[OT] Re: Found on proggit: Krug, a new experimental programming language, compiler written in D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 06:10:35PM +0000, Meta via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> Oh yes, I'm well aware that there's a lot of semantic contortion
> required here, and that as spoken, this sounds like complete
> gibberish. I don't know where the monosyllable meme came from, either;
> it's readily apparently from learning even basic vocabulary. 今天,
> 马上, 故事, hell, 中国 is a compound word.

AFAICT, the monosyllable thing is something that came from the ancient
scribes who were (at least partly) responsible for the writing system.
It's an ideal that gives a nice 1-to-1 mapping between glyphs and
"words", providing a philosophically elegant way to rationalize
everything into monosyllabic units.  Sortof like representing everything
with 1's and 0's. :-D  But, like all ideals, it's also somewhat detached
from reality, despite having permeated Chinese thinking such that people
have come to equate "word" with "syllable", even though many such
"words" clearly only exist as compounds that cannot be separated without
destroying its meaning.

There's also another, currently not-fully-understood factor, and that is
that pronunciation has changed over time, and there is some evidence
that certain features of the written language may reflect inserted
consonants that formed consonant clusters in the ancient language,
sounds that have since become silent. It makes one wonder if some of
these "monosyllables" may have been, in some distant past, actually
polysyllabic words in their own right, and the monosyllable thing may
have been merely a side-effect of the shift in pronunciation over many
centuries.  (This pronunciation shift is evidenced by the "alternate
readings" of certain glyphs that's adopted when reading ancient poetry,
clearly a retroactive effort to compensate for the divergence in rhyme
caused by sound change since the time said poetry was written. Who knows
what other compensatory measures have been taken over time that may
have, consciously or not, contributed to the monosyllabic illusion.)


T

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