3 ms·
I know both Classical Chinese and Sanskrit and have no idea what you are talking about. "It's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a bl
by Jd 13y ago
I know both Classical Chinese and Sanskrit and have no idea what you are talking about.
"It's rare in both languages to stumble across a word that is just a black box, whose etymology you can't pull apart so as to guess what it means."
Err, yeah I guess you can guess from the morpheme of a Chinese character that a particular character is a type of tree or has something to do with trees, but that's about it. Similarly with Sanskrit, because of sandhi rules often times you can't even figure out what the word is in advance, and I'm not sure how you are suppose to "guess" the meaning absent looking it up in Monier Williams (unless you are guessing backwards from other Indo-European languages, in which case your potential guessable vocabulary will be quite small).
- contingencies 13y agoGlad my post survived the glance of a pro! (PS. Saw your evr.gr: please send me an email, I am working on ~LETS stuff tangentially and would like to share info.)
- pattisapu 13y agoJd, how do the sandhi rules keep you from finding out what the word is? They make it easier to find out. The rules are just that -- rules -- that bring order out of the chaos. As to how you guess, yes, you infer from the etymology. The fact that it's guessing doesn't mean it's easy, or that guessing gives you as much information as actually looking it up, parsing it, etc.
- Jd 13y agoWhat makes words easy to figure out is by putting spaces in between the words. Iamafrog <- you can figure that out what that means, but it certainly isn't easier than modern orthorgraphy. Aamafrog <- you could figure that out if you know that "i" + "a" sometimes combines to form "aa" -- but why would you want to do that? In what way is that easier?