Hi Heather,
I wanted to bypas the MoQ-Discuss as this has no real relevance to posts
under consideration at present and am not sure if others are interested and
I am by no means sinologist but do want to respond to your reaction as best
I can. Your reaction was:
Andre,
Are you saying the Chinese look at the meaning of something and don't
break it down into its' smaller parts right off the bat? So, they can break
down a meaningful event/character, but that is not what they habitually do,
unless of course the intend to. In other words, for me to relate maybe a
bit better, I see this in the same thread as those that don't pay much
attention to grammar but love the meaning and ideas in what verbiage is
communicating. Look at poetry for instance. Doesn't follow the rules of
grammar, the structure of how a sentence is supposed to be, for that would
take away from the meaning, which is the real intent to a poet or a poet
that would write or sing in such a way.
woods,
SA
Yes but...the Chinese have very strict grammatical rules for what are
allowable combinations. What I was getting at was that most chinese
characters are a combination of pictographs and ideographs. While most
characters are words by themselves they are usually composed of at least two
characters (a simple example: "pirate" is composed of 'sea' and 'thief',
"crisis" is composed of 'danger' and 'opportunity' but is usually understood
as 'dangerous time'.
It really gets very complex but knowing only a few thousand characters can
be used to understand many tens or even hundreds of thousands of words.
The system on mainland China only incorporates approx. 6500 characters!
They used to be written right to left, top to bottom but this changed due to
Western influences ( around the Opium War 1830's ?). So now they are read
left to right.
Again I must stress I am not an expert but I hope it clarifies your
question.
Regards
Andre
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