Sitting in my office, I overheard this comment from an undergrad walking down the hallway:
"There are many more syllables than you think in every Asian word."
Dear readers who speak "Asian", any thoughts on this?
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3 comments:
I am confused. I don't know where to begin.
That sounds about right.
I was under the impression that words in the Chinese language were made up of two syllables, and the intonation of the syllables gave the word its meaning.
A funny story I heard a long time ago was a Chinese-Canadian girl who returned home (Vancouver?) for the holidays and had lost some of her Mandarin, and so inadvertently asked someone to pass "the Indian man" at dinner instead of "salt".
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