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| bio | website | moduscomputandi.posterous.com |
|---|---|---|
| location | San Francisco, CA | |
| age | 32 | |
| visits | member for | 1 year, 4 months |
| seen | yesterday | |
| stats | profile views | 25 |
Founding Engineer at FutureAdvisor.
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Aug 25 |
revised |
Tips for multiple-pronunciation characters (多音字) Reformatting to make tone marks more apparent. |
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Aug 25 |
answered | Tips for multiple-pronunciation characters (多音字) |
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Aug 15 |
comment |
国家 vs. 国, when can 国 be used alone? @Alenanno: The current participants on that exchange are much more knowledgeable than me in linguistics and usually provide much better answers, so I've been happy to simply lurk for now. |
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Aug 15 |
comment |
国家 vs. 国, when can 国 be used alone? @NS.X.: The word you were looking for is prosody. You're not incorrect; prosody does play a role in whether speakers choose a polysyllabic word over a monosyllabic one, and it probably did play a role in the formation of bound morphemes in modern Mandarin (though the loss of the final consonants -p -t -k -m from Middle Chinese played a much larger role). Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar by Yip Po-Ching has a full chapter devoted to prosody in modern Mandarin. |
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Aug 15 |
comment |
国家 vs. 国, when can 国 be used alone? @NS.X.: Concerning your second example, while comprehensible, 天国就是天上的国 seems somewhat incomplete to me when spoken aloud. Various speakers may disagree, but I feel that 天国就是天上的国度 sounds much more natural orally. |
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Aug 15 |
comment |
国家 vs. 国, when can 国 be used alone? @NS.X.: I don't know much about the "degree of bound" of 国, but I suppose it's not unreasonable to think that degrees may exist as particular words fossilize into bound morphemes. That being said, your first example uses 与, which is typically a Classical Chinese conjunction and in modern Mandarin is considered more formal than the usual 和. In addition, I would posit that 国 is actually bound to 国与国, which is a rather idiomatic phrase which only has a few limited variations, such as 国与民. |
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Aug 14 |
comment |
国家 vs. 国, when can 国 be used alone? In linguistics, 国 is what is known as a bound morpheme. It carries grammatical meaning, but does not exist independently as a standalone word. Note that you may still see 国 as a standalone word in written language sometimes. This may be sometimes employed to give the writing a "classical" feel, since 国 in Classical Chinese was not a bound morpheme. |
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Jul 27 |
answered | Tone of 竟 and 境 in Mandarin and Cantonese |
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Jul 26 |
answered | Cantonese 咩 (me1) vs. 嗎 (maa1) |
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Jun 23 |
comment |
Difference between 别 and 不 @StumpyJoePete: I don't exactly remember where I learned it, but I've seen it variously mentioned by teachers and on the Internet. Interestingly, in trying to find a more authoritative source, I came upon a paper (dspace.xmu.edu.cn/dspace/bitstream/2288/1220/1/…) that acknowledges the common belief that 别 is a contraction 不要, but instead argues that it is actually a contraction of 不必. |
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May 17 |
revised |
Pronunciation of 那个 added 12 characters in body |
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May 17 |
answered | Pronunciation of 那个 |
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May 17 |
comment |
Is it common to refer to cousins as “cousin-brothers”? In that case, they probably just don't realize that English familial terms are not that specific. "Cousin brother" probably resulted from a calque of Chinese 表哥 or 堂哥. |
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May 16 |
comment |
Referring to great-grandparents I just wanted to add that the Wikipedia article on Chinese kinship (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…) has tables of the various familial relationship terms. |
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May 14 |
revised |
The development of rhotic vowels in Mandarin edited tags |
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May 13 |
comment |
The development of rhotic vowels in Mandarin Other than the references already mentioned in my comment, Edwin Pulleyblank's Middle Chinese is very good. I don't actually have it because it appears to be very expensive; however, it looks to be pretty comprehensive based on the excerpts I've seen on Google Books (books.google.com/books?id=iWgDpSUY_fkC&printsec=frontcover). I do have Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation (also by Pulleyblank), which can be considered a companion to Middle Chinese. It primarily contains tables of pronunciations, but its introduction has a good summary of various phonological topics. |
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May 13 |
comment |
The development of rhotic vowels in Mandarin BTW, I just wanted to add that this metathesis must have happened before Mandarin lost the final plosives in its 入聲 words (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checked_tone). For instance, 日 (MC: ńźjet) is pronounced ri rather than er in Mandarin, indicating that the final -t got dropped after the /ʐɨ/ to /ɨʐ/ change occurred. |
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May 13 |
revised |
The development of rhotic vowels in Mandarin Add Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciation for 爾; change Cantonese romanization to Jyutping. |
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May 13 |
answered | The development of rhotic vowels in Mandarin |
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May 9 |
comment |
Temperature around 0°C @Huang: Interesting; do you have a link online to these standards? |
