From sjwillett@earthlink.net Thu Dec 27 17:53:50 2001 Received: from mailscan2.cac.washington.edu (mailscan2.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.16]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.6+UW01.08/8.11.6+UW01.10) with SMTP id fBS1rnn84144 for ; Thu, 27 Dec 2001 17:53:49 -0800 Received: FROM mxu3.u.washington.edu BY mailscan2.cac.washington.edu ; Thu Dec 27 17:53:45 2001 -0800 Received: from pintail.mail.pas.earthlink.net (pintail.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.122]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW01.12) with ESMTP id fBS1rim1002986 for ; Thu, 27 Dec 2001 17:53:44 -0800 Received: from pm3-03-42.sle.du.teleport.com ([216.26.16.234] helo=stevenw) by pintail.mail.pas.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 16JmDP-00061U-00 for classics@u.washington.edu; Thu, 27 Dec 2001 17:53:44 -0800 From: "Steven J. Willett" To: classics@u.washington.edu Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 18:07:04 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Re: Scripts and Languages [Long] Reply-to: sjwillett@earthlink.net Message-ID: <3C2B6348.2324.20D5F439@localhost> In-reply-to: <3C2B6242.DC509802@pauahtun.org> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v4.01) Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Content-description: Mail message body On 27 Dec 2001 at 11:02, Ivan Van Laningham wrote: > Although Chinese and Japanese are both "sound-poor" languages, i.e., > languages that have limited possibilities for the creation of new words, > they have responded to this challenge in extremely different ways. > Japanese by allowing words to be constructed by stringing together > syllables (out of the ~50 possible) like little trains, and Chinese by > adding tones to the basic 400 or so monosyllabic words. China has also > lately (and I have no idea how lately) taken to creating words that are > effectively single units, even though they are written as two (or more) > syllabic units. AMK-sama probably knows much more about this than do I. What is "sound-poor" supposed to mean? If it means that Japanese and Chinese have a narrower phonological range than some languages, this has no bearing whatsoever on the ability of the two languages to form new words either by borrowing--with the appropriate sound changes--or compounding. Japanese can adopt any word it wants quite simply by modifying phonology and writing with katakkana. Sometimes that produces Japanese shorter (pasukon') or longer (makudonarudo) than English, but the process has nothing to do with "stringing together syllables ... like little trains." Japanese is in fact a polysyllabic language with an inflected, highly regular verb system. In his important study _Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation_ (Needham Research Institute Studies 2, Cambridge UP), Robert Wardy shows how 17th century Chinese scholars created a philosophical vocabulary for the translation of Aristotle's _Categories_, most typically by compounding existing terminology. Wardy lists the Chinese vocabulary in his appendix for those who want to see how that was achieved. As I noted in my long review of Wardy to this list a couple of years ago, the vocabulary would not have been obviously comprehensible to ordinary well-educated scholars of the time, but it did permit a translation. This is an extreme case; the rendering of common engineering, computer and technical terminology is much less difficult. Since my list tour of Wardy, the BMCR has published no review despite the fact that the book was long ago marked as "taken." I wrote one of the editors last year, urging him to prick the reviewer into haste. At this rate the book will be remaindered before a notice appears. Are you reading, JOD? So far as I know, my post is still the only sustained treatment of this landmark study. Steve Shankman has a short review of _Aristotle in China_ in the next issue of Comparative Literature. We discussed his views at some length over lunch last summer in Eugene, and agreed to disagree about a few matters, but concluded that it was a work all Classicists should know. His reservations about the monograph have less to do with its fundamental premise and more with Wardy's dissent from certain linguistic views held by A. C. Graham. I personally side with Wardy here. ====================================== Steven J. Willett Shizuoka University of Art and Culture 1794-1 Noguchi-cho, Hamamatsu City Japan 430-8533 Tel/Fax: (53) 457-6124 steven@suac.ac.jp (Japan) sjwillett@earthlink.net (US) .