Sunday, October 23, 2016
Morphemes in Logographic Writing Systems
Once again this week I was drawn to thinking about the concepts in the readings through the lens of Japanese. As I read about morphemes and lexemes and such I realized that they operate slightly differently in Japanese than they do in English. This is mostly due to the Japanese writing system of Kanji, which are essentially borrowed Chinese characters used in combination with their other syllable-based writing systems. Each of these characters have a self-contained meaning and so each one would be considered a morpheme. However, when multiple Kanji are put together they represent a new and different word, which combine the meanings of the individual Kanji it consists of. In fact, I might even argue that these combinations of Kanji act as a form of compounding for the Japanese language, even though the Kanji characters themselves aren't technically lexemes. As for lexemes and words found in the dictionary, I couldn't help but think as I was reading the articles this week how useful a resource for all word-forms of a language would be, especially for someone learning a second language. I've found that even when using online dictionaries it can be difficult to find the correct form for the verb you need in a certain context. I feel like reading about these rules and interpretations of the meanings of individual words helped me further grasp how much depth there is in everything we say. It started with every possible sound we can make when producing a word, outlined by the IPA, then we got a bit broader and looked at the syntax to recognize how sentences are constructed to convey meaning, and now we've learned about how meaning can be conveyed within individual words inside of those sentences. I'm not sure where we can go from here but I'm excited for next week's readings!
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Hey Jesse, interesting post. I too was also drawn to thinking about the concepts through the lens of Japanese and Chinese. I find it fascinating that although I grew up learning Chinese and only recently started learning Japanese, I realize that Japanese Kanji use Chinese characters in a slightly different way than they're used in Chinese - in particular, the morphemes (each Chinese character) has a sightly different pronunciation in Japanese and slightly different meaning. The S-language phrases commonly used in the Chinese language also don't necessarily directly transfer to the Japanese language. I hypothesize that this phenomenon is due to differences in cultures and contexts under which these languages were formed, as well as the necessity of tweaking Kanji to work with the Hiragana and Katakana, the other two systems in Japanese.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you compared the readings' descriptions of how we build up words in the English language to how Kanji characters are created. When I first started learning how to write in Chinese, I was amazed at how various root strokes contributed to the formation of what a character looks like. For example, the "person" root appears in all the characters for members of the family to indicate that it is referencing a person. In a similar way, we create many English words by merging words with related meanings into a final word. Although I was always so intrigued and impressed by the clear thought that must have gone behind creating characters, it's so fun to see now how English often functions in such a similarly systematic way.
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