Monosyllabic language

Last updated

A monosyllabic language is a language in which words predominantly consist of a single syllable. An example of a monosyllabic language would be Old Chinese [1] or Vietnamese or Burmese.

Contents

Monosyllabism is the name for the property of single-syllable word form. The natural complement of monosyllabism is polysyllabism.

Whether a language is monosyllabic or not sometimes depends on the definition of "word", which is far from being a settled matter among linguists. [2] For example, Modern Chinese (Mandarin) is ""monosyllabic"" if each written Chinese character is considered a word; which is justified by observing that most characters have proper meaning(s) (even if very generic and ambiguous). [3] However, most entries in a Chinese dictionary are compounds of two or more characters; if those entries are taken as the "words", then Mandarin is not truly monosyllabic, only its morphemes are. [1] [4]

Single-vowel form

A monosyllable may be complex and include seven or more consonants and a vowel (CCCCVCCC or CCCVCCC as in English "strengths") or be as simple as a single vowel or a syllabic consonant.

Few known recorded languages preserve simple CV forms which apparently are fully functional roots conveying meaning, i.e. are words—but are not the reductions from earlier complex forms that we find in Mandarin Chinese CV forms, almost always derived with tonal and phonological modifications from Sino-Tibetan *(C)CV(C)(C)/(V) forms.[ citation needed ]

Suffix and prefix

Monosyllabic languages typically lack suffixes and prefixes that can be added to words to alter their meaning or time. Instead, it is frequently determined by context and/or other words.

For instance in Vietnamese:

EnglishVietnamese
I askTôi hỏi
I askedTôi đã hỏi
I'm askingTôi đang hỏi
EnglishVietnamese
explaingiải thích
unexplainkhông giải thích
explanationsự giải thích
For informal speech
EnglishVietnamese
I promise.Tôi hứa.
I promised yesterday.Tôi hứa hôm qua.
I will promise tomorrow.Tôi hứa ngày mai.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinese language</span> National language of China

Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.3 billion people, or around 16% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.

In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme is a set of phones that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously to consonants and vowels. Languages that have this feature are called tonal languages; the distinctive tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes, by analogy with phoneme. Tonal languages are common in East and Southeast Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific.

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logogram</span> Grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme

In a written language, a logogram, also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chinese characters as used in Chinese as well as other languages are logograms, as are Egyptian hieroglyphs and characters in cuneiform script. A writing system that primarily uses logograms is called a logography. Non-logographic writing systems, such as alphabets and syllabaries, are phonemic: their individual symbols represent sounds directly and lack any inherent meaning. However, all known logographies have some phonetic component, generally based on the rebus principle, and the addition of a phonetic component to pure ideographs is considered to be a key innovation in enabling the writing system to adequately encode human language.

Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function of the adjacent words. Sandhi belongs to morphophonology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Middle Chinese</span> Pronunciation system for Chinese recorded in the Qieyun dictionary (601)

Middle Chinese or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the preface of the Qieyun, most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology.

Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic spellings were used.

Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango, is that subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese.

Gǀui or Gǀwi is a Khoe dialect of Botswana with 2,500 speakers. It is part of the Gǁana dialect cluster, and is closely related to Naro. It has a number of loan words from ǂʼAmkoe. Gǀui, ǂʼAmkoe, and Taa form the core of the Kalahari Basin sprachbund, and share a number of characteristic features, including extremely large consonant inventories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Word</span> Basic element of language

A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.

General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kosraean language</span> Oceanic language spoken in Micronesia

Kosraean is the language spoken on the islands of Kosrae (Kusaie), a nation-state of the Federated States of Micronesia, Caroline Islands. In 2001 there were approximately 8,000 speakers in Micronesia, and 9,060 in all countries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eastern Pomo language</span> Pomoan language

Eastern Pomo, also known as Clear Lake Pomo, is a nearly extinct Pomoan language spoken around Clear Lake in Lake County, California by one of the Pomo peoples.

Sino-Xenic or Sinoxenic pronunciations are regular systems for reading Chinese characters in Japan, Korea and Vietnam, originating in medieval times and the source of large-scale borrowings of Chinese words into the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, none of which are genetically related to Chinese. The resulting Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies now make up a large part of the lexicons of these languages. The pronunciation systems are used alongside modern varieties of Chinese in historical Chinese phonology, particularly the reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese. Some other languages, such as Hmong–Mien and Kra–Dai languages, also contain large numbers of Chinese loanwords but without the systematic correspondences that characterize Sino-Xenic vocabularies.

Vietnamese, like many languages in Southeast Asia, is an analytic language.

The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties. Television and radio announcers are chosen for their ability to affect a standard accent. Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable. In addition to its four main tones, Standard Chinese has a neutral tone that appears on weak syllables.

Kensiu (Kensiw) is an Austro-asiatic language of the Jahaic subbranch. It is spoken by a small community of 300 in Yala Province in southern Thailand and also reportedly by a community of approximately 300 speakers in Western Malaysia in Perak and Kedah states. Speakers of this language are Negritos who are known as the Mani people or Maniq of Thailand.

The Ersu language proper is a Sino-Tibetan spoken in western Sichuan, China. It is the most widely spoken of the three Ersu languages. There are 13,000 speakers according to Sun (1982).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area</span> Geolinguistic region sharing areal features such as tonality

The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien, Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar typological features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. James Matisoff referred to this area as the "Sinosphere", contrasted with the "Indosphere", but viewed it as a zone of mutual influence in the ancient period.

References

  1. 1 2 Feng, Wang (2015). "Multisyllabication and Phonological Simplification throughout Chinese History". Journal of Chinese Linguistics. 43 (2): 714–718. JSTOR   24774983.
  2. Haspelmath, Martin (2011). "The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax" (PDF). Folia Linguistica. 45 (1): 31–80. doi:10.1515/flin.2011.002. ISSN   0165-4004.
  3. Hockett, Charles F. (1951). "Review: Nationalism and language reform in China by John De Francis". Language. 27 (3): 439–445. doi:10.2307/409788. JSTOR   409788. an overwhelmingly high percentage of Chinese segmental morphemes (bound or free) consist of a single syllable; no more than perhaps five percent are longer than one syllable, and only a small handful are shorter. In this sense — in the sense of the favored canonical shape of morphemes — Chinese is indeed monosyllabic
  4. Hannas, Wm. C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press. ISBN   9780585344010..