Is a verb used when assigning an adjective to a noun?

[reed07]

For instance, I want to say that I'm hungry. I have seen this written as "wo e le"; the "wo" meaning "I", the "e" meaning "hungry" and the "le" meaning past tense because I am already hungry. In English, one would say that "I am hungry," which contains the verb, "am." In chinese, am I ever expected to add such a verb, such as "wo shi e le."?

[li3wei1]

First, the 'le' in your sentence does not mean past tense. It can mean a change of situation or status (I have become hungry) or new information for the listener (You didn't know it, but I'm hungry). As discussed elsewhere in this forum, le as you're thinking of it is not really 'past tense' but 'completed action'. The action can be in the present or future.

And for your original question, no, you don't need a verb. 'e' itself is what's called an 'adjectival verb', which you can think of as an adjective that's behaving like a verb. English and Chinese grammar are different, so there will often be words in one language that are not needed in the other.

[Demonic_Duck]

I think most (or at least a large proportion) of adjectives in Chinese can function as adjectival verbs (things like colours are an exception). 饿 isn't an unusual case by any means.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I wonder if it would be technically correct to say that, on beginner's level, you need shì only to connect two Nouns. Like "She is a teacher/an Indonesian person/a female person".

When you advance, you need shì of course to form more complex sentences. But would my sentence above be correct for beginner's Mandarin?

[Demonic_Duck]

I would say "是的", "是啊", "是吗？" etc. are fairly beginner-level. You can also have 这辆车是蓝色的, etc.

[Guest realmayo]

I think most (or at least a large proportion) of adjectives in Chinese can function as adjectival verbs

If you look at it another way, you could say that Chinese doesn't actually have as many "pure" adjectives as English does.

Instead it has lots of verbs which are "stative verbs", i.e. they describe a state. Translated to English, it can help to insert a silent "is" before it.

So: "the is big dog is running towards me"; "the is blue flowers is [are] beautiful."

And I is [am] hungry.

That way rather than seeing certain sentences that just seem to have a string of nouns and adjectives and no verb to tie them all together, you start seeing there are actually enough verbs in there doing their thing.

[li3wei1]

I think trying to describe Chinese grammar using concepts like noun, verb, adjective, etc., is like describing the anatomy of an animal using terms from botany. Apparently the first Mandarin grammar book was published in the 1960s or something, and was heavily influenced by European grammars. Someday, someone will figure out a way to explain Chinese grammar from the bottom up, without leaning on foreign grammatical concepts.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I couldn't agree more, li3wei1

I'm looking forward to something like this happening

[Guest realmayo]

Well it wouldn't be much help to beginners.

What is this word doing?

Oh, that's a "wetheiwt".

What are "wethewts"?

Well, they're like verbs which describe a state, and often behave similar to adjectives in English.

No no, don't use terms from European grammar!

Sorry, I meant to say they're ewrews which describe a fewthewoutw.

[Demonic_Duck]

What's wrong with "noun", "verb", "adjective"? Oftentimes, a word is clearly being used as one or the other, and when it's not, you can resort to other terms such as "stative verb" etc. For instance, in my opinion (contrary to what realmayo said), the 大 in 这只大狗 is an adjective. The 大 in 这只够很大 is a stative/adjectival verb.

[li3wei1]

They've worked for the last fifty-odd years, but they need qualifying (stative verbs, adjectival verbs, etc.) and they create expectations in the minds of learners from European backgrounds. In English, I can say that every sentence needs a verb (I know there are exceptions), and they're easy to spot. In Chinese, this leads to beginners making the mistake the OP makes, putting 是 into a sentence with an adjectival verb. I'm sure there are other examples. We even have trouble with the word 'word'.

When a child is learning English grammar, you can explain what nouns, verbs, and adjectives are very easily. If a Chinese speaker who had no experience of European languages (or Chinese grammars based on them) tried to explain how his language worked, how would he go about it? What categories would define? Would he even use 'parts of speech', 'words', or would something else make more sense?

[Guest realmayo]

Hmm Demonic-Duck, I kind of agree but when you say "a word is being used as" something, I think that is li3wei1's point, that you then risk substituting a Chinese-grammar concept with a foreign one. Like, 'here chopsticks are being used as a fork'. And 'here they're being used as a knife'. But especially if the person using them has never even seen European cutlery, it sounds wrong. Maybe better to say here he's spearing the food with his chopsticks, here he's cutting with them, most of the time he just uses them normally. Therefore 这只大狗 has 大 as a stative verb in kind of a sub-clause?

I don't know, it all gets quite existential after a while. And any time I look at wikipedia it seems linguists have changed definitions and descriptions of how English works since I last looked, so clearly none of these things are perfect. Perhaps you just pick the convention that is easiest to grasp for the person at that level.The stuff I learned in a physics classroom at age 15 would have been contradicted by what I would have been taught at age 20 if I had kept on studying ... but it's unlikely 15-year olds are going to grasp quantum physics without knowing the basic, later-to-be-contradicted stuff first.

[Demonic_Duck]

I mean "is being used as" in the sense that, for instance, the English word "love" can be used as a verb or a noun (verb: "I love him", noun: "love is just a feeling"). Same word being used as a different part of speech.

[Ruben von Zwack]

You could also say, love as a verb and as a noun exist idependently of each other, but happen to have the same form in present-day English

[Guest realmayo]

Yes, thinking about it maybe: try to gauge how different the two "loves" feel to an English speaker, or how different the two "-ings" are in "I was running towards the shooting".

And then ask if a Chinese speaker reckons there's the same level of difference between 红 and 美 in, say, 红花真美. Could you easily switch the two?

[Demonic_Duck]

Well, I would say 美 can be either an adjective or a stative verb, whilst 红 can be either an adjective or a verb (in the sense "to turn red", as in 脸红了). You couldn't say 美花真红, at any rate, it would have to be 美花是红的.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Now you're making fun of me. The two "-ing" are clearly the same

[Demonic_Duck]

Oh, I guess I didn't read the post properly (sorry). I'm not quite sure what point you're making realmayo. Sure, "running" and "shooting" in the first sentence are different parts of speech, as are 红 and 美 in the second. No problem with that.

[Guest realmayo]

I'm just wondering whether the difference felt by a Chinese speaker for the Chinese words is weaker than that felt by an English speaker between the English words. It's probably unanswerable, here at least. But if the boundaries were weaker and more fluid, then I'd see less necessity about saying "this is a stative verb in this sentence but an adjective in the other" because it would be irrelevant, the word would be treated the same and using the word "adjective" would mean no more than "it is describing a state" which is, well, what a stative verb is.

[li3wei1]

Which is why I wonder if this ideal Chinese grammar would necessarily involve the concept of 'parts of speech' as we understand them - clear functions easily differentiated from each other. Sometimes I find Chinese sentences where there's a word whose part of speech is not clear, but the meaning it contributes to the sentence is. I think Gary Snyder or Ezra Pound or someone once described Chinese as a language where everything was a verb, or something (it was a long time ago).