chinese english tautologies
howard richler
tautological expressions such as "government soldiers" and "it is red
color." Are there many of these tautolgical expressions in Chinese
English?
Harlan Messinger
"howard richler" <hric...@sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:feb755de.02112...@posting.google.com...
In regard to the "red color", at least: Chinese has evolved into an enormous
number of sets of homophonous "zi4" (monosyllables). In order to avoid
confusion, many concepts are now expressed through combinations ("ci2") of
zi4 that have similar meanings or complementary meanings. Hong2se4 "red
color" = "red", is thus distinguished from hong2da4 "vast big" = "vast" and
hong2shui3 "flood water" = "floods", where each "hong2" is a different zi4
represented by a different character.
benlizross
"Government soldiers" is not tautological.
Ross Clark
Mark Wallace
Can be 'dictatorial', though.
What country was it, again?
--
Mark Wallace
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Simon R. Hughes
Thus Spake howard richler:
Tautology: a statement in which the predicate repeats the subject
(definition made up on the spot). I see no tautology in your
examples. I do, however, see semantic redundancy (in the second
example).
--
Simon R. Hughes
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Robert Bannister
> benlizross wrote:
>
>> howard richler wrote:
>>
>>> I made my first trip to China earlier this year and I heard
>>> tautological expressions such as "government soldiers" and "it is
>>> red color." Are there many of these tautolgical expressions in
>>> Chinese English?
>>
>> "Government soldiers" is not tautological.
>
>
> Can be 'dictatorial', though. What country was it, again?
I couldn't make my mind up whether Mr Richler thought all soldiers were
necessarily employed by governments or whether governments were all
serving soldiers. I suppose either can be true, depending on the country.
--
Rob Bannister
Peter Moylan
The Chinese languages are a lot more compact than Western European
languages. I don't know of any precise studies, but the examples
I've seen tend to suggest about a 50% compression; that is, you
can say something in 10 syllables in Chinese that would take
about 20 syllables in most European languages.
The catch is that we need redundancy in language, to compensate
for things like imperfect hearing. In European languages, the
redundancy comes mainly from our having many polysyllabic words.
In Chinese it's done by adding tautologies. If you said "It is
red" rather than "it is red colour", you would run the risk of having
the word "red" misinterpreted as a completely different word that
just happened to have a similar sound.
--
Peter Moylan pe...@ee.newcastle.edu.au
http://eepjm.newcastle.edu.au
Javi
news:as7f9k$iar$9...@seagoon.newcastle.edu.au...
> howard richler wrote:
> > I made my first trip to China earlier this year and I heard
> > tautological expressions such as "government soldiers" and "it is red
> > color." Are there many of these tautolgical expressions in Chinese
> > English?
>
> The Chinese languages are a lot more compact than Western European
> languages. I don't know of any precise studies, but the examples
> I've seen tend to suggest about a 50% compression; that is, you
> can say something in 10 syllables in Chinese that would take
> about 20 syllables in most European languages.
But syllables that sound homophones to western ears don't sound the same to
eastern ears, because Mandarin Chinese has, IIRC, six tones. I don't know
about those studies you mention, but 10 syllables and 6 tones make 10^6 (one
million) different sounds; if non-tonal languages can say the same with only
20 syllables, this is, 20 different sounds, this shows that some languages
are more efficient than others.
> The catch is that we need redundancy in language, to compensate
> for things like imperfect hearing.
As it seems, the tonal system is far from perfection.
--
Javi
Lee Sau Dan
Peter> The Chinese languages are a lot more compact than Western
Peter> European languages. I don't know of any precise studies,
Peter> but the examples I've seen tend to suggest about a 50%
Peter> compression;
Would you show us how you come up with this figure? What do you
measure? Number of characters/letters? Number of syllables? Time
taken to say something? Time taken to write an essay? Time taken to
read an essay?
Peter> that is, you can say something in 10 syllables
Peter> in Chinese that would take about 20 syllables in most
Peter> European languages.
Really? How do you say "I love you"? How many syllables? In French,
that's only 2 syllables!
How about "No smoking!"? In Mandarin, that's 4 syllables. In
English: 3 syllables. How about "Thanks!"? That's 1:2. "Where are
you?" is just 3 syllables, whereas ni3zai4na3li3 is 4 syllables.
"What's up?" is just 2 syllables, and shen4me_shi4 is 3 syllables.
Peter> The catch is that we need redundancy in language, to
Peter> compensate for things like imperfect hearing. In European
Peter> languages, the redundancy comes mainly from our having many
Peter> polysyllabic words.
No. That's not redundancy. The syllables do not repeat information
with one another.
Peter> In Chinese it's done by adding tautologies.
I don't like the term "tautology" here. That is "reinforcement".
Peter> If you said "It is red" rather than "it is red colour", you
Peter> would run the risk of having the word "red" misinterpreted
Peter> as a completely different word that just happened to have a
Peter> similar sound.
Just that English is different here.
