UCSD Cognitive Science Student Association

French is a synthetic language, meaning that it has a high morpheme-per-word ratio, which in normal English means that a single word carries much information. For instance, verbs in French contain much more information than in English. Not only can you see when the action took place (tense), you can also see who did it, because the verb changes according to the subject of the sentence (person). This is true for some English verbs as well, such as “to be”. This means that there is a lot of redundancy in the system, because you don’t actually have to understand both the subject and the verb of a sentence. In English, if you know the verb is “am”, the subject has to be “I”, for instance. Chinese is at the other end of the spectrum. Languages that have a low morpheme-per-word ratio are called isolating languages and Chinese is a very good example of this. In French, we could see who did it and when, in English only when (and sometimes who), but in Chinese we can’t even see if it’s a verb or not! Most of the time, the inflections of words that allow us to see that a word is a verb, noun or adjective simply aren’t there. Boundaries between word classes are not distinct. But how is meaning conveyed in such a language? Through context, mostly, and this is the first key to understanding why reading aloud in Chinese is so hard. The information is there even if you can’t see it directly The fact that we can’t know if 冰 is a noun, verb or adjective simply by looking at the character (compare ice, to ice and icy in English) doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter which one it is. In a specific sentence, it’s usually only one of these, not all three. In order to make sense of a sentence, you still need to figure out what function it has in that context.