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From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Chinese Contrary to John Halloran's Thesis?
Message-ID: <petrichDyHJnz.AK5@netcom.com>
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References: <5184eg$p8a@halley.pi.net> <seagoat.569.00872857@primenet.com> <7fzq2bp4oq.fsf@wisdom.cs.hku.hk> <seagoat.584.0030BB02@primenet.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Sep 1996 08:31:11 GMT
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Sender: petrich@netcom13.netcom.com

In article <seagoat.584.0030BB02@primenet.com>,
John A. Halloran <seagoat@primenet.com> wrote:
>In article <7fzq2bp4oq.fsf@wisdom.cs.hku.hk> sdlee@cs.hku.hk (Lee Sau Dan ~{@nJX6X~}) writes:

>>Sorry, John.  Please read carefully  the paragraphs quoted above.  The
>>"ma" example was taken from  Thai, not Chinese.   The word for "fruit"
>>in Mandarin is <guo3>.  It is written as a separate character which is
>>a suffix of the names of many (but not all) fruits, e.g. apple (<ping2
>>guo3>), fig (<wu2 hua1 guo3>).

>Sumerian scholars call such characters determinatives, so that the word 
>sign for 'place, earth' precedes all place names, the word sign for 'deity' 
>precedes all divine names, etc.  It is not known if these determinatives were 
>ever pronounced, or merely written.

	You misunderstood LSD's point; AFAIK, Chinese does *not* use 
unpronounced determinatives, he was just commenting that the Chinese 
names of many fruits end with a word that means "fruit".

	I'd be surprised if those determinatives were pronounced, since 
their purpose was to resolve ambiguities in written symbols.
-- 
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