C versus JK
There are many pitfalls that await a learner of Chinese, if that learner also speaks Japanese or Korean. The reverse is also true. One of those pitfalls has to do with two-character compounds. There are several dozen two-character words in Chinese XY which are present in Japanese (or Korean) as YX. Off the top of my head:
| Japanese | Chinese | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 制限 sei gen | 限制 xian4 zhi4 | restriction, limit |
| 平和 hei wa | 和平 he2 ping2 | peace |
| 紹介 syou kai | 介紹 jie4 shao4 | introduction |
| 言語 gen go | 語言 yu3 yan2 | language |
I used to have access to a book that contained a page’s worth of such compounds, but at the moment I don’t even remember what it was called, or if a copy of it is housed in my local library. I’m also not exactly sure why these reversals took place. As far as I can tell, Korean and Japanese share the same order, and some comments I found on various forums seemed to indicate that Vietnamese has the same order as Chinese, at least for some words (like ‘peace’). There are also no cases I’m aware of where the pronunciation doesn’t match the orthography, e.g., writing the compound XY but pronouncing it YX. That would be interesting, though.
That reminds me of a review I recently read of the CGEL in Language (80:1), by Peter Cullicover:
Accepting for the moment that what CGEL says about some phenomenon is all that there is to say, it is somewhat puzzling that as scientists we would have a serious notion of what would be more interesting than the truth. For instance, it would definitely be more interesting to discover that the moon is made almost entirely of green cheese than that it is made of rock and dust, especially given that it looks like it is made of rocks and dust, and the samples that have been brought back are—rocks and dust! It would be more interesting to learn that pigs cannot fly because their wings are made of an invisible substance that is too insubstantial to support their weight, rather than that they simply lack the anatomical and physiological wherewithal in the first place. It would be far more interesting to discover that chimps appear to lack human language because their religious beliefs prohibit the expression of personal thoughts (as opposed to feelings) to other creatures, rather than whatever the true answer is, which is probably some mundane story about neural organization, computational capacity, conceptual structure, and the like. But granting that the less interesting explanations are the right ones, scientists do not give up the good fight and turn to other pursuits. Why should linguists?
I was disappointed that the possibility of data fabrication was not brought up. Surely it would help increase young people’s interest in science if the scientific world engaged on a crusade to find pigs’ invisible wings.