Why Chinese HATES 1 Syllable Words

have you noticed something weird about these chinese words meli yanting maoz meli means beautiful but if you looked up the first character by itself you'll see that it means beautiful and li also means beautiful yanding means i but yen by itself also means i and jin is still i and why would we say malza to mean hat when mo by itself already means hat and literally serves no purpose other than to add another syllable in this three-part series let's find out why chinese seems to hate one-syllable words you're probably familiar with the idea of a compound word it's a word that's created by combining two existing words like airport bookshelf or toothbrush and compound words exist in almost every language including chinese words like meli yanzing and malza are all technically compound words but they are far different from the english idea of a compound word here's why in english the building blocks of a word are letters the letters a and g e l form the word angel but oftentimes there's another layer the letters may first form word roots which alongside prefixes and suffixes then combine to create words take a look at the word audience audi is the word root which in latin means to listen or hear when combined with the suffix e and ce which signifies action or state the word audience is formed which means something like those who are listening now what if we try to create a chinese equivalent of this word it might be something like tingja ting would mean listen and ja means one who is so this word would mean listener so here is the key point i want you to realize did you see what i did just now i just compared a chinese character to a word root and a suffix and this is something a lot of people don't get about chinese what exactly is a chinese word is a character a word it could be but it can also be a word root it can be a prefix a suffix or a particle in some cases it can be all of them the character d means ground and can be used as a prefix in d fung as a suffix in lu d or as a particle in xiaosinda this confusion is further amplified by the fact that many characters have numerous different meanings different pronunciations and even different parts of speech for example rya can mean month or the moon this character can be pronounced zhao in jiaoti or joao and our first example mei can be used as an adjective in meli a noun in maestro or as a verb in zame so the reason chinese hates one-syllable words is because one character by itself can have too many different meanings and uses that often leads to ambiguity in the intended definition or function of that character so adding a second character narrows it down to one specific meaning and gets rid of any ambiguity let's see how this works in real speech if i say ni khan tata yen you might guess that it means look at his eyes but it might also mean look at his expression yan shin look at his eyelash yantia mal or look at his glasses yan zing so while the first sentence is fine in most cases if you want to be clear you're referring to the physical eyes then you might want to say ni kantara yanzing and what about this sentence jaliti but it might mean the air quality here is not great but maybe you're trying to say jalita tiffen butaihau as in the atmosphere here is not great not to mention she as a noun can also refer to anger like in washington i'm angry at him so to make it clear you're talking about the physical air you would say jalira konsi butaihau finally if you want to say you can see the moon from the window you have to say nizontronghu nankanda liang because yuya by itself actually refers to month 99 of the time so as a general rule if a word in chinese has a two character version and a one character version that seemed to mean the same thing the two character version will always sound more specific precise and less vague i just want to briefly talk about words that end in what exactly is the function of this character to be frank i'm almost as confused as you are but i'll try to explain the basics in all these words it seems like there's no loss in meaning if we admit it but they all sound so weird without it there are two explanations the first purpose is that serves to objectify the preceding character shu is a verb meaning to come but shrudz is the physical comb pong is an adjective meaning fat and ponzi means a fat person gai means to cover whereas guides means a lid or a covering the second purpose is it avoids confusion with homophones especially with very common words without the box would sound like hood with quite soon chopsticks would sound like quite fast and might be confused with book here's something else interesting once the words are paired with the prefix that's usually becomes unnecessary for example balls antioxidants are the proper ways to say steamed buns and dumplings but once you add a modifier like zhou bao or schreids yao then it's fine without but at the end of the day there are still a lot of chinese characters that are perfectly comfortable by themselves perhaps it's because these characters don't have any homophones to confuse with or don't have multiple definitions but for a language that's evolved over thousands of years it's really hard to say still i hope this video was insightful and useful for your learning that's all i have for today bye [Music]

Channel: ABChinese

Views: 295,463

Keywords: what counts as a Chinese word, Chinese grammar, etymology of Chinese, Chinese characters vs words, Asian languages, Chinese homophones

Id: Iro19GB6fH8

Length: 6min 1sec (361 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021