Chinese Language - Science topic

Shar Little , I am only familiar with google scholar; I will try to check the sites you referred to me, thanks a lot!! :)

Hi Andrey. Although my wife is Chinese, I cannot contribute to this subject. I do not speak Yoruba, either. However, considering your incredibly wide range of interests in many sciences, I suggest you to take a look at my website named CorrectingWorldHistory. Also, I realized that many Philippine languages and some western African languages (west of the Yoruba speakers) have almost the same word for "good" (mabute, mbuti, etc.). Perhaps there are more similarities. If one could prove such relationship between the black (Melanesian) nations of the Philippines (or the Aborigines of Australia) and some of the African languages we may suggest that the same word existed in both continents before, say, 40,000 years B.P. Thus, the basic words of these languages are perhaps not only a few thousand years old but perhaps 50 thousand years old. I congratulate to your research papers and results. I am originally Hungarian who lives in Canada since 1976. Have a great weekend!!!

U're welcome

fred

Dear researcher,

It is very interesting topic to dicuss. you will find a research about this in this link her:

There exists a large body of literature on contrastive/intercultural rhetoric that, I believe, will be helpful. Whether you do or don't speak the native language of your students, it helps to be aware of the likely challenges in their Academic English due to the Chinese-English differences not only in the grammar, but also in the rhetorical patterns, punctuation, citation practices, etc. I may be biased though, as a linguist. ;)

I would like to respond, but I do not specialize in this topic. I will also read the answers of fellow researchers, to learn from them. Greetings.

Yes. Please see link to the Hebrew translation from 1974. left side of the screen:

I will first give a response to some of content of your question and then ask a question of my own:

you said: "it is an agglutinating language, a morpheme = a word."

short response: the term you are actually looking for is isolating

long response: agglutinating or agglutinative is one extreme in basic morphological typology. It does not, however, mean 1 morpheme =  1 word. Basic morphological typology has two axes:

Agglutinative is the extreme of the meanings/morpheme axis, where a single morpheme would carry only one unit of meaning (sememe), e.g. English /-s/ only conveys "plural". On the other extreme of the axis is fusional, where a single morpheme would carry multiple sememes, e.g. German /dem/ which conveys "definiteness, masculine gender, dative case".

Isolating, which is the term you were looking for to describe Mandarin, is the extreme end of the morphemes/word axis, meaning that words are composed of single syllables. On the other extreme of the axis is polysynthetic, where a single phonological word contains multiple morphemes. Good examples of such languages include Hawaiian, and most Bantu languages like Swahili and Sesotho. Most of the world's languages fall under the category of "synthetic" meaning words are comprised of a moderate number of morphemes.

short response: - actually, Madarin uses a logographic writing system, unless you are referring to pinyin, which is an alphabet.

long response: - the world's writing systems can be organized into five categories based on correspondence between symbols and sounds:

Madarin traditionally uses a logographic script, which you can learn more about here: (http://www.omniglot.com/chinese/written.htm). Mandarin also sometimes uses a standardized alphabet called pinyin, which was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1930's. You can read more about pinyin here: (http://www.omniglot.com/chinese/mandarin_pts.htm)

you said: it is a tonal language, which means that tone plays an important role in creating new meanings.

short response: yes, but more specifically it means that tone can make the difference between two words.

long response: tone and intonation are words referring to the relative pitch (fundamental frequency) of an utterance. All languages have pitch, as it is impossible to produce sound without pitch. The question for linguistic typology, however, is which domain does tone impact in a given language.

Finally, I come to my question:

When you ask about "distinct features", I assume you are wanting to know how Mandarin contrasts with other languages, but this necessitates the question "Which languages?" What counts as distinct or not depends a lot on where your point of comparison is.

- Are you looking for a comparison between Mandarin and other Chinese languages?

- Are you looking for a comparison between Mandarin and English or other Indo-European languages?

- Are you looking for a typological description? Meaning, are you looking for what type of language Chinese compared to linguistic universals?

Similarly, when you ask about "features" are you asking about linguistic features or sociolinguistic or both?

- Are you looking for information on Mandarin sounds? Phonetics and phonology?

- Are you looking for information on Mandarin grammar? Morphology? Syntax? Discourse?

- Are you looking for information on the Chinese writing system?

- Are you looking for cultural or demographic information?

If you are able to answer this question, and its sub-questions I think you will receive an answer much more specific to your needs.

Yes Cherie, that is really a good way, and you remind me that the Confucius Institutes based in the universities seem also good places to probe into.

I didn't use textmining tools for Chinese language so far, but I find some information about two of them - maybe it will be useful:

The Stanford Word Segmenter supports Chinese:

There are some plugins to GATE for processing Chinese:

I am sorry that I have no literature you an cite, but there certainly are differences.  Even my Chinese speaking friends who speak English well sometimes say "him" when they mean "her" or "her" when they mean "him."  

I believe that this is because the Chinese pronoun, Tà, is the same for him, her, and it, correct?