--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦(Big5) ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ)
E-mail: dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
Aaron J. Dinkin
>>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Moylan <pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au> writes:
>
> Peter> The catch is that we need redundancy in language, to
> Peter> compensate for things like imperfect hearing. In European
> Peter> languages, the redundancy comes mainly from our having many
> Peter> polysyllabic words.
>
> No. That's not redundancy. The syllables do not repeat information
> with one another.
It's redundancy in that if you fail to hear a bit of a word, then the
longer the word, the more likely you are to be able to deduce what the
whole word was. Just within English, a partially-heard "??at" is harder to
understand than a partially-heard "??elinquish".
-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom
Lee Sau Dan
Aaron> On 29 Nov 2002 18:59:59 +0100, Lee Sau Dan
Aaron> <dan...@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
>>>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Moylan <pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au>
>>>>>>> writes:
>>
Peter> The catch is that we need redundancy in language, to
Peter> compensate for things like imperfect hearing. In European
Peter> languages, the redundancy comes mainly from our having many
Peter> polysyllabic words.
>> No. That's not redundancy. The syllables do not repeat
>> information with one another.
Aaron> It's redundancy in that if you fail to hear a bit of a
Aaron> word, then the longer the word, the more likely you are to
Aaron> be able to deduce what the whole word was. Just within
Aaron> English, a partially-heard "??at" is harder to understand
Aaron> than a partially-heard "??elinquish".
Being able to _guess_ a lot out of a very small piece of information
doesn't imply that the information itself is highly redundant. Just
the guesser knows a lot (background knowledge) and is clever.
Peter Moylan
>>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Moylan <pe...@PJM2.newcastle.edu.au> writes:
>
> Peter> The Chinese languages are a lot more compact than Western
> Peter> European languages. I don't know of any precise studies,
> Peter> but the examples I've seen tend to suggest about a 50%
> Peter> compression;
First, I should emphasise that I am not an expert in this area,
and I know of no detailed studies on the subject. My 50% is a
very rough guess, and the true figure could be very different.
All I'm asserting is that there is a difference that is big
enough to be obvious.
> Would you show us how you come up with this figure? What do you
> measure? Number of characters/letters? Number of syllables? Time
> taken to say something? Time taken to write an essay? Time taken to
> read an essay?
Definitely not the last few, for the reasons mentioned below. It's
my belief that Chinese uses fewer syllables per word, on average,
than a language like English, but that that difference disappears
once you get up to the level of measures like "time taken to
read an essay".
> Peter> that is, you can say something in 10 syllables
> Peter> in Chinese that would take about 20 syllables in most
> Peter> European languages.
>
> Really? How do you say "I love you"? How many syllables? In French,
> that's only 2 syllables!
>
> How about "No smoking!"? In Mandarin, that's 4 syllables. In
> English: 3 syllables. How about "Thanks!"? That's 1:2. "Where are
> you?" is just 3 syllables, whereas ni3zai4na3li3 is 4 syllables.
> "What's up?" is just 2 syllables, and shen4me_shi4 is 3 syllables.
Sure, there will always be counterexamples, especially in the case
of short common utterances. Nevertheless, I assert that if you
start pulling words out of the dictionary at random, you will find
many examples where a multisyllable English word translates to a
one-syllable Chinese word, but very few examples of the opposite.
> Peter> The catch is that we need redundancy in language, to
> Peter> compensate for things like imperfect hearing. In European
> Peter> languages, the redundancy comes mainly from our having many
> Peter> polysyllabic words.
>
> No. That's not redundancy. The syllables do not repeat information
> with one another.
You seem to have a very restrictive definition of redundancy. I'm
thinking more of the information theory definition. But in any
case I think Aaron has given a good answer to this.
> Peter> In Chinese it's done by adding tautologies.
>
> I don't like the term "tautology" here. That is "reinforcement".
It doesn't much matter to me what you call it. The essential
point is that a complete utterance, at say the sentence level,
very often involves throwing in more words than would strictly
be required.
Let's consider a hypothetical very compact language. We know that
all natural languages are highly redundant (in the information
theory sense), and that it would be possible in principle to
design a new language that had far less redundancy and that would
in consequence allow us to speak at a much higher speed. Why
don't we do it, then? The reason is that such a language
would be too vulnerable to information loss.
If you are saying a five-second utterance in an existing
natural language, and half a second of it is lost because
somebody nearby coughed, the listener could still probably
reconstruct the missing part, and nothing is lost. If the
language is so compact that that same utterance takes only half
a second, and half a second of that is lost, you're stuck
with having to start again from the beginning. That's the
point I was trying to make at the outset: we need redundancy.
If you have a language that allows you to pack a lot of
information into a short burst of sound (for example, by
having a large number of vowels or a large number of tones),
you'll automatically compensate for that by throwing in
extra words. I suspect, in fact, that all human languages have
converged to the same long-term average information rate,
simply because we all have much the same restrictions on things
like hearing range.