fractured grammar tales

mark,

I guess that depends on how you define "completely different" and "common concept." For example, Chinese uses aspect but not tense. As native speakers of English, we're used to conflating the two and calling it "tense," but if you examine the two languages long enough, they feel less "completely different" and like more of a "common concept."

Language is inherently human. Personally I prefer to focus on how we're all alike, but the differences can certainly be interesting.

Hi lily_counselor

Thanks for the interesting post. I think I heard the story before, but I didn't think it would be "conjugation". Looks like I need to closely look at the difference among conjugation, inflection, and derivation........

Thanks, Changye, I always learn something from your posts.

Hi mark

I know that "嫁" and "娶" are often simply translated as "marry" in English, mainly because of western attitudes toward (equal) marriage, but in fact the two words don't have the same meaning in Chinese, or at least you can say they have rather different nuances.

Exactly, "嫁" means "marry into a family", and "娶" means "take a wife (into man's family)", both of which clearly represent Chinese traditional custom and view of marriage. In a sense, the relationship between "嫁" and "娶" may be similar to that between "卖" (sell) and "买" (buy).

"结婚" is a neutral word and the exact translation of "marry". It contains both "嫁" and "娶", just like "买卖/交易" (transaction) contain both concepts, "sell" and "buy". If "结婚" had two gender-based different forms, it might be entitled to be called "conjugation" ..... (?)

And therefore, I don't think that "嫁 versus 娶 is conjugation."

Q.E.D.

P/S. There is a similar pair of words in Japanese, i.e. "嫁ぐ" (to-tsu-gu) and "娶る" (me-to-ru), and they also have different nuances.

Hi Changye,

Perhaps, I have too American of an attitude. I think marriage is the same action for both men and women.

Hi mark

Thanks for the reply. I agree with you. Don't you think the same logic applies to "嫁" and "娶"?

> I think of 买 and 卖 as different actions.

Indonesian is also widely considered to be one of the easiest natural languages in the world.

Hi go_manly

Indonesian belongs to the Austronesian language family, and it's a sister language of Malay, which also has measure words (I forgot to mention it in my previous post). Indonesian is an agglutinative language, like Korean and Japanese.

Some linguists insist that one of substratum languages of Japanese might be an Austronesian language because of similarity in pronunciations of Indonesian and Japanese. I don't know if Indonesian is related to Chinese.

Indonesian is a member of the Austronesian language group.

It is not a tonal language like Chinese, a member of the Sino-Tibetan language group. Neither is it inflected in the same way as Indo-European languages.

It is described as an agglutinative language, because the meanings of world are modified or changed by the use of certain prefixes and suffixes.

Indonesian is very closely related to Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and the two are mutually intelligible for the most part. It is more distantly related to languages such as Maori, Tahitian and other pacific ocean languages, and to the indigenous language of Taiwan. Related languages are also spoken in the remote mountainous regions of Vietnam

What language grouping does Indonesian belong to? Is it related to Chinese?

For the record, as far as I know, Korean, Indonesian, and Japanese also have measure words.

As far as I can tell, according to the following link, we do use the term measure word in English and his examples are measure words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_word

I think the problem is that measure words are unessential for most nouns in English and are learned quite intuitively, so native speakers aren't generally aware of the term or even the concept.

That said, the link I provided above says this:

"Most measure words in English are more accurately called units of measurement. They are normal count nouns, not grammatical particles."

We don't use the term 'Measure Word' in English. So in your 4 examples, aside from being nouns themselves, what grammatical term is used to describe the function performed by 'glass', 'cup', 'bottle' and 'tank' in those examples? For animals we talk of Collective Nouns, but I doubt that term would apply here.

sydcarten - naughty, naughty. A "flange" of baboons comes from the "Gerald the gorilla" sketch on Not The Nine O'clock News - as you well know. Now stop teasing the non-native speakers.

Good work guys, but English still has a far lead as far as I'm concerned, haha. It would be very interesting if Chinese came from behind and took a commanding lead.

I've managed to find another measure word used for an animal group.

一窝蜜蜂 (a nest of bees), 一窝蚂蚁 (a nest of ants)

队 duì is used for a swarm of bees and a flock of wild geese flying in formation. A "team" of bees.

And usually they are related to animals. Normally, Chinese wins the measure word contest, but because 群 is as far as I know the only measure word that is used for groups of animals in Chinese, this time English wins. (Of course I could be totally wrong about the lack of animal 'group' measure words.)

