Words, morphemes, collocations, characters
« previous post |
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.)
Pedro said,
July 4, 2025 @ 4:46 am
@Barbara Phillips Long: Lots of people pronounce the T in often, or pronounce et cetera "excetera". I don't, but I long ago learnt to ignore such things when listening to an expert speaking on a subject I'm interested in – far better to pay attention to what she's saying.
I love the example of ice cream. You can't separate the two parts and say *"Please buy whipped, ice and double cream" (or even *"Please buy whipped and ice cream", which only implicitly separates them) – you have to say "Please buy whipped cream, ice cream and double cream" (or better still "Please buy ice cream, and also whipped and double cream") – which to me is a strong indicator that it's a single word, despite being spelt with a space.
By the same logic, a full infinitive like to buy can be shown to be two words because you can say "I need to go to the shop and buy ice cream" (where the two words of the phrase "to buy" are separated by five words).
This is a point Julesy didn't address in her video. Is it possible to split those disyllabic compounds up and recombine them or reorder them?
Victor Mair said,
July 4, 2025 @ 4:50 am
@Barbara Phillips Long
Those are all good pronunciation issues that you raise, but my impression is that, in the general population, people come down on one side or another of them willy-nilly.
I don't like the sound of "eckcetera", but some of my dearest friends (and even family members!) say it.
I myself am usually punctilious about pronouncing as many of the letters in a word / phrase as possible / permissible — e.g., "iced tea" — but I'm not bothered if people say "ice tea", and, in running conversation, I probably say it myself fairly often ("offen", not "often", for me).
Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (who was by training a nuclear engineer) both said "nucular", which really grates on my ear(s).
C'est la vie!
Victor Mair said,
July 4, 2025 @ 5:00 am
@Pedro
You and I were writing our comments at the same time and in the same mood / mode / mentality..
I like an issue that came up in your last sentence: "split XXX up" vs. "split up XXX".