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Mar. 15th, 2005 04:09 pm
Musings on men
I can no longer remember what it was that I was looking for that caused me to stumble upon a fascinating article by Robert Iljic on the history and usage of the Standard Chinese particle 們. Now, every book on learning Chinese out there will tell you that this syllable (pronounced men in the "neutral" tone) marks the plurals of the personal pronouns.
Don't believe them.
Rather, don't fall into the trap of believing that the pluralisation of pronouns is qualitatively identical to the pluralisation of nouns. My real duh-moment when reading the article came at this line:
Iljic's central thesis is that once one realises that 們 signals a "personal collective" (derived from 門, originally meaning "gate" and thence, by metonymy, "house, family, clan, sect, disciples"), then there is no mystery why it is required with personal pronouns but used in a restricted and optional way with nouns. The confusion results--as is so often the case--from applying categories derived from certain languages to the description of other, unrelated ones with very different features.
I'm not sure if Chinese is more prone to this pitfall than other languages, but it sure seems that way. One of the causes has to be the absence of a native grammatical tradition. AFAICT, there were simply no native grammars of Literary or spoken Chinese before Westernisation. (One learned the language by emulating the style of the ancient classics, not by memorising rules.) Just as Western languages had merely adopted the terminology and analytical categories of Latin, China did so in turn; it's a burden we've all only recently begun to dig ourselves out from under.
Don't believe them.
Rather, don't fall into the trap of believing that the pluralisation of pronouns is qualitatively identical to the pluralisation of nouns. My real duh-moment when reading the article came at this line:
Benveniste has shown as early as 1946, on the basis of data from Indo-European languages, that the plural of personal pronouns does not amount to a pluralization in the sense of an addition or multiplication of elements, but to what he calls ‘amplification’ of persons--in other words, a collective.That is, we is not a multiplicity of mes--it's a personal collective of which I form a part. Similarly, the so-called "second person plural" does not necessarily represent a multiplicity of addressees. "Are y'all/you guys coming tomorrow?" addressed to a single person is clearly a query about the intentions of various people not present who happen to be associated with the addressee in some way. (Incidentally, as he points out, this helps explain the use of the "royal we", the plural second person for polite address [e.g. French vous], and other apparently illogical behaviour of European pronouns.)
Iljic's central thesis is that once one realises that 們 signals a "personal collective" (derived from 門, originally meaning "gate" and thence, by metonymy, "house, family, clan, sect, disciples"), then there is no mystery why it is required with personal pronouns but used in a restricted and optional way with nouns. The confusion results--as is so often the case--from applying categories derived from certain languages to the description of other, unrelated ones with very different features.
I'm not sure if Chinese is more prone to this pitfall than other languages, but it sure seems that way. One of the causes has to be the absence of a native grammatical tradition. AFAICT, there were simply no native grammars of Literary or spoken Chinese before Westernisation. (One learned the language by emulating the style of the ancient classics, not by memorising rules.) Just as Western languages had merely adopted the terminology and analytical categories of Latin, China did so in turn; it's a burden we've all only recently begun to dig ourselves out from under.