On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 06:10:35PM +0000, Meta via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...] > Oh yes, I'm well aware that there's a lot of semantic contortion > required here, and that as spoken, this sounds like complete > gibberish. I don't know where the monosyllable meme came from, either; > it's readily apparently from learning even basic vocabulary. 今天, > 马上, 故事, hell, 中国 is a compound word.
AFAICT, the monosyllable thing is something that came from the ancient scribes who were (at least partly) responsible for the writing system. It's an ideal that gives a nice 1-to-1 mapping between glyphs and "words", providing a philosophically elegant way to rationalize everything into monosyllabic units. Sortof like representing everything with 1's and 0's. :-D But, like all ideals, it's also somewhat detached from reality, despite having permeated Chinese thinking such that people have come to equate "word" with "syllable", even though many such "words" clearly only exist as compounds that cannot be separated without destroying its meaning. There's also another, currently not-fully-understood factor, and that is that pronunciation has changed over time, and there is some evidence that certain features of the written language may reflect inserted consonants that formed consonant clusters in the ancient language, sounds that have since become silent. It makes one wonder if some of these "monosyllables" may have been, in some distant past, actually polysyllabic words in their own right, and the monosyllable thing may have been merely a side-effect of the shift in pronunciation over many centuries. (This pronunciation shift is evidenced by the "alternate readings" of certain glyphs that's adopted when reading ancient poetry, clearly a retroactive effort to compensate for the divergence in rhyme caused by sound change since the time said poetry was written. Who knows what other compensatory measures have been taken over time that may have, consciously or not, contributed to the monosyllabic illusion.) T -- Debian GNU/Linux: Cray on your desktop.