Many of the debates over Chinese language issues that keep coming up on Language Log and elsewhere may be attributed to a small number of basic misunderstandings and disagreements concerning the relationship between speech and writing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
All too often, people think that the Chinese characters (h\u00e0nz\u00ec<\/i> \u6c49\u5b57) are<\/b> the Chinese language.\u00a0 Right away that brings us face to face with the monumental conundrum of what is the<\/b> Chinese language.\u00a0 This is a question that we have confronted countless times, and I have always come down on the side of there being numerous mutually unintelligible Chinese languages.\u00a0 Moreover, many of the morphemes of these languages (often the most frequently occurring ones) cannot even be written in h\u00e0nz\u00ec.\u00a0 Consequently, the proposition that the h\u00e0nz\u00ec are somehow collectively to be equated with the many varieties of H\u00e0ny\u01d4 \u6c49\u8bed (Sinitic) breaks down from the very beginning.<\/p>\n
I view Sinitic as a group or family of languages that may be divided into branches like those that exist for all other language groups \/ families.\u00a0 (Whether Sinitic is a group or a family depends upon how closely it is related to Tibeto-Burman and other groups.\u00a0 Since the jury is still out on\u00a0 the relationship between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman, etc., I refrain from drawing any firm conclusions on this vexed issue.)<\/p>\n
I reserve the designation \"Chinese\" (Zh\u014dngw\u00e9n \u4e2d\u6587) for the written form of Mandarin that is used by literate speakers of all the Sinitic languages and topolects.<\/p>\n
Having come just this far, we need to be constantly on the alert to confusing language<\/b> and script<\/b>, which is bound to result in faulty analysis of both.\u00a0 Language is what people speak (the sounds that convey meaning); to the extent that their language may be written (most languages in the world are not written), script is the tool they use to write it.<\/p>\n
Another source of vast confusion in the study of \"Chinese\" is the relationship between character<\/b> and word<\/b>.\u00a0 Many students are under the misapprehension that every character is a word and every word is a character.\u00a0 It must be pointed out that, until the first half of the twentieth century, there wasn't even a word for \"word\" in Chinese (henceforth I'll dispense with the definitional quotation marks).\u00a0 As a result, Chinese linguists borrowed a term that originally (late medieval period) referred to a type of lyric verse set to various metrical patterns (still earlier, it meant \"phraseology\"), c\u00ed \u8bcd, to stand for \"word\".\u00a0 Thus, in modern Chinese linguistics, a sharp distinction is drawn between z\u00ec<\/b> \u5b57<\/b> (\"character\")<\/b> and c\u00ed \u8bcd (\"word\"<\/b>).\u00a0 This distinction is fundamental to all contemporary linguistic analysis.\u00a0 It is also why there are z<\/b>\u00ecdi\u01cen \u5b57\u5178 (\"character dictionaries\")<\/b> and c\u00eddi\u01cen \u8bcd\u5178 (\"word dictionaries\")<\/b>.\u00a0 These two types of dictionaries serve very different purposes, and we need both.<\/p>\n
Except for the rare polysyllabic characters that we have talked about from time to time on Language Log, Chinese characters are one syllable in length.\u00a0 In contrast, the average length of a Chinese word is almost exactly two syllables \/ characters.<\/p>\n
Not all characters are morphemes, since some Sinitic morphemes are disyllabic; i.e., the individual syllables \/ characters do not mean anything by themselves:\u00a0 sh\u0101nh\u00fa \u73ca\u745a (\"coral\"), h\u00fadi\u00e9 \u8774\u8776 (\"butterfly\"), q\u00edl\u00edn \u9e92\u9e9f (\"kirin\"), zh\u012bzh\u016b \u8718\u86db (\"spider\"), f\u00e8nghu\u00e1ng \u51e4\u51f0 (\"phoenix\"), p\u00edp\u00e1 \u7435\u7436 (\"lute\"), qi\u016by\u01d0n \u86af\u8693 (\"earthworm\"), bi\u0101nf\u00fa \u8759\u8760 (\"bat\"), and so forth (these are old terms, and there are many more like them).<\/p>\n
Some characters are free<\/b> (i.e., may be used independently as a single syllable word) while others are bound<\/b> (i.e., may only be used in combination with another character or characters to form a disyllabic or polysyllabic word).<\/p>\n
Chinese words may have affixes like words in other languages.\u00a0 Already in 1976, the historical linguist Axel Schuessler wrote a seminal work on Affixes in Proto-Chinese<\/i>, whose principles were elaborated in his A Dictionary of Early Zhou Chinese<\/i> (1987) and other works by him.\u00a0 Zhu\u014dzi \u684c\u5b50 does not mean \"son of table\" — it means \"table\"; zh\u014dngt\u00f3u \u949f\u5934 does not mean \"head of bell\" — it means \"hour\".<\/p>\n
Another common mistake in research on Sinitic is to call the description of character construction<\/b> (radicals, residual strokes, etc.) etymology<\/b>.\u00a0 Etymology has to do with the evolution of the meanings of words<\/b> through time.\u00a0 That is a separate matter from the evolution of the form and structure of characters through time. Here again we are indebted to Axel Schuessler for his ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese<\/i> <\/i>(2006), <\/i>the first of its kind.<\/p>\n
Since the mistranslation of the Chinese term f\u0101ngy\u00e1n \u65b9\u8a00 into English as \"dialect\", and vice versa, has caused so much mischief in the study of Sinitic, we would do well to avoid it altogether and substitute \"topolect\" in English for f\u0101ngy\u00e1n \u65b9\u8a00 and t\u014dngy\u00e1n \u901a\u8a00 in Chinese for \"dialect\".\u00a0 For copious examples of the reasoning behind these suggestions, see several pages of each of these searches:\u00a0 here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n —————<\/p>\n The above paragraphs constitute a mini introductory grammar of Sinitic for the neophyte.\u00a0 We have gone into all of the topics touched upon here in much greater depth in Language Log posts of the last decade.\u00a0 For those who are serious in pursuing these matters further, the following books are warmly recommended:<\/p>\n Y. R. Chao and L. S. Yang, Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese<\/i> (Harvard University Press, 1947).\u00a0 Elegant, brilliant work that is particularly good at delineating the contrast between free and bound.<\/p>\n Charles N. Li and Sandra A. Thompson, Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar<\/i> (University of California Press, 1989)<\/p>\n Yuen Ren Chao, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese<\/i> (University of California Press, 1965).<\/p>\n Jerome L. Packard, The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach<\/i> (Cambridge University Press, 2000).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many of the debates over Chinese language issues that keep coming up on Language Log and elsewhere may be attributed to a small number of basic misunderstandings and disagreements concerning the relationship between speech and writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,124,178,199,51,24,224,79,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classification","category-dialects","category-etymology","category-grammar","category-morphology","category-phonetics-and-phonology","category-topolects","category-writing","category-writing-systems"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29443"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29469,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29443\/revisions\/29469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}