Compounds As Words
An important principle of GR is that syllables which form words should be written together. This strikes speakers of European languages as obvious; but in Chinese the concept of "word" is not easy to pin down. The basic unit of speech is popularly thought to be the monosyllable represented by a character (字 tzyh, zì), which in most cases represents a meaningful syllable or morpheme, a smaller unit than the "linguistic word". Characters are written and printed with no spaces between words; yet in practice most Chinese words consist of two-syllable compounds, and it was Chao's bold innovation in 1922 to reflect this in GR orthography by grouping the appropriate syllables together into words. This represented a radical departure from hyphenated Wade-Giles forms such as Kuo2-yü3 Lo2-ma3-tzŭ4 (the Wade spelling of GR). This principle, illustrated in the extract below, was later adopted in Pinyin.
Read more about this topic: Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Famous quotes containing the words compounds and/or words:
“We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in terms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that’s the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.”
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)