suzmccarth wrote:

>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
> wrote:

no I didn't

> > > Certainly. E.g., I remember a lengthy article about how the
> Chinese
> > > translators of Harry Potter's books transcribed the names: they
> > > carefully chose the characters(=hanzi) whose meaning hinted
> about the
> > > character(=moral quality) of each character(=personage) in the
> novel.
>
> When we performed Robin Hood in our ESL class last year we wrote a
> brief summary of the story in Chinese. I asked an adult about how
> to write Robin Hood in Chinese and I was told that there was no need
> to find out how someone else had already translated it. I should
> just ask the children to chose characters that would represent the
> sounds in his name and then discuss which ones would best represent
> what Robin Hood stood for.
>
> So yes we had to find out which characters best represented the
> character of each character in our play.

_that_ was my line

> I am rereading an article by C.K. Leung on reading acquisition in
> Chinese. (He writes extensively about dyslexia in Chinese readers so
> probably not well known in this list.) However, he remarks that

he's known to anyone who's read about dyslexia

> understanding the fanqie principle provides a more powerful means of
> pronouncing Chinese characters than the component phonetic radicals
> or the use of heterographic homophones. He gives the impression that
> there is a lack of understanding of the fangie priniciple in most
> discussions of Chinese orthography. Unfortunately there is no
> illustration of the chart in his article so I am glad to have found
> one now.
>
> C.K.Leung also refers to the "internal structure of characters
> encompassing both meaning (morpho) and sound (phonemics)". I think

but in English they're usually called the radical and the phonetic
respectively

> that this must be the origin of my much criticised use of the
> term "morphophonemic" last summer, when I used the term with a
> meaning other than the usual one (simply to describe units which
> represents meaning and sound). For myself, I prefer to think of the
> word morphophonemic as being able to have more than one meaning, but
> I accept that others here don't - so no need to tell me this is
> unacceptable.

that's fine if you want to remain incomprehensible
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...