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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: PTD was the most-respected of the AUE regulars ...
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 23:34:17 +1200
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On 29/07/2024 3:06 a.m., jerryfriedman wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Jul 2024 17:29:10 +0000, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> 
>> On 2024-07-26, Steve Hayes <hayesstw@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:41:13 -0700, HenHanna <HenHanna@devnull.tb>
>>>>       The instance I remember most was when he (PTD) opined that Most
>>>> Chinese words consisted of 2 Chinese characters.
>>
>> It's not wrong just because PTD said it.  Over on Language Log, the
>> eminent sinologist Victor Mair also keeps pointing out that the
>> Chinese thinking that a Chinese character/syllable equals a word
>> is just not true and that most of the Chinese lexicon is made from
>> a combinations of two morphemes and rendered in two characters.
> 
> Mair contributed a chapter to Daniels and Bright, so he was probably
> the source for PTD's knowledge of that.

Perhaps. PTD did not seem to know much about Chinese. But the business 
about Chinese "words" has been known to linguists for a long time. I'm 
pretty sure it's in Hockett's 1958 textbook, to mention nothing earlier 
than my own experience.

The reasons why this seems like a perverse doctrine to many people are 
several. Most people do not have a distinction between "word" and 
"morpheme", so use "word" for any small meaningful unit. Written English 
has word divisions (spaces) which correspond roughly to what you would 
get by analyzing the "word" units of the spoken language; this makes the 
concept of "word" (where it begins and ends) seem self-evident. In 
written Chinese, however, all characters are equally spaced, so no 
larger units are identified. People know that characters have meanings, 
so they must be words. But if you apply the same analysis to spoken 
Chinese as you would to any other language, you find that there are 
"morphemes" (minimal meaningful units), most of which are one 
character/syllable, but also "words" (or "lexemes"), a very large 
percentage of which consist of two (sometimes more) 
morphemes/characters/syllables. Even if you don't read Chinese, some 
confirmation of this can be found just by browsing a Chinese-English 
dictionary; or probably even by putting a few random words into Google 
Translate,and counting the characters.