I know what you mean. That's a good question. I think yes. Consider someone in a helicopter saying this:

"I see two murders of crows, one to the east and one to the north."

Can 'murder' really be considered a measure word? I've never heard someone refer to 'two murders of crows'.

God forbid, I should wake up this morning to find myself, a "Chomskyist". I took a course from George Lakeoff once where I learned that Chomsky was more-or-less the anti-Christ of linguistics. :=)

None-the-less, I think there is more going on with my examples that "mere translation". English usually resists sentence reordering, but somehow, "using" makes my example ok. The mechanics of sentence construction as well as the meaning is similar to what is going on with 把， in my opinion.

As to "could and couldn't", I tend to see them as sort of a prefix for verbs, that changes the meaning of the verbs to indicate their success or failure. As it happens, Chinese uses and infix notation to do the same thing with potential complements.

The reason I asked is that I would't consider "using" to be a "language feature". You could just as well write "standing on a hammer, I smashed it to bits". Or "Thinking about a hammer" or "dressed as a hammer" or "while on my way to work, I smashed it to bits". The "language feature" in use here is just sentence reordering, which is surely availible in Chinese without needing the 把. Thus, I can't see it being an equivalent. But it is a translation.

Same thing with "could" and "couldn't". They're not grammatical concepts in English, they're just words. "I washed it but couldn't get it clean" can be replaced by "I washed it but didn't get it clean" or "I washed it but didn't think about getting it clean". So the word "couldn't" isn't the grammatical feature being used, but rather the using of "but". Again, this is possible to do in Chinese without the "potential compliment" grammar pattern. It's a translation, but it's not an equivalent.

But then, as usual, this is just a matter of definition. I wouldn't consider any of these "equivalents", but a Chomskyist might.

As to redoubling of adjectives, well, English certainly has redoubling of adverbs to add emphasis. As in, "I really, really want to go to China." "I am very very hungry."...

To my ear, some redoubled adjectives sound like the speaker has ignored the admonishments of many a grammar teacher, but still authentic. For example, "A big, big spider landed on my bed, and scared me to death."

So, I think there are familiar reference points for this kind of construct.

Simon: not quite. My question is whether there is a linguistic feature (for lack of a better term) that is used in one language and completely not present in the other. My intuition on the subject is that the human mind thinks in certain ways and has certain techniques available for constructing languages. A given language will favor some techniques over others, but traces of the less used techniques could still be found. I don't know, if this is true, or not, but it is the proposition that I'm trying to evaluate.

In the case of potential compliments, I think the concept is an efficient way to modify a verb to indicate its result. You can argue whether or not that is an over generalization.

BTW, I know that Russian has a very elaborate method of expressing the result of a verb with prefixes and suffixes.

Mark: So what this thread is really about is whether or not there is something that can be said in Chinese that cannot be said in English, or vice versa?

As to potential complements, English certainly has a way of expressing success or failure of a verb. The morphology is not the same as potential compliments in Chinese, but I tend to think it is the same idea: "could /verb/" or "couldn't /verb/"

For 把, I think you could use "using" as in "Using a hammer, I smashed it to bits." versus "I smashed it to bits with a hammer.". I think this has the same effects of reordering the sentence and adding emphasis to exactly what was used to perform the action.

I will have to think on the others a bit more.

Hi mark

I think I found another possible candidate for "conjunction" in Chinese, which seems to fit your definition of conjunction, namely "take temporal context, or who is performing the action into account when choosing what verb, or verb form, to use." What do you think about this pair of words?

买 (mai3) = buy (action by a buyer)

卖 (mai4) = sell (action by a seller)

Mark: I have several candidates, that I wrote yesterday. The threading may have prevented you from noticing them. They're at the bottom.

Hi mark

Let me show you an interesting pair of characters that might support (?) your theory, i.e. 嬲 (niao3) and 嫐 (nao3). Both characters means "harass", and the former has a woman (女) placed between two men (男), while the latter has a man (男) between two women (女). These characters are really well made and vividly describe "ancient harassment".

I imagine (groundlessly) that in ancient times, 嬲 (niao3) was used to describe a man harassing a women, while 嫐 (nao3) was used when a woman harasses a man, although I'm not so sure. If this were the case, the pair of characters would be another example of conjugation (?) in Chinese. Fortunately, they have similar pronunciations.

