Yes as the author pointed out these words may have stared as compounds but they aren't any more. Just because a word started as a compound does not mean it always is one.
That sounds more like philosophy than linguistics. It's the same dadgum word!
What explanation? How does myth and legend change how the words functions?
It changes the way people
perceive those functions, and in language perception is pretty much everything.
When the Chinese "mommies and daddies" teach their children these words they say "these are compounds words, every one can be broken down into single syllables that make distinct sense"? Your literally claiming they say something with no evidence that they do!
I have admitted several times that I am only an amateur in this discipline so my knowledge could be wrong. Nonetheless, the evidence I have was gathered from at least a dozen well-educated native speakers of at least three different Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese and Fujian).
1. Chinese word is not tied to its written form, many of the words even though they may be written with multiple characters can't be divided into individual morphemes per character. Page 13
The Chinese mommies and daddies insist that they can.
2. Mandarin has changed from a monosyllable ancestor, lost syllables created too many homophones, His example: 'yiu' and 'yeuhk' in Cantonese became only 'yao', They had to compound to solve this. Page 14
I'm familiar with this phenomenon. As far as it's been explained to me, the morpheme added for clarity
always has a related meaning, so the compound comes out something like "puppy-dog." After all, these compounds were not fabricated by scholars in a laboratory. They were developed by native speakers, surely different populations coming up with different compounds and one eventually winning out in the usual "marketplace of ideas." There were already accents and dialects, that's where today's incomprehensibly different Chinese languages evolved from. One compound would be a little more obvious and understandable in one region, another in another, and in a third the ambiguity didn't occur so they didn't even feel the need for a compound. I would imagine that the speech of the emperor's capital would usually win out, but not invariably.
3. The compounded word the second syllable's tone may be made neutral thus changing its meaning from its isolated stated. Page xxi
As I noted in an earlier post, in common phrases like "How do you do?" the tones of all but the first word are often flattened because there's enough redundancy to make them unnecessary. The same is true in compounds. Have you ever seen a movie in Chinese? They speak every tone perfectly, because they know that half the people in the audience are not standard-Beijing-dialect Mandarin speakers and need the help. It's a boon for us foreign students to have not only subtitles in English and subtitles in Chinese, but also classroom-prefect pronunciation to help us improve our own.
And they still know the meanings of the individual morphemes.
Ji3 qi4 jiao3 ta4 che1, "gas engine leg pace wagon" --> "motor bicycle" --> "motorcycyle" is always pronounced
ji3 qi0 jiao0 ta0 che0 but everybody knows what the tones are and will automatically pronounce them correctly if you ask them for help with the word.
Every language has a huge amount of redundancy and Chinese is no exception.
3. Polysyllable words like 'chengzi' ("city") using locomotive particles particular for them alone: while monosyllable words may use either form of locomotive particle the polysyllable one must use only one form. Page 392
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the term "locomotive particle" and all Google retrieves are articles about Chinese railroads.
4. Polysyllable words can't undergo reduplication as monosyllable words can, thus the definition of the word is the construct of the two syllables and thus duplicated each syllable would create a new nonsensical word. Page 35
Well duh? I can't come up with any reason why this obvious information might be important. And surely we all know that not
all root words can be duplicated.
5. Suffixes specific to polysyllable words. Page 40
Okay, I'm curious.
6. Poly and monosyllabic synonyms. Page 68-69
Ditto.
Define food? Cause technically we can keep people alive on IV, it not a long happily life, but it is alive.
You're splitting hairs. It's still food! Protein, carbohydrates, fat, vitamins and minerals. BTW they can keep coma patients alive on IV for years, to the point that we have to start facing the question of when to pull the plug. It's recently been discovered that some of them can hear and be trained to respond to yes-or-no questions by activating two widely separated parts of their brain that shows up on a monitor. So in some cases we'll simply be able to ask them. In my case, just assume that the answer is RIGHT NOW!
I can with a magnetic field/lifting wing/thrust defeat and defy gravity creating situations where objects denser then air do not fall down.
Splitting hairs. Gravity pulls down on the coffee cup in my hand, even though my hand stops it from falling. Another "duh" for this one.
Nothing in this universe is certain: the whole universe could in fact be a false construct, a matrix, an illusions made by the gods to shackle us, and all rules of physics and reality that we hold dear could be broken or erased with the twinkle of a deities nose! technical its possible, not really probable or practical, but it is possible and thus there is a degree of uncertain to everything.
Please take your philosophy to the philosophy subforum.
That does not make its so! I could say the name 'butterfly' was created when people tried to eat them in butter, does that make it so?
No, but we actually know that this is not true because we have ancient texts showing that it was more likely named because A) people thought that butter and milk were their favorite foods or B) the particular species in a particular region where the word arose had butter-colored wings. Apparently none of the ancient Chinese texts explain why "thing" is "east-west." Nature abhors a vacuum and so do people, so they made up their own explanation.
As I keep saying, this does not mean that their explanation is
correct, but it absolutely ensures that they continue to
regard it as a compound word.
By the way I asked several Chinese co-workers to break down the Chinese word for butterfly 'hú-dié' and they couldn't: they said it did not make sense broken down, one of them even said that in the past "ancient" Chinese, they had a single syllable word for these things but now they don't. And these guys are laymen speakers that you so cherish as the source of god.
I don't know that word so I've never asked anyone about it. Not all Chinese care about these things. Most of the ones I know are software engineers so they are analytical by nature. When their children ask them why a "thing" is an "east-west," they have to have an answer.
The answer is out there, fanciful though it may be. My guys are interested enough to track it down. Yours are not.
How does that change it back to a compound word? If we were to explain that to a computer could it then compound other words using that one legend?
You're just being snarky. Obviously each legend is developed independently.
Up to 67% of Chinese words are polysyllabic, is there a legend to explain the compounding of EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM???
Huh? The vast majority of them require no explanation, like
Ji3 qi4 jiao3 ta4 che1 for
motorcycle,
dian nao (electric brain) for "computer,"
shi you (stone oil) for "petroleum" (identical to our Latin "petroleum" but as usual with fewer syllables), and
wei qi (surround chess) for "go" (the game). Japanese and Korean go players have looked at the Chinese characters for
wei qi and after a moment said, "Aha, I bet that's the Chinese name for go."
As for the others, every time I ask one of my (analytically oriented software engineer) Chinese friends to explain one, they already have one that they learned as (analytically oriented) little children.
And no, don't give me any assignments. Since I moved to the East Coast all of my project team mates are now Indians instead of Chinese.
Namaste.