Gianni,

If you had to pick a term or a phrase what would you call Chinese
writing? I thought that the Chinese components couldn't really
be 'logographic' because they are not stand alone and the sound
connection seems to be quite important. It sounds like a good term
but it could be missleading. What do you think?

Suzanne


--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Stage Linguistique
<linguistique_stage@...> wrote:

> > 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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