> Also, the Egyptian determinatives play a grammatical
> rôle, the Chinese radicals don't.

[M] What grammatical role do the Egyptian
determinatives play!!??

Apparently when you and I refer to 'Egyptian
determinatives', we are not referring to the same
thing. I am referring to those unpronounced signs that
are added at the end of words to indicate the
grammatical category they belong to (nouns, verbs...).


[M] This idea that hanzis are the basic
building
blocks of Chinese writing has has little or no basis
in reality.

Your opinion.
If they were not, you could draw up new hanzi by
haphazard combinations of basic strokes, which is
simply not the case: new hanzi (like the names of
racing horses in Hong Kong) are created by 'squeezing'
two characters into one square.


[M] In fact, neither lexicographers nor common people
ever considered
Chinese
"characters" as non-analyzable units

_non-analysable_ is *not* synonymous with _building
blocks_
Hanzi *are* the building blocks of Chinese writing
(you cannot write Chinese if you only learn the 8
basic strokes). And they *are* analysable.


[M] lexicographers organized their
dictionary exactly by analyzing hanzi, and common
people remember and
explain (even on the phone!) the "spelling" of a
certain hanzi by
listing
its components in order.

This is *certainly not* the most common way of
spelling. Usually people tell you what hanzi to use by
rhyming: e.g., «Shang4hai3 de hai3» to spell hai3
written with the water radical [a good example of a
radical that is not stand-alone] next to pie3 and
heng1 above the 'mother' character. Way faster than
describing the ten strokes and their relative
positions!

> the Egyptian 'squares' can be further
> broken into stand-alone signs. In this aspect,
> Egyptian is more akin to Korean.

[M] Sorry: you are first comparing apples with oranges
(Egyptian and
Chinese
"squares") and then apples with melons (Egyptian and
Korean)...

O_O
*you* started comparing apples with oranges....


Gianni






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