Words, morphemes, collocations, characters
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We've met Julesy before: "The conundrum of singing with tones" (5/30/25). She has a Ph.D. in linguistics and knows how to communicate her scientific knowledge of Mandarin to intelligent laypersons. Here she is again, this time telling us some very important things about the differences between words and characters:
During the first half of her presentation, Julesy made me feel that she was preaching the gospel according to VHM (difference between zì 字 ["character"] and cí 詞 ["word"]), spacing / parsing, etc., but in the second half she got into some statistical surveys and the notion of "collocations" that were "lexically significant", and salvaged some unique properties of sinographs while yet assimilating them into modern concepts of linguistics.
What a breath of fresh air to have someone with her expertise and exactitude explaining how Sinitic languages work. Until the recent past, most of what was purveyed about "Chinese" was either too technical and theoretical for the non-specialist to grasp or was a mishmash of nonsense gobbledygook.
Keep 'em comin', Julesy!
Selected readings
- "Lexemes and word forms" (12/6/04)
- "Don't say 'lexeme' or we'll break your legs" (3/21/04)
- "Word, syllable, morpheme, phoneme" (10/6/18)
- "The concept of word in Sinitic" (10/3/18)
- "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)
- "Diacriticless Vietnamese on a sign in San Francisco" (9/30/18)
- "Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12)
Barbara Phillips Long said,
July 3, 2025 @ 11:56 pm
Julesy was very informative, but I got distracted a couple of times. She pronounces the “t” in “often,” which I do not, and I got the impression that “et cetera” came out with “eck” instead of “et.”
She also avoided going down the rabbit hole about “iced cream” and “ice cream,” but I am left wondering what she thinks of “iced tea.” (Sorry, as far as I am concerned, “ice tea” is not acceptable, even though I am enthusiastic about ice cream.)