Re: Human speech 350,000 years ago?

Dick Fischer wrote:

"Chinese style words rarely are more than one syllable."

Technical point: A quick scan through a Chinese dictionary reveals that most Chinese words have more than one syllable. The sound associated with each character is indeed only a single syllable, but most words have more than one character. In many instances the meaning of such multiple-character words is clear to someone who knows the meanings of the individual characters, but in many other instances the meanings are not so discernable. This is especially true of abstract or scientific words.

In fact it's a really good thing that most words do have two or more syllables; otherwise the spoken language would be hopelessly ambiguous. My little dictionary has 57 distinct meanings for the sound /shi/, ranging through "corpse," "louse," "poetry," "ten," "lion," "stone," "to eat," "to be," etc., etc. Given there are only four tones, that's a lot of potential ambiguity. There are many similar examples. To understand the spoken language, you need to have a really good idea of context. The use of multiple syllables greatly reduces but does not eliminate ambiguity. The written language is much less ambiguous, because the character is different for each meaning.

A Chinese woman once recited for me a fairly lengthy poem in which every sound was the single syllable /shi/. She acknowledged that no one would be able to understand it in its oral form.

The Chinese make much of the sounds of their words. Example: Few of them will buy a house with the numeral 4 prominent in the street address, because the sound /si/ for "4" is the same as the sound for "death," even though the tones are different!

Don

 
Received on Sat Jul 3 07:04:39 2004