Structure and Coinage of Taiwanese Nouns

• Main Authors: Lim Tsiog.iong, 林足勇
• Other Authors: Ching-ching Lu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/08615118832706419196

碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 87 === 1) . Each language should and must have its own ability to produce new words. In Taiwan, however, since Mandarin is the dominant language, it takes almost all the privilege of the naming system. Other languages are forced to follow Mandarin's steps. Take Taiwanese as an example, it yields two phenomena---one is following Mandarin's pronunciation, such as 長頸鹿 'giraffe', 巫婆 'witch' and 企鵝 'penguin', the other is translating directly from Mandarin's characters, such as tidsingki 'helicopter', loogto 'camel駱駝' and kunkam 'warship 軍艦'. But the words following Mandarin's pronunciations are definitely not Taiwanese words, they are just Mandarin ones. The words translated directly from Mandarin's characters might be alright, but only if they obey the Taiwanese morphological rules. The more the loan words are, the less energetic a language will be. Loan words no doubt can be a way to enlarge the lexicon, but if a language depends too much on loan words or just let it be the only way of word formation, or even let the loan words replace the native ones, then it signifies something bad is happening --- this language is dying. 2) . To derive new nouns in accordance with the Taiwanese morphological rules, I go to the mountainous countryside 甲仙 'Kasian' to collect the related data from the elders there. This is the data of so called the purely native level (純本土層) and hence our discussions all focus on this level. From analyzing the data, we finally have the Simplification Rule, Categorization Rule and 22 subcategories of Taiwanese compound nouns. With these in mind, we try to generate hundreds of Taiwanese new nouns at the end of our study, such as a.u狗 'wolf (狼)', 屎尿缸-a 'toilet (馬桶)', muaxiu-a鴨 'penguin (企鵝)', 坐掃帚-e 'witch (巫婆)', 黑目k'oo-a 'panda (貓熊)', 捲螺-a冰 'ice cream cone (蛋捲冰淇淋)', un龜路'short viaduct (陸橋)', xaiN頭手-e 'concert conductor (樂團指揮)' and so on. 3) . In the thesis, we also present new viewpoints on some linguistic terms. First, affixes sound short and soft and most of the suffixes follow their preceding tones. For instance, the suffix' tones in Taiwanese a-公-a, a-嬤-a, a-秀-a, a-叔-a, a-姨-a, a-舅-a, a-葉-a or in Chinese 花兒, 蝴蝶兒, 鳥兒, 話兒 are different from one another. Second, there is an effective way to differentiate compound nouns from noun phrases. That is, a noun phrase consists of a phrase marker "-e" or conjunction "ka?", but a compound noun does not have either of them. For instance, 紅-e 花 is a noun phrase while the simplified form 紅花 is a compound noun. 老父 ka? 子 is a noun phrase while the simplified form 父-a-子 is a compound noun. Third, each compound noun theoretically can be reversed back to its noun phrase. Consequently, we find out except the N conj N category, all of the other compound nouns are heading on the right-hand visible or invisible noun. 4) . Since each language originally has its own morphological rules to coin new lexicons, we suggest that the permanent official naming institutes should be immediately set up. They should include the Taiwanese Naming Institute, Hakka Naming Institute, Amis Naming Institute, Bunun Naming Institute, Tajan Naming Institute … and so on. And to save effectively the native languages in Taiwan, we firmly believe that only the Monolingual Education, never the Bilingual Education, can accomplish the mission faithfully and thoroughly.