P/S. Dictionary-wise, 嫐 is merely the variant form of 嬲, and they basically have the same meaning.

If you accept the following definition of conjugation, I think I have made my point that the concept exists in Chinese, but it is not used much. However, my command of Chinese is insufficient to come up with more examples of gender influencing verb choice.

Proposed definition of conjugation: Take temporal context, or who is performing the action into account when choosing what verb, or verb form, to use.

(BTW my academic background is in math. So, my attitude is that once you get the definition right, the proof follows easily.)

Anyway, anyone else have any candidates for grammar concepts that exist in English but not in Chinese, or visa-versa? Or do you want to argue my definition?

Hi simon

It seems to me that “嫁” means "a woman marries someone", and this doesn't necessarily mean "a woman marries a man", at least the character doesn't contain the part "男", so on second thought, theoretically (but not traditionally) you can use "嫁" when a woman marries a woman. By the same token, you can use "娶" when a woman marries (get) a woman. In short, both "嫁" and "娶" can be used for lesbian marriage, but not for gay marriage.

> At any rate, it's certainly "conjugal", which is close enough for me.

Nice joke!!

Changye, are you saying that neither 嫁 nor 娶 would be useable for a homosexual wedding? Of course you could use 结婚 or 结合, but what I'm really interested in is whether 嫁 means "to marry a man" or just "to marry someone", but only applicable if you're a woman.

Anyway, the question of whether one can consider it "conjugation" is a largely philosophical one. At any rate, it's certainly "conjugal", which is close enough for me.

Hi simon

> What verb is used when a woman marries a woman? What verb is used when a man marries a man?

That's a good question. You can use the word 结婚 in modern Mandarin, but the two characters still have the part 女 in them (I guess you don't like it). Fortunately, the single character 昏 was interchangeably used with 婚 (marry) in ancient times. 昏 sounds neutral, doesn't it?

P/S. 结合, which doesn't have 女 part, also means "marry" in modern Chinese.

Hi simon

You really are a clever guy. As you expected, the original character of 娶 was 取, and later 女 was added to 取 in order to make its meaning clear. As for 嫁, one of my dictionaries defines it as "把男子家就当作自己的家". The character 嫁 strongly connotes the relationship between a woman and a house/family.

As you pointed out, it's obvious that 娶 and 嫁 are two different words both etymologically and phonetically. Mark also admits this, and he cleverly brought up "go" and "went", which are also originated in two different words, just like "be" and "is". So we have to find other reasons to deny mark's claim. I'll leave it to you, hehe.

To speculate some more, here's my theory on the etymologies of 嫁 and 娶. Note that the first is generally used with 给, to give. I'm thinking it was originally 家给 and 取. That is, a woman gives a home to a man (把家给男人), whereas a man takes a woman (取女人). The pronounciation changed over time and the woman radical was added to both words to indicate the new meaning. And, of course, since 家 had become a verb, the 把 was no longer needed.

All of the above, of course, adjusted to older language (maybe you didn't even need the 把 back then?).

If this personal theory is close to the truth, it's two different words and not any kind of conjugation. Of course, I'm just pulling things out of my ass here; I have no idea if this makes any sense at all.

The key to this seems to be in homosexual marriages. What verb is used when a woman marries a woman? What verb is used when a man marries a man? That is, is the verb dependant on who's doing the marrying or who one marries?

Hi mark

> like say, "go" and "went" in English.

This is really a good example for supporting your theory. Do you come up with other cases/examples of "conjugation based on gender" in Chinese?

Ok, maybe, 嫁 and 娶 just sort of rhyme with conjugation. Presumably, the young couple both attended the same ceremony, but a different sound is used to describe what they each did. It seems a similar idea to conjugation, and there are some irregular conjugations where it is hard to see the relationship between the different forms, like say, "go" and "went" in English.

Hi mark

> Isn't the 着 in 看着 or the 了 in 看了

That's a good point. It may be said that they are a kind of "weak conjugation", hehe.

> you could also say that 嫁 versus 娶 is conjugation according to the gender

This is not the case, unless you prove 嫁 (jia) and 娶 (qu) are originated in the same word.

Oh, you could also say that 嫁 versus 娶 is conjugation according to the gender of the subject.

Isn't the 着 in 看着 or the 了 in 看了，verb conjugation, at least, for tense?