[math-fun] Counting/counters/N/Z/units, etc.
The Japanese language has multiple types of "counters" for counting different types of objects. They act kind of like units to disambiguate certain sentences. I don't recall any such concept from any European languages (Latin, German, French, etc.). The only distinction in English is between "mass" nouns (sheep, etc.) and discrete nouns (cow/cows). European languages often give inanimate objects a gender, but this is orthogonal to the counting issue. Do other Asian languages have similar features to Japanese?
Chinese also has such words. I remember "i tiao lu" "one long-thing road".
X-Sender: hbaker1@pop.pipeline.com Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2003 21:44:07 -0800 From: Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> X-BeenThere: math-fun@mailman.xmission.com X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> List-Id: math-fun <math-fun.mailman.xmission.com> List-Help: <mailto:math-fun-request@mailman.xmission.com?subject=help> List-Post: <mailto:math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> List-Subscribe: <http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun>, <mailto:math-fun-request@mailman.xmission.com?subject=subscribe> List-Archive: <http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/private/math-fun> List-Unsubscribe: <http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun>, <mailto:math-fun-request@mailman.xmission.com?subject=unsubscribe> X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.60-csdcf (1.212-2003-09-23-exp) on cs2.Stanford.EDU X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-4.8 required=7.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00 autolearn=ham version=2.60-csdcf
The Japanese language has multiple types of "counters" for counting different types of objects. They act kind of like units to disambiguate certain sentences. I don't recall any such concept from any European languages (Latin, German, French, etc.). The only distinction in English is between "mass" nouns (sheep, etc.) and discrete nouns (cow/cows). European languages often give inanimate objects a gender, but this is orthogonal to the counting issue.
Do other Asian languages have similar features to Japanese?
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun
On Sat, 1 Nov 2003, John McCarthy wrote:
Chinese also has such words.
And Korean. Korean actually has two different sets of numbers - "Sino-Korean" and "Pure Korean". Which set is used depends on the counting class. Interestingly enough, the greatest pure Korean number is 99. Also in English, you say "two bottles of wine" and "two slices of bread". The word can be omitted, but not replaced with another one. Many languages make a distinction between countable and noncountable objects. For example, in Estonian the grammatical case of "X" in "i buy X" depends on that. If X is countable ("one slice of bread", "a chair"), we use the genitive. If X is uncountable or the amount is unspecified ("bread", "milk", "sugar"), we use the partitive. I think the linguistical roots are actually not very mysterious: if you buy a chair, you are going to own it (thus genitive), if you buy milk, you only buy a part of it, not all the milk in the world. [A similar phenomenon also existed in French, I think.] Helger
The use of so-called classifier particles with nouns is a widespread areal feature of eastern Asia. By "areal", linguists mean that a feature is not confined to a single language family, but rather seems to spread between languages due to geographic contact. In the case of noun classifiers, the phenomenon almost certainly started in Chinese, and spread to Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, and many other languages, by a process of cultural diffusion. (These languages mostly belong to entirely separate language families; if any of them are descended from a common ancestor, that connection is much older than the comparatively recent spread of noun classifiers.) Although the details differ from language to language, the overall features are quite similar. The universe of nouns is divided up, very unevenly, into between a dozen and a hundred categories. Each category is identified by a classifier word, also called a measure word. Classifiers are used with words like "this", "that", and numerals. In other contexts, classifiers are forbidden. In Mandarin, for example, one must use the classifier in phrases like "this book" or "seven books", but in "my book" or "they sell books", the classifier does not appear. Typically, a particular classifier governs a set of nouns with some obvious semantic similarity, such as shape. Some classifiers are specific to a single noun; there is often (as in Mandarin) a catch-all classifier which can be used in a pinch with any noun. Kids and foreigners tend to use these more general classifiers; use of the 'correct' classifier is a mark of fluency and education. Many assignments of classifiers to nouns make as little sense as the gender assignments of nouns in European languages. In a few other parts of the world, other languages display phenomena like East Asian classifiers, but with key differences. Some indigenous languages of North Australia have thirty or forty 'genders', each with its own set of singular and plural articles. In the Americas, the Athabaskan languages have different verbs of handling for different categories of object, so that "I am carrying the rock" and "I am carrying the basket" use different verbs. This division of the world into many categories of noun is quite different from the accusative/partitive distinction in Finnish and Estonian that Helgar Lipmaa describes. Even Early Modern English shows that distinction, using 'of' where Finnish and Estonian would use the partitive, as in "He ate of the bread". -A
How recent is the spread of noun classifiers? It seems to violate the general tendency towards grammar simplification. Is there any tendency in modern Chinese (of any flavor) to drop the classifiers? Are noun classifiers a form of type safety for spoken language, or do they sound cool? Why doesn't everyone use some interpretive programming language and give up those tedious and voluminous data type declarations. Imagine saying An-instance-of animal-of-type-feline "cat" existing-of-type-exists "is" relative-to "on" an-instance-of flat-thing-of-type-covering "mat" on the grounds that it avoids errors like letting bears sleep in the living room. Hilarie
participants (5)
-
Allan C. Wechsler -
Helger Lipmaa -
Henry Baker -
John McCarthy -
The Purple Streak, Hilarie Orman