The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In light of this consistency, am inclined to interpret "meaning" as something more akin to "phonetic realization" than a difference in semantics, but I wanted to give you the chance to clarify what distinctions you're trying to draw.

I don't know if I can help, since you quoted four or five times I explained it and concluded the exact opposite of what I said.

The meaning of a symbol, a hanzi, a string of written letters, a diagram etc. is whatever the person who looks at it thinks it mean. The meaning of a spoken word, alarm, clap, whistle, etc is whatever the person who hears it thinks it mean. 

In either case, the meaning lives only in the mind of that person, and therefore may be completely different for different persons.  Thus there is no such thing as THE meaning of something.  Including a given hanzi. Including a given Mandarin or Cantonese syllable. 

We can infer what something means to someone else by analyzing their reactions when they see or hear that something.  Like, watching which way the guests of a hotel in Germany turn when they rush out after a fire alarm and see the sign "NOT AUSGANG  ▶" at the end of the hallway.

By that method we can tell that, in fact, the meaning of the syllable that can be represented in IPA as [fa˥] is mostly the same for all native Mandarin speakers, and mostly the same for all Cantonese speakers; but those are two very different meanings -- one is a general notion of sending out and expanding, the other is the general idea of flower or blossom.  

And by that method we can also tell that the meaning of the hanzi 水 is mostly the same for any Chinese or Taiwanese native, namely "things, actions, and qualities that have to do with the substance that chemists denote by H2O, mainly in its liquid phase".  And that is roughly the meaning of that hanzi also for Japanese natives, and for many people in Southeast Asia, even if their native language and script are not at all related to the Chinese ones.

And by that method we can also deduce that (according to my earnest lalamo) that meaning of 水 is mostly the same as the meaning of the spoken syllable [ʂwəi̯˨˩˦] (IPA; pinyin shuǐ) to Mandarin speakers, or of the spoken syllable [sɵy̯˧˥] (IPA; jyutping seoi2) to Cantonese speakers.  Except that [sɵy̯˧˥] may have additional alternative meanings to a Cantonese speaker when he hears it in a poem or recitation of a literary work; while that allegedly is not the case for the Mandarin speaker.

And we do not know what one would should have said to the Divine Farmer to get him to think of H2O, nor what he would say when asked to read 水 aloud.  In bot cases the answer would probably have been a single syllable too; but AFAIK no one really knows what that syllable was, or whether it had a tone.  We do not even know whether the modern Mandarin and/or Cantonese readings evolved from it, or whether all three readings evolved from some other language.

It may be that some Mandarin speakers (especially monolingual ones), when they see the hanzi 水,they will first think of the spoken syllable [ʂwəi̯˨˩˦], and then that syllable gets them to think of H2O etc.  This claim may seem more plausible to those who believe that we think by juggling words in out brain, rather than non-verbal concepts.  I personally think that this view (and its more extreme form, the Whorfian Hypothesis) is bullshit.  But, anyway, that claim should matter only to neurologists and psychologists; because the observable reaction of people to seeing 水 will be the same, whether they think of H2O directly or via the spoken word.

In the case of the Chinese script, in contrast, learning the mappings from glyphs to sounds and from glyphs to concepts requires memorizing another table with 50'000 entries or so.

(Please note I have added a 0 to 50'000 as I believe that was your meaning and you have used that figure elsewhere in the post, but you may have intended 5,000 and I would be interested to know if that was your intent.)

There are two different things one must learn: the hanzi and the lexicon. 

To be literate in any Chinese language one must learn a certain number of hanzi, their pronunciation, and their general meaning.  The sources I have seen put that minimum number somewhere between 2500 to 5000.

But, in order to use a language -- Chinese or not -- one must also learn a large enough fraction of its lexicon -- the terms (words or phrases) that refer to specific concepts.  

Thus, in English, the word "writer" is associated to a certain general concept, the word "type" is associated to another, and the word "block" to another.  But the compound "typewriter" is associated to a fourth specific concept: which is included in the general concepts of "type" and "writer",  but cannot be deduced from them.  That makes "typewriter" a separate item of the English lexicon.  And the same goes for the phrase "writer's block": it refers to a concept that is contained in the general concepts of "writer" and "block", but cannot be deduced from them. Thus "writer's block" is a fifth entry of the lexicon.  And all these five entries must be learned before one can understand the respective phraes. 

In contrast, the concept evoked by the phrase "writer's nephew" can be deduced from the general concepts associated with "writer" and "nephew".  So "writer's nephew" is not generally considered a separate entry in the English lexicon.

A good dictionary for any language must ideally list every entry of its lexicon, describing its meaning and specifying both the written signs and the spoken sounds that should evoke it in the mind of a native speaker who has learned it.  It should have entries for "typewriter" and "writer's block", in addition to "type", "writer" and "block".  But not even the best dictionaries will list every phrase that has a special meaning to some speakers of the language.  Thus no entry  for "writer's nephew".  (Even though that may be a lexicon entry for the patrons of some hypothetical pub in Auckand where it has acquired the meaning of "someone who sips beer through a straw", after a legendary event that happened there in 1927; or to the members of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.'s Fan Club.) 

Likewise, the hanzi pair 電話 and the syllable pair diàn huà are a distinct entry in the Mandarin lexicon, whose meaning is that tool that scammers use to trick fools into revealing their bank password.  That meaning cannot be deduced from the general meaning of 電 diàn (nowadays mostly things having to do with electricity; notwithstanding that when the character was coined, 2000 years ago, it meant a lightning bolt; and that it was created by combining two characters created 3000 years ago, when turtles could still feel the future in their bones, which respectively meant to the shamans the concept of lightning bolt and the concept of spheroidal globules of H2O in liquid form moving vertically through the atmosphere in the general direction of the local gravity field, from clouds to the ground, which may seem redundant but was included anyway in 電 merely as a mnemonic for its proper pronunciation.) and the general meaning of 話 (mostly things having something to do with speech).  Thus people learning Mandarin or any Chinese language must learn the meaning of 電話, even after learning the meanings of 電 and 話 and their pronunciations in that language.

So, how many entries of the Mandarin lexicon must one learn to be reasonably fluent in the language -- say, as much as the average native speaker at the end of high school?  AFAIK this number is surprisingly similar for all languages, Chinese or not: several tens of thousands.  But of course the number of lexicon entries that one knows will vary a lot from person to person, will generally increase with age, and will be higher for people who read more books or are exposed to richer language.  

(You can estimate the size of your lexicon by asking someone else to open a good dictionary on one page out of every (say) 20 pages, read aloud the first word or phrase defined on that page, and note down whether you can give a more or less correct definition for it, from memory.  With that score and the total counts of pages and entries in the dictionary you can estimate how many of the words and phrases defined therein you know.)

So that was the "50'000" that I guessed in my posts. 

All the best, --stolfi