User Comments - aert
aert
Posted on: 简体字与繁体字
February 18, 2008 at 10:17 AMhi changye I answered your latest note to me before so much as reading the title of this lesson. I do not believe in extrasensory perception but coincidences would't have a name if they did not occur, like the royal straight flush in poker. I never had one.
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 18, 2008 at 10:01 AMhi Changye Thanks for the link. How can you be so well informed about so many things?! The disadvantage of having so many different numberings is that you don't remember them. I started on Chinese with the classical language, and of course in the beginning you look up many words and after a while remember the numbers of the more frequent classifiers. I use my Chinese-Russian dictionary as much as possible, so I use the traditional-simplified lists in the opposite direction from what they are mainly intended for. In the case of yì tǐ zì these lists do not contain the discarded more complex character nor the simpler one retained in the present script, but I always end up with the complex one and find the pronunciation but not the meaning and derivatives, only a reference to the simpler character, and not by number (Oshanin has in total 8878) but by the character itself, so I have to start looking up once more. You probably know that the Russians have a system of finding characters not based on radicals. It is sometimes very useful.
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 17, 2008 at 8:39 PMhi Changye Thanks for all your information. Much as I would like to go into historical things, I am not going to neglect the daily lessons again, but will be content with the very interesting details you keep coming up with. The Canadian a in "Canada" is indeed more fronted than that in "father", and if the shift from k to ji is so recent this might explain why newer borrowings such as calorie, card etc. are transcribed with ka. The Russian name of China is indeed Kitay (stress on 2nd syllable, ay with the pinyin and not the English pronunciation). Unlike English and German, but like French and Dutch, Russian does not aspirate consonants in any position in the word. It would be better for everybody if some academy would regularize the transcription of foreign names. Come to think of it, the same goes for the list of radicals. I have three books with three different numberings, and that besides the traditional one, of which I know the more common ones by heart.
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 16, 2008 at 11:21 PMPS I agree with both of you on word classes. It is said eg. that any word that in predicative function can be preceded by the negation bu is a verb, and in addition yǒu. But to apply this rule you have to know Chinese and bu can be the first element of a compound, as in bù'ān vs. ānjìng, bùděngshì vs. děngshi in math. "(in)equality". So it doesn't do a student any good. I have these examples from Viviane Alleton's Grammaire du Chinois in the series Que sais-je? of the Presses universitaires de France, a very interesting little book (128 pp.). She doesn't indicate the tones, but I added them all in my copy
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 16, 2008 at 8:45 PMchangye, henning Shame on me, I have played truant from Chinesepod because I became engrossed in Old English and via that in Germanic in general. But I did meanwhile the Media and I have (a) class ones. I'll keep the linguistics here, in one place. Henning, the three Indoeuropean genders are just a (now largely arbitrary) classification of the names of things, the Chinese measure words are a somewhat less arbitrary one where shape plays a certain role.. Some Bantu languages have around 15 classes which are more or less definable, the Chechens in the Caucasus have 8, more arbitrary; the Abkhaz (the ones that want to secede from Georgia) have a reasonable division in 3: non-rational vs. rational, the latter subdivided into masc. and fem. so here you don't have to learn things by heart. There is to my knowledge no evidence that Indoeuropean ever had more than 3. Changye, a shift from k to ch before a front vowel is common, compare chin, cheese to German Kinn, Käse etc. And I would think qing a better rendering of King, as the first consonant is aspirated and the last is ng. And unless the Chinese shift is very recent I don' understand why they render Canada as jiānádà. As to munch, it does not correspond to Mund (related to Latin mentum "jaw") because its final ch points to k. But the mouth as such can have played a role as it is said to be "imitative, compare crunch, scrunch". Such "expressive" words escape sound laws. Maybe the Last Judgment will get them.
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 14, 2008 at 4:15 PMHi Changye German inflection is child's play compared to that of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic, Russian, in short, of most Indoeuropean languages, especially their older stages. The most simplified one is Afrikaans, spoken by the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa. This does, however, still have the so called "strong" verbs, which have to be learned by heart. But for us it is easy to read since we have the same irregular verbs ourselves I did not know the etymology of "uncouth" and was surprised it is the counterpart of Dutch "onkunde" = ignorance. Here are the four words I mentioned,with their German counterparts: five - fünf, goose - Gans. mouth - Mund, us - uns. In all 4 German has an n which is not there in English. Other examples are soft - sanft, other - ander, wish (old wyscan) - wünschen. At one stage in Old English the n was dropped before a fricative (f s th). The same must have happened in the word "cuth" German Kunde. Don't ask me why uncouth rhymes with youth and not with mouth, south. I don't know, and it would take time and effort to find out. Somebody said "historical phonology is the science where consonants count for little and vowels not at all". Certainly the history of the English vowels is very complicated. If I were not studying Chinese I would be happy to go into it. In Sound and Symbol in Chinese (p, 24/5) Karlgren mentions that in the latter part of the Zhou dynasty there were nominative vs. accusative forms in personal pronouns, and refers to his own article in Journal asiatique, 1920. The nominatives ended in o, the accusatives in a; but he notes two different kinds of a. The notation of his reconstructions is very complicated, and may include "positional variants" of what is one and the same phoneme. However, I should learn one form of Chinese before I even talk about such things.
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 14, 2008 at 7:31 AMchangye If you know German, I can give you an interesting account of the etymology of the word uncouth. All that is needed is the German words for five, goose, mouth, us..
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 14, 2008 at 7:22 AMbitte, bitte. sn as in snooty, rhymes with hippie.
Posted on: Finding One's seat
February 13, 2008 at 7:43 PMhi Changye uncouth (rhymes with youth) in older English meant "unknown, unfrequented", later it meant something like "awkward, clumsy" and then came to mean two different things:(1) cūlǔ (2) cūbèn, in French respectively (1) grossier (2) gauche, malappris. So Nicolas is accused of being both too sharp and too blunt. What is even funnier is a difficulty of English. That is the phrase "he is X if not X+" (where X+ means the same as X, only to a higher degree). This phrase is ambiguous. It should mean "X not to say X+", but is often understood as "X though not X+", thus by Nicolas who takes "not uncouth" as a compliment, while I am sure Auntie68 meant it the other way. Well, see where being uncouth got him: he gets answers to "[un]answered" questions, lessons in English, references to useful links, and above all, ATTENTION. Mein Liebchen, was willst du mehr?
Posted on: 简体字与繁体字
February 18, 2008 at 3:47 PMhi Auntie68 I am afraid you can no more vote about scripts/spellings than you can about religion. The vast majority of people will vote for what they're used to. It would be interesting, though, te see how many people would show up at the polls.