Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.language.artificial
From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Chinese classifiers (was: Opinions on EU language(s))
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Chris Burd wrote:

> From what little I know of Chinese, I'm not surprised to find this degree
> of creativity/flexibility. I've heard Chinese praised as a model language
> in terms of word-building and syntax. I recall, though, that there
> were certain irregularities in expressing plurals -- a system of
> classifiers that seemed rather hard to learn.

The Chinese classifier system is really much the same as the English
classifier system, except that there's more of it.

In English, we make a distinction between *count nouns* like "horse",
and *mass nouns* like "butter".  We can count horses, thus:
"one horse, two horses, three horses, ..." using the singular form
"horse" when the number "one" is expressed or implied, and the
plural form "horses" when we have more than one.  We cannot operate
the same way on "butter", though; we cannot say "one butter, two
butters, ..." but must say "one stick of butter, two sticks of
butter, ..." or "one pat of butter, ..."  Furthermore, with "bread",
also a mass noun, we cannot say "one stick of bread" or "one pat
of bread"; we must say "one loaf of bread" or "one piece of bread".
So which classifier is used depends on the noun, and also on the
way in which we are choosing to segment the substance denoted by
the noun.  The only reason that English-speakers don't think
this system is "hard to learn" is that they are born to it.

All Chinese nouns correspond to English mass nouns in this sense.
The word for "horse", ma3, when used alone means "some amount of
horseness".  Whether one individual, two individuals, or many
individuals are referred to is not grammatically relevant.
To say "three horses", one must literally say "three components
of horseness".  Classifiers are also used after demonstratives:
zhei4 san1 ge ren2 means "these three components-of person-ness"
literally, or "these three persons" idiomatically.

The classifier "ge" (which has no tone) is the universal classifier;
it is used with the great majority of nouns, and many nouns which
were historically used with a different classifier are starting to
use "ge" more and more.  But there are still plenty of nouns which
cannot take "ge" and must have their own classifier.

Measure words can also stand as classifiers:  "one kilogram of wheat"
uses the word for "kilogram" as its classifier.

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
