Difference between revisions of "Latin and Mandarin Chinese"

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One case of one-to-many mapping between Chinese and Latin has to do with the preposition 在. This is a general locative preposition in Chinese, and it can be used to mean anything from 'in' to 'above' to 'outside' to 'to in front of' to 'west of.' Usually, the object of 在 is either a place word (such as 'China' or 'the library') or a word that means 'in', 'above', etc. which is then modified by a noun, resulting in a phrase sort of equivalent to "在 the inside of the box" or "在 the top of the table." In contrast, Latin has many different prepositions which specify different locational relationships to the object of the preposition, much like English.
 
One case of one-to-many mapping between Chinese and Latin has to do with the preposition 在. This is a general locative preposition in Chinese, and it can be used to mean anything from 'in' to 'above' to 'outside' to 'to in front of' to 'west of.' Usually, the object of 在 is either a place word (such as 'China' or 'the library') or a word that means 'in', 'above', etc. which is then modified by a noun, resulting in a phrase sort of equivalent to "在 the inside of the box" or "在 the top of the table." In contrast, Latin has many different prepositions which specify different locational relationships to the object of the preposition, much like English.
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Another case has to do with pronouns; each Latin pronoun has many different forms for different cases. In contrast, in Chinese each pronoun has at most two different forms: one singular and one plural.
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It's a bit more difficult to find one-to-many mappings from Latin to Chinese due to the nature of the beast. However, note that Chinese is a classifier language, meaning that you need a classifier or measure word in order to couple a noun with a numeral or determiner. Different nouns can have different measure words depending on the shape of the object they represent, among other factors. This is different from Latin, in which you don't have to worry about all of these different measure words when pairing a noun with a numeral; you just have to make sure the numeral agrees with the noun in terms of gender, number, and case.
  
 
[[Category:Sp18_TranslationPairs]]
 
[[Category:Sp18_TranslationPairs]]

Revision as of 23:31, 30 March 2018

Resources for machine translation between Latin and Mandarin Chinese

Machine Translator

Parallel Corpus

Contrastive Grammar

Lexical Selection

One case of one-to-many mapping between Chinese and Latin has to do with the preposition 在. This is a general locative preposition in Chinese, and it can be used to mean anything from 'in' to 'above' to 'outside' to 'to in front of' to 'west of.' Usually, the object of 在 is either a place word (such as 'China' or 'the library') or a word that means 'in', 'above', etc. which is then modified by a noun, resulting in a phrase sort of equivalent to "在 the inside of the box" or "在 the top of the table." In contrast, Latin has many different prepositions which specify different locational relationships to the object of the preposition, much like English.

Another case has to do with pronouns; each Latin pronoun has many different forms for different cases. In contrast, in Chinese each pronoun has at most two different forms: one singular and one plural.

It's a bit more difficult to find one-to-many mappings from Latin to Chinese due to the nature of the beast. However, note that Chinese is a classifier language, meaning that you need a classifier or measure word in order to couple a noun with a numeral or determiner. Different nouns can have different measure words depending on the shape of the object they represent, among other factors. This is different from Latin, in which you don't have to worry about all of these different measure words when pairing a noun with a numeral; you just have to make sure the numeral agrees with the noun in terms of gender, number, and case.