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Aug 08, 2009 23:43

I love dissecting Chinese (Cantonese) words. Excuse any poor phonetical and literal translations ( Read more... )

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straight_flakes August 10 2009, 04:43:20 UTC
hahaha... "bite the wax tadpole"!

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stelfton15 August 10 2009, 23:01:14 UTC
Another analogy between Chinese and English are with English's compound words. Words and names like "together", "newspaper", "mailman", "Westwego (a city in Louisiana)" and "Fedex" as well as acronyms like "NASA", "NFL", and "RADAR" are all made up of smaller words. On top of that, we don't think of the smaller words that make up the bigger ones, we see them as a single word.

Chinese words and characters are merely extremely complicated compound words.

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stelfton15 August 10 2009, 23:12:32 UTC
* we see them as a single word... but obviously we can also see how the smaller words can be formed together to form a larger concept.

The difference though between English compound words and Chinese words is that English has a somewhat restrictive manner to form compound words, based on grammar structure; we say "mailman" or "newspaper", not "manmail" or "papernews". Chinese languages (and many Asian languages as well) have a less rigid structure. "i goto mall, gonna buy milk", "milk buy gonna, goto mall I" and "mall goto I, milk gonna buy" all mean the same thing in Chinese and many Asian languages. Thusly, Chinese words and characters can be formed less restrictively, which is also why we get those wild Engrish phrases. Even I accidentally made one above: "have happy enjoyment". :P

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