From my experiences with my Chinese friends, I consider that verb tenses, pronouns and articles are the three hardest things about English for Chinese native speakers, because they are so different in the two languages.  These things require not just different words but a different way of thinking.

If there is a 切韻 Qièyùn or 廣韻 guangyun online, this can be calculated straightforwardly. Do you have an electronic version?

Without the database in hand, my guess is that it will be much more than 193 categories for multiple characters are used as 反切下字 for the same rhyme.

I totally agree with Glenn that in "John talked in vain" "in vain" does not cancel the presupposition that "John did talk" but we seem to infer from it that his speech fell on deaf ears. The same holds for the second example, where the goal of teaching (i.e. learning) did not obtain, but the presupposition that teaching did take place is there. However, in terms of this "presupposition negator" I am thinking of complement clauses of negative implicative verbs such as fail, remember, manage, forget, refuse, stop, pretend, and prevent, which all cancel the presupposition such as in:

Monica failed to attend the party (presupposes that Monica did not attend).

Monica refused to attend the party (presupposes that Monica did not attend).

Here are two online resources with information of Chinese historical phonology:

1. This one covers all the information you may need, including piyin, simplified and traditional orthography, IPA, explanation in Chinese, English translations, analyses of orthographical structures, historical pronuciations, and a few dialectal pronuciations, etc. However, note that the users need to be careful with the information and double check with the help of the other resources. Also, I have not found any way of downloading the database behind.

2. This one provides the historical categories and the historical reconstructions by different researchers ( Note that some researchers are Sinologists whose names are written in Chinese. Google translate would give their western names). This resource is very accurate.

As for word frequency, the following resources are useful.

Cai, Q., & Brysbaert, M. (2010). SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on film subtitles. PLoS ONE, 5(6), e10729. http://expsy.ugent.be/subtlex-ch/

Institute of Linguistics, A. S. (2012). Taiwan Mandarin Spoken Word List. http://mmc.sinica.edu.tw/resources_e_01.htm

Tseng, S.-C. (2013). Lexical coverage in Taiwan Mandarin conversation. http://mmc.sinica.edu.tw/resources_e_02.html

The Ugyhurs would do well to look at what the Welsh did when speaking their language was illegal and nearly wiped out.

They resurrected an ancient musical tradition called the Eisteddfod.  By promoting the language through their cultural heritage, they've been able to preserve it.

I think you are mixing between power relations and ideological polarisation even though they are both addressed by CDA scholars as I did in my PhD thesis. Perhaps one of my papers here and another one which will be published very soon in an open access journal can give some ideas. You also need to be familiar with CDA approaches by referring to Fairclough, van Dijk and Wodak. I designed an approach to use it when I studied the Iraq war 2003 discourse. My book on Amazon.come can also help you if you can find it in your university library because it is expensive in the market. 

I wonder this website (handian: http://www.zdic.net/) can help. It should include almost all rare Chinese characters. But I am not quite sure if it fits to your need for Oracle Bone inscriptions. What I often do is to look up, copy and paste. I think OS system on Mac already includes the necessary fonts for those rare characters, which are normally MingLiU-ExtB and MingLiU_HKSCS-ExtB. I am not a tech, but I have found almost all rare characters I need by doing so. You also can do something similarly on this site: http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihanrsindex.html But sometimes the display of characters doesn't work as well as it does on Handian. 

The disappearing of minority languages is not a problem with China alone, I suppose. It is possibly the natural part of language evolution as a whole. While the government is trying to promote the use of Putonghua, there are also measures being taken to protect those languages in danger.

Though a Chinese, no idea. Better if with examples.

These researchers seem to be working on something like that http://aclweb.org/anthology/D09-1150 Sounds like a very interesting project!

There is also the aspect that slang can expand on this concept. Using the example of "go": in American English slang there is the expression "you go girl", which is giving it the role of an adjective in the sense of saying the girl is great. Or in the case of 'get up and go' where it means assertive force or ability as a noun. Yet in Chinese, du to the lack of conjugation or many other gramatical constructs it needs to be noted that it is as a result also a far more contextual language. Furthermore, where inflection can infer different meanings on the same words and phrases, the tonal structure in Chinese spoken languages means that inflection should not be used lest one drastically changes the meaning. The split between a written and spoken form of a language is also far more pronounce between Chinese and western languages. I have to correct my not Chinese friends that I speak Mandarin and not Chinese but that I read and write Chinese and not Mandarin but taht Ispeak, read and write English, French and German.

You seem to have answered your own question. The relationship between the phonetic part of some characters and the Putonghua pronunciation is no longer transparent because of sound changes; whilst in some cases, the lack of transparency is due to the existence of variant readings (itself sometimes a result of diachronic processes affecting the phonemic inventory). I think the best way to get your finger round this whole business is to read up on the reconstruction of Middle Chinese from the Qieyun and modern day dialect pronunciation of characters.