English "words" - 詞,字,單字

[in_lab]

I'm going to be talking about some English grammar points in Chinese. I know what 詞 and 字 mean when describing Chinese, but what do 詞 and 字 mean if you are talking about English? And second, are these words even appropriate, or would it be better to alway use the term 單字 to describe "words" in English? I want to say things like: 你不應該把這兩個單字連在一起.

[shibo77]

Primary school teachers always say 字zi4 and 词ci2 together, but they are not in the same category.

When you are referring to the spoken language or the language in general:

语素 yu3su4 I don't know the English word for it but it would be something of a "morpheme-phoneme combination" (the smallest linguistic unit that means anything, associating semantics "meaning" with phonetics "sound")

单音节语素dan1yin1jie2yu3su4 "monophonemic" (a 语素yu3su4 with a single phoneme, for example: 花hua1 flower)

双音节语素shuang1yin1jie2yu3su4 "diphonemic" (a 语素yu3su4 with a two phonemes, for example: 仿佛fang3fu2 to seem)

多音节语素duo1yin1jie2yu3su4 "polyphonemic" (a 语素yu3su4 with more than two phonemes, for example: 维吾尔wei2wu2er3 Uyghur, 布尔什维克bu4er3shi2wei2ke4 Bolshevik)

词ci2 word (made from 语素yu3su4 the smallest linguistic unit for the formation of a sentence, for example 苹果ping2guo3 apple, because 果guo3 acts as a separate 语素yu3su4 here)

When you are talking about the written script:

字zi4 character (a single logogram), any single logogram, doesn't have to be of any meaning.

For example, "乒乓球ping1pang1qiu2 ping pong" is a "词ci2 word";

"乒乓ping1pang1 ping pong" is a 双音节语素shuang1yin1jie2yu3su4 "diphonemic"语素yu3su4;

"球qiu2 ball" is a 单音节语素dan1yin1jie2yu3su4 "monophonemic"语素yu3su4;

"乒ping1 ping", "乓pang1 pong", "球qiu2 ball" are all single logograms or "字zi4 characters" in the written script. Some like "球qiu2 ball" has a meaning, but others like "乒ping1 ping" has no meaning by itself, nevertheless it is still a "字zi4 character".

I hope this helped...

-Shibo

[in_lab]

Thanks for responding to the question, Shibo. But my question was about describing English words using Chinese, not about describing Chinese words using Chinese. Tomorrow I am going to be going over some English grammar points using Chinese, so the question was about how to describe English words.

[zhwj]

字 is basically undefined as far as the Roman alphabet is concerned - a letter is 字母;English words are 单词 (I believe this is much more common than 单字, and it maintains the same meaning when referring to Chinese "words", whereas 单字 indicates a single character).

You can generally use 词儿 for this, too.

[shibo77]

Sorry, zhwj is correct:

word 單詞(单词) dan1ci2

lettre 字母 zi4mu3

I have rarely heard of 單字dan1zi4 here.

-Shibo

[in_lab]

Thanks again for the replies. I googled 單詞 and a funny thing happened. On the results page, 單字 was highlighted, and nowhere a 單詞! Google.com, in translating the simplified characters to traditional characters also translated 單詞 to 單字. Mainland and Taiwan Chinese seem to be quite different when it comes to grammar terms.