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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Chinese classifiers
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Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 03:25:19 GMT
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In article <AF02BEA996681D27F0@i2-50.islandnet.com>,
Chris Burd <cburd@islandnet.com> wrote:
>In article <E3yJ0C.Gy1@nonexistent.com>,
>John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:
>
>>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". [snip] 
>>All Chinese nouns correspond to English mass nouns in this sense.
>[snip]
>>
>Thanks for an excellent explanation (I've edited most of it out,
>'cause my newsreader forces me to maintain a civilised quote-comment
>ratio.) 

Very sensible, that.

>Two points: (1) English mass nouns have their own complications, but they
>constitute a only small proportion of all English nouns.
[snip]

Small compared to the total vocabulary, but they loom large among the most
frequently-used nouns.  For instance, how can you talk about food(!)
without constant recourse to them?  In this sense, they're like English
irregular verbs.

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
