Richard:
> Thai differs in several ways. It uses the classifiers with
> cardinals, ordinals and demonstratives, and the word order is noun-
> CLASSIFIER-demonstrative/ordinal or noun-cardinal-classifier.
Apparently not too different. With the classifier "ge", one can say
"di-yi-ge gao3" ("the first dog"), "yi-ge gao3" ("one dog") and
"zhei-ge gao3" ("this dog"). However, I was saying that you can't
use it as a pronoun just like "I, you, he, she, etc" per se although
I noticed my friend using it as a relative pronoun as in "Ta shi _ge_
hui2 Beijing de nühaizi" ("She is the girl returning to Beijing.")
In effect, the clause is between the classifier "ge" and the
largely possessive/adjectivizing marker "de".
> The classifiers tend to be used as pronouns, often like the English
> pronoun(?) 'one', as in 'I'll have the big ones.'
Oooh, okay. The Mandarin translation afaik would be "Wo xiang3 da4-de"
where "de" (also functioning as possessive and relative marker)
functions like this (1 = "high level", 2 = "rising", 3 = "low-rising",
4 = "falling"). Perhaps Cantonese is more like Thai than Mandarin
because if I understand properly, the same phrase in Cantonese would
be "Ngo seong daai-go" where "go" is cognate with the Mandarin classifier
"ge". However saying *"Wo xiang da-ge" would be awkward
according to the Beijing Standard, I think, although this isn't
unconceivable colloquially or in choppy interdialect conversations,
I'd suspect.
> One Thai-English dictionary therefore decided to translate all the
> classifiers as 'a'!
No, that doesn't quite work. The best correlation in English would
be as in the phrase "one _HEAD_ of lettuce". Definiteness may be
marked seperately in Mandarin by means of explicitly using proximal
"zhei4" or distal "nei4" (also "zhe4" and "na4") before the classifier.
The classifier has nothing to do with this definiteness and thus cannot
be considered like "a" or "the" at all. The classifier is actually
definite-neutral.
> Most of the 2nd person pronouns (if that they be) can also
> be used as 3rd person, but I'd be very wary of using them to
> distinguish human participants.
This is where it starts to sound more like Japanese or Vietnamese.
Mandarin is thankfully straightforward where "wo3" means "I",
"ni3" means "you", and "ta1" means "he/she/it" (with other
pronominals being rarer like formal 2p "nin2" and inanimate 3p
"tie2"). There's none of this pronominal ambiguity.
>> I'm a careless foreign sinophone that has forgotten many
>> of the classifiers I was taught, but that's okay because most
>> Chinese have too :)
>
> The same's supposed to go for Thai!
The usage of classifiers would appear to be an areal feature of
many Asian languages. I've encountered them in Vietnamese, Mandarin,
Cantonese and Japanese.
> Thai seems to be heading down that route. To confuse matters, a lot
> of nouns have a (removable) classificatory prefix that usually has no
> direct relationship to the classifier.
Hmm, cool. That sounds like Proto-Sino-Tibetan itself but Proto-Sinitic
apparently lost all these prefixes as it headed towards an analytic
state of affairs. Tibetan still retains them though, well sorta.
= gLeN