A technical note on the "Chinese" analysis in section 3.10 and A.9, which is fine to its limits and answers the questions raised by the citations it is responding to, but uses a corpus that is very strange if you want to draw wider conclusions about real languages. It is a Pinyin rendering of a Classical Chinese text and thus completely illegible.
Per Geoffry Sampson:
The paper is specifically answering Stolfi, who explicitly believes that such a rendering of specific Classical texts was comprehensible to speakers of descendent languages, so the oddness of the corpus is not only responsive, but more responsive than one that accounts for this or uses a modern Mandarin text. However, we must be cautious describing this as "Chinese" as it is neither Classical nor Mandarin as those two terms are usually understood---and it certainly cannot be said to be every Sinitic language, or worse non-Sinitic languages using Chinese orthography. This is a corpus using a blend of two different languages in a way that does not and cannot produce language fit for communication between a writer and a reader. Such texts are non-linguistic objects if we're being really hard-nosed about language needing to be useful for communication, though it obviously shares a great many features with the texts it is transliterated from.
To that last point, I would not be surprised if careful research accounting for this showed that both the hapax share and the order share were roughly in line with Mandarin texts in either orthography (which are perfectly comprehensible when spoken) or Classical texts using native orthography (which are perfectly legible). StandardYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., so the weirdness may be coming from inside the language, not from the author's analytical choices. I wish the paper was unambiguously showing this was a feature of attested languages, in the plural, because it would be more decisive and my positions here are well known. However, that's not what's published here and not what can be concluded from it.
My only point here being that the authors have analyzed nonsense, not by error but as part of the premises of the COT, and people citing this part of the paper should be aware when talking about it; they have not analyzed any language that any human being could read, and certainly not "Chinese". I do think the authors should be clearer about this---both because its worth describing the object of study unambiguously for its own sake and to head off later misinterpretation---but I don't think it impacts the letter of their conclusions as laid out or how they apply to Stolfi's arguments on their own terms.
(Should this become heated or extensive, I will move the conversation over to the Chinese thread, but the remark here is obviously and directly about the paper at hand.)
Per Geoffry Sampson:
Quote:Once a spoken language has acquired a written form, the two linguistic systems may evolve independently so that the relationship between written and spoken languages becomes increasingly remote. With Chinese this happened in a way for which I know no parallel: during much of recent history, before the reforms in written usage associated with the May Fourth Movement initiated in 1919, the standard written language of China (wen yan, or literary Chinese) was a language which when read aloud in contemporary pronunciation could not be understood by a hearer, irrespective of how learned he might be, because the spoken equivalent of a written text did not contain sufficient information to determine the identities of the morphemes of which the text was composed. There were two reasons for this. Sound changes during the long period since the creation of the script had removed many phonological contrasts and thus introduced an extremely high incidence of homophony among morphemes;You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and developments in literary usage had created many possibilities of meaningfully combining morphemes in writing in ways that would never have occurred in spoken Chinese at any period of its history, thus reducing the chance of determining the intended morpheme among a set of homophone candidates by reference to its morphemic environment.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. Therefore literary Chinese not merely did only function but could only function as a written and read language, not as a spoken and heard language.This fact plainly extends to transliterations of the same, including Pinyin. Note that the issue is not that such a transliteration is impossible, or even never done, just that there is no audience who can make use of it:
Quote:But any literary Chinese text has a perfectly specific spoken form, composed of morphemes many of which occur in modern spoken Chinese and all of which are etymologically identifiable with morphemes that have occurred in spoken Chinese at some historical period: there is a well-defined way of reading a literary Chinese text aloud (morphemes which are obsolete in spoken Chinese are given the pronunciations that result by applying subsequent sound-laws to the pronunciations the morphemes had when they were current in speech), even if this activity achieves no communicative purpose.
The paper is specifically answering Stolfi, who explicitly believes that such a rendering of specific Classical texts was comprehensible to speakers of descendent languages, so the oddness of the corpus is not only responsive, but more responsive than one that accounts for this or uses a modern Mandarin text. However, we must be cautious describing this as "Chinese" as it is neither Classical nor Mandarin as those two terms are usually understood---and it certainly cannot be said to be every Sinitic language, or worse non-Sinitic languages using Chinese orthography. This is a corpus using a blend of two different languages in a way that does not and cannot produce language fit for communication between a writer and a reader. Such texts are non-linguistic objects if we're being really hard-nosed about language needing to be useful for communication, though it obviously shares a great many features with the texts it is transliterated from.
To that last point, I would not be surprised if careful research accounting for this showed that both the hapax share and the order share were roughly in line with Mandarin texts in either orthography (which are perfectly comprehensible when spoken) or Classical texts using native orthography (which are perfectly legible). StandardYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., so the weirdness may be coming from inside the language, not from the author's analytical choices. I wish the paper was unambiguously showing this was a feature of attested languages, in the plural, because it would be more decisive and my positions here are well known. However, that's not what's published here and not what can be concluded from it.
My only point here being that the authors have analyzed nonsense, not by error but as part of the premises of the COT, and people citing this part of the paper should be aware when talking about it; they have not analyzed any language that any human being could read, and certainly not "Chinese". I do think the authors should be clearer about this---both because its worth describing the object of study unambiguously for its own sake and to head off later misinterpretation---but I don't think it impacts the letter of their conclusions as laid out or how they apply to Stolfi's arguments on their own terms.
(Should this become heated or extensive, I will move the conversation over to the Chinese thread, but the remark here is obviously and directly about the paper at hand.)