John, (01)
Let us try to keep this simple. We disagree. (02)
>From a cultural point of view, it is easy to understand why Chinese would
>retain its mechanisms for word coinage, ignoring 'foreign' influences, while
>Japanese would be willing to adopt and use. You may be right that Japanese
>gave up some of its native linguistic practices and Chinese didn't, but I
>think that was as much about culture as about linguistics. (03)
As you noted, 'takashi' is linguistically more economical than chu-zu-qi-che,
so Japanese made a choice based on economy instead of tradition, especially
since translating something like the Chinese characterization into Japanese
might have been 15 syllables. The Chinese language is older and more
economical in the first place; so the cost wasn't high, but in use the Chinese
still abbreviate the term to che (wagon) and use context to determine the
intent. Economy of expression is a strong motivator in determining coinage. (04)
To say that the choice of word for Taxi was a consequence of a conflict of
linguistic mechanisms that somehow impoverished Japanese seems very difficult
to support, in the presence of culture and language economy influences. (05)
As to the following:
> No. When there are multiple paradigms for word formation, they tend to
> become moribund or drastically simplified. (06)
I would like to know your reference for this. Languages and their formative
elements become simplified over time, with or without multiple coinage
paradigms. The choice of coinage paradigms, when there is such a choice, is,
as your example of 'celestial spheres' indicates, a characteristic of cultural
influences at least as much as language influences. We didn't lose the ability
to coin 'starsight' or 'fireman' just because the culture of the time dictated
that we use 'existence' instead of 'beingness'. I think you will find that the
usage of Germanic and Romance coinage mechanisms is still quite robust in
English. (07)
> English retained a few, but most of them are not as productive as they were
>in their original languages. (08)
The obvious interpretation of that statement is clearly true and irrelevant.
If the original language only has one mechanism, it will be used for every
coinage. If the language has two mechanisms, it is probable that individual
usages will be more like 50-50. So is the mechanism less productive in the
language that has two mechanisms? And the rate of knowledge acquisition since
1066 has increased just a bit over that of Anglo-Saxon England. So, what kind
of measurement is this? (09)
We tend to use more Germanic noun phrases and fewer Romance turns of phrase,
more Romance term formation for abstractions and more Germanic term formation
for physical things, etc. Does that make the other paradigms "less
productive"? I suppose so, but there is only so much coinage to share, and as
I said above, culture and economy will also affect the choice in particular
instances. Writing coaches suggest we use active voice and verbs rather than
nominalizations, precisely because the commercial and government bureaucratic
cultures have led us to do the opposite. In a certain sense, that could be
considered a Germanic pushback against the Romance flowery circumlocution. (010)
Some Germanic practices have disappeared from English, yes. We don't use ge-
to denote abstractions any more -- we don't have Ge-spice as distinct from
spice(s), as German does. In general, we have simplified the language to use no
prefix for abstractions (just 'spice'), and we also rarely use the French
circumlocution to make the distinction between abstractions and the class of
actual individuals; we make the distinction in context. I would argue,
however, that the Germanic mechanism has been sidelined by language
simplification, rather than by Romance competition. (011)
I am no expert in this area. I could be completely wrong in my contentions.
As I said to Ron, I have only limited education in this area, and it isn't
recent. At the same time, I was taught: "Qui ne comprend pas la la culture ne
comprend pas la langue." And it is my experience that that is very relevant to
change in language. (012)
-Ed (013)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
> Sent: Friday, December 13, 2013 11:33 PM
> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] LInked Data meme revisited
>
> Ed,
>
> All languages evolve. But they have different structures, which may make
> certain kinds of expressions shorter and simpler than others.
>
> > What you think is significant about English right now was true of
> > French 300 years ago and may be true of Chinese in 2050.
> > It is all about language evolution, which is the central theme.
>
> The fact that English happens to be the dominant language now and French
> was dominant a few centuries ago is definitely *not* what I was trying to
> explain.
>
> For parallels, look at Japanese and Chinese. Japanese scribes learned
> Chinese characters with their pronunciation in a dialect of Chinese. When
> they used them to write Japanese, they pronounced them in Japanese --
> except in compounds. The character for 'new' is pronounced in Japanese as
> /atarashi/ when used as an adjective by itself. But in compounds, it's
> pronounced in Chinese as /shin/.
> The area of Tokyo named Shinjuku has three Chinese words and characters
> for 'new hotel district'. Nobody pronounces those three characters with the
> native Japanese pronunciation.
>
> This is an example of the way a clash of languages changed Japanese.
> It caused Japanese to adopt the Chinese paradigm for coining new words,
> and weakened the native Japanese paradigms. However, Japanese does
> have various grammatical morphemes. So they developed the syllabic
> hiragana and katakana to express those forms.
>
> When the Japanese opened up to the wider world, they started to borrow
> many new words from western languages, which they spelled in katakana.
> The character for ju (a kind of hotel) in Shinjuku is pronounced /yadoya/ in
> native Japanese. When they began to build western-style hotels, they
> borrowed the western word, which is pronounced /hoteru/.
>
> For the word 'taxi', the Japanese use syllabic katakana to spell /takushi/.
>For
> 'bus', they say /basu/. For taxi, the Chinese themselves say chu-zu-qi-che
> (for-hire-energy-vehicle). For bus, they say gong-gong-qi-che (public-use-
> energy-vehicle). But in context, they rarely use those compounds. Instead,
> they'll say "Call me a che" -- i.e., taxi. Or they'll say "I'm waiting for
>the che" --
> i.e., bus.
>
> This is the point I was trying to make: the changes to Japanese caused by its
> clash with Chinese weakened its native methods for coining new words.
> That also made it more receptive to borrowing words from other languages.
> But Chinese uses its own resources to coin new compounds.
>
> EJB
> > An-ge-stell-t-er is literally 'in-stall-d-er' -- a person who is 'put
> > in a place' in an organization. The French origin of em-ploy-ee could
> > be translated in-use-d, or in-place-d, a participial adjective taken
> > as a noun.
>
> I agree. But note three points: (1) the clash with Danish caused the Anglo-
> Saxon paradigms to be weakened; (2) the clash with French introduced a
> completely different paradigm; and (3) the university system, which taught
> Latin (and some Greek) to anyone who did any significant amount of writing.
>
> As a result of these clashes, Anglo-Saxon compounds such as the equivalent
> of 'heaven-candle' were lost. Anyone who wrote anything more than sales
> receipts used their university training to write 'celestial spheres'.
>
> > And we have coined similar terms, like 'installer' and 'mortgagee'.
> >
> > As we can see, rather than losing this technique for vocabulary
> > extension to the French influence, English simply gained the
> > mechanisms of the second language as well.
>
> No. When there are multiple paradigms for word formation, they tend to
> become moribund or drastically simplified. English retained a few, but most
> of them are not as productive as they were in their original languages. The
> Germanic -er is still fairly productive in English, but -ee is rarely used
>except
> for words borrowed from French.
>
> The issues that cause one language or another to become dominant are very
> different from those that make it easy for a language to borrow new terms.
>
> John
>
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