🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1ii0n7INN6ig@life.ai.mit.edu>, glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams) writes:
|> In article <1993Jan7.065611.15193@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
|> >This example becomes more of a problem when translated to one of a glyph
|> >variant between Chinese and Japanese.  I agree that the problem is one
|> >of words, not characters -- however, in ideographic languages, words *are*
|> >characters.  The example is not as artificial as you make out.
|> 
|> I'm afraid this is incorrect.  Ideographic characters in Chinese, Japanese,
|> Korean, and Vietnamese (chu+" no>m va! chu+" ha'n) *are not* equivalent
|> to words.  Rather, they are mostly equivalent to morphemes (although there are
|> a number of multiple character morphemes).  Many words in these languages
|> are composed from multiple morphemes, e.g., modern Chinese has about 2.2
|> morphemes (characters) per word on average.  For example, in Chinese
|> "zhong1guo2" 'China' and "ri4ben3" 'Japan' are single words but contain
|> two morphemes each.

Ok, partially bad instances (some characters *are* ideographic, or at least
morphographic with single morphemes.  Pick a non-Chinese and non-Japanese
purely ideographic language, and reapply the example to pass the purity of
example requirements (since it *is* possible to produce a non-contrived
example (ie: "chicken" as in "chicken soup") in Chinese, wherein a single
glyph *does* represent a single word.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
					terry_lambert@novell.com
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Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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