On Tue, 7 Jun 2005 21:58:03 -0400, Reef Fish wrote:
>BWhahahahaha! Robert, I don't suppose you knew that I am a
>native Chinese, educated in Hong Kong until high school
>graduation, having studied Chinese literature through the
>LEVEL of a post-doctorate in the Chinese Language as a
>Language of study in the USA -- which of course is not
>saying much, but certainly knows a piece of wood from a
>forest, especially when that's my NAME. :-))
Then you're a speaker of Cantonese. When I say "Chinese" of course I
mean standard putonghua, based on Beijing dialect of Mandarin. As far
as I'm concerned, the so-called dialects of Chinese are separate
(though related) languages, in the same sense that we regard Spanish,
French, Portuguese and Italian to be separate but related languages.
And of course, there are many names as well as other words that are
cognate among all the Romance languages, mean the same thing, but are
pronounced differently, and thus spelled differently using the western
phonetic system.
We wouldn't accept an argument from a Spaniard that the correct
pronunciation of "I" (je) in French in "yo". The closest English
spelling to the Chinese word for forest is "lin", not "ling", which
happens to be the closest approximation in English spelling to the word
for forest in another language - Cantonese.
If Western Europe used Chinese characters, all their words for "I",
"fish", and "forest" could also be written with the same characters,
much as all Europeans have adopted universal non-phonetic traffic signs
and universal symbols for "bathroom", "no smoking", etc., each of which
is "pronounced" differently by speakers of different languages. So
what?
>Even Babelfish knows that character (a crucifix cross with
>two legs sticking out) is the character for "wood"!
The mu (wood) radical can mean "wood" when used as a character that is
part of a compound word (such as mutou "wood" in Mandarin), but when
used as an isolated character representing a complete word itself, it
means tree, though it is only used (as far as I know) as an isolated
character in classical Chinese, the standard Chinese for "tree" of
course being "shu".. The graph for the mu radical, whether used as an
radical element as in the character LIN (forest), or as an isolated
character in classical Chinese, doesn't - and has never - meant "a
piece of wood".
>>Those words are pronounced with completely different tones - and sound
>>as different to any Chinese as they would to you if they had different
>>vowels or consonants. They only "seem" identical to a Western ear, or
>>if spelled phonetically using a Western phonetic representation system
>>that is insensitive to and cannot express tonal differences.
>
>That's partly true, but don't think for a minute that the intonations
>(which is the MOST difficult thing for 'ferners to learn) is as
>clear and obvious as you made it seem.
The tones are clear and obvious to any native speaker of any Chinese
language, which is all that counts. And are much more difficult in the
Cantonese, the language you grew up speaking, than in Mandarin, the one
I learned NOT at my mother's knee.
And when I say language, as I mentioned above, I mean Cantonese,
Shanghainese, Fukkienese, and Mandarin as different languages (in the
same sense that Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian are different but
related languages).
>I went to a New York restaurant in Chinatown to order some roast
>pork, and I wanted it "lean" (pronounced "sou" as in "south").
>But the waiter laughed when it came out with a SLIGHT tinge of
>"ts" instead of "s", and it would have meant "stinky" instead of
>"lean".
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