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From: stanwyck@drutx.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Chinese words
Message-ID: <4916@drutx.ATT.COM>
Date: Mon, 17-Aug-87 10:36:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: drutx.4916
Posted: Mon Aug 17 10:36:39 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Aug-87 00:53:05 EDT
References: <615@unmvax.UNM.EDU>
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Organization: AT&T, Denver, CO
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in article <615@unmvax.UNM.EDU>, mike@turing.unm.edu (Michael I. Bushnell) says:
> In Chinese, every word is one syllable.  Needless to say, there is
> lots of overloading here, but the multiple meanings of a word are
> usually quite different and can be easily distinguished from context.
> There is not one character per word(== syllable), rather, there is one
> character per word meaning.  
> 
> 					mike@turing.UNM.EDU

Au contraire!  As a former Chinese translater I can catagorically state the
falseness of the above statement.  There are 2 errors, related, in the
above:
  1.  In Chinese, many words are multi-syllable (e.g., computer is 2
      syllables - dien nyau [ dien - electric, nyau - brain])

  2.  In Chinese, virtually every character is one syllable and has only
      one pronounciation.  This is the primary advantage of learning
      Chinese rather than Japanese (which I also speak).  Japanese kanji
      normally have at least two and as many as 23 different
      pronounciations (nama of nama tomago), some of which are single
      syllable and others of which are multiple syllables.

The result is the opposite of the above statement:  Chinese characters
generally map one-to-one with a syllable, and while many words are
monosyllabic, there are many compound words (see above example) that are
polysyllabic.  Most of the latter are of recent introduction.  
-- 
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