San Duanmu

Okay, so I know very little about Chinese and am not capable of putting a very critical eye on this, but Duanmu is very cogent and convincing given that he could basically tell me whatever he wanted and I'd believe him. The common view of Chinese is that it is made up entirely or almost entirely of monosyllabic words. Linguists long ago left this false cliché behind (though I was surprised to find it was still espoused by Otto Jespersen in the forties; shame on you, Jespersen!), and the standard specialist understanding that Old Chinese was monosyllabic but that it added a large quantity of polysyllabic (mostly but not entirely disyllabic) words as it became Modern Chinese. The main explanation for this is "homonym avoidance"; over time, words that in Old Chinese were pronounced differently came to be pronounced similarly, requiring people to add syllables to them to differentiate them. (If that sounds so weird, imagine that Americans in the South started calling a pen an "ink-pen" to differentiate it from a pin.) There are also arguments that speech tempo necessitated it--if your language is all monosyllables, it's all pow-pow-pow, and then you start to slyly add little side syllables that get lexicalized. Lots of Chinese words make this more plausible than it sounds--for instance, there is a one-syllable word for tiger that no one uses because they all call him "old tiger" (two syllables), which is functionally the word for tiger (but then "white tiger" and other compounds use the "tiger" syllable only. This variation makes tempo and rhythm explanations plausible (there are also rhythm explanations, which work similarly). Then, there is the argument that "grammar" requires it, that certain kinds of words must be disyllabic, which is just unmotivated, circular and incoherent.

With examples, word and syllable counts, and logic, Duanmu shows that these arguments are inadequate and especially that the homonym avoidance one is riddled with logical issues (ambiguities are known to be easily sortoutable, as will be seen by an English speaker, even though we have fewer of them, by how little trouble we have with words like "bear" and "bare"; many words remain monosyllabic although they are the most ikely to cause confusion, like the words for he/she/it are all the same!!; most of the increase in disyllables has been recent, and most of the increase in homonyms has not; Old Chinese has been recently shown already to have many homonyms; etc.!) and empirically baseless furthermore. Based on the elasticity of Chinese words (often they are monosyllabic in one context and disyllabic in another) and the fact that the large increase in disyllables over time is largely loan-words from other languages, which either have to imitate the polysyllabic sounds of those languages or express the meanings in an effective way (so why would we adopt a confusing monosyllable pi for beer when we could call it pijiu 'beerwine' and learn everybody about this new booze right in the name?), Duanmu makes a compelling case for a mix of prosodic arguments (he favours metre over tempo, for arcane reasons) and the "new word borrowing/translation/creation" argument that is seemingly original to him.

It's a fun paper! Appeared in Diachronica.… (altro)