It's broken at only two places, by grammatical particles which are unstressed.

So there you have it. A little tidbit from beyond IE. More is coming for those interested.[/u]

_________________
Winter is coming

Nice stuff, Ranskaldan. Are you Chinese yourself, or just studying the language?

Some linguists argue that the great number of disyllables in Mandarin derives from the problem of homonyms that you point out... it's a way of reinforcing what you mean. Some evidence for this is 1) wen2yan2 (classical Chinese) had many fewer disyllables, and 2) Cantonese, which has lost fewer phonetic contrasts than Mandarin, has fewer disyllables.

I should really get back to my Mandarin course. (If nothing else, to hear the Chinese girl on the tape. Mandarin sounds really cute spoken by girls...)

I've used some bits of Chinese syntax in Almean languages, notably the te particle in Kebreni.

By the way, the one useful 'smiley' I've created is an arrow which you can get by typing : > (without the space).

I was motivated to learn Cantonese after i heard the conversation in Wayne's World.

still haven't quite got there though . . . got caught up in Hindi.

Zeng!

--Rhisto Filipei

sounds like a lot of rambling for a little bit of nonsense. Confucius would be proud.

I've tried a monosyllabic lang, but i haven't gotten much work on it. Eh, life. or should i say, "Eh, pigeon flying out her cage in the early morning"

_________________
Winter is coming

Here's tidbit #2. It's shorter, I promise.

In Chinese there's a structure showing you how successful an action is. Often, a verb can't survive without this structure:

*Ta1 kan4.
He read
"He reads".

Ta1 kan4 de wan2.
He read affirmat. finish
"He can finish reading it."

Ta1 kan4 bu wan2.
He read neg. finish
"He won't finish reading it."

The complement, wan1, is normally a verb, meaning "to end".

This can also be used, slightly modified, with aspects:

Ta1 kan4 le.
He read-perf
"He has read." (but this structure implies that he didn't read it through.)

Ta1 kan4 wan2 le.
He read-finish-perf.
"He has finished reading."

_________________
Winter is coming

_________________
Winter is coming

_________________
Winter is coming

_________________
Winter is coming

_________________
Winter is coming

_________________
Esli epei eto cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
e'osai ko sarji la lojban

I'd almost consider Tigerian an IE language, except for the fact that it's...well...not a terrestrial language at all. But I did base the grammar and overall sound heavily on Spanish, the only non-English terrestrial language I have a good command of.

If you've noticed, Tigerian words can ramble on. Many roots, apart from endings, have three syllables, and some even have four.
Example : curiperane -> don't count the -ne infinitive ending.

But then again, Tigerian doesn't have your nasssty consonant clusters, either. Of course that's intentional.

_________________
Winter is coming