Compound Words Are Clearer (1)

We have talked young, female and male of animals, it told us that the Chinese language  had designed different shapes for each of them, so we may say the Chinese vocabulary is much large than English vocabulary. The English vocabulary has over one million words already, how big the Chinese vocabulary could be? Yet every Chinese speaker can master the whole vocabulary very well, for they are compound words.

Beside these, there are collective noun, collateral adjective and culinary noun for meat. I can’t list all of them here, on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animal_names you may find those nouns for 228 animals. So you have to learn all of them before you can understand and use them, but in Chinese things are very simple, you just put a character 群 （group）after the animal’s name for their collective noun. Put 的 after the animal’s name means their adjective. Put 肉 after the animal’s name means their meat. Some special word can shift to special compound word in Chinese such as myrmecina切叶蚁 cut-leaf-ant.

We may find plenty other names if using compound words would be clearer. In the following table, you may notice, the word cattle-milk is funny; but the Chinese regards that bull can’t offer milk, so they use the neutral word as cattle instead cow:

Put the character in first column after each character of the first row will be the necessary compound word such as 猪奶=sow’s milk, 羊奶= ewe’s milk etc. There is a question for English word, that why the cow’s milk don’t need indicated the ‘cow’? The other milk had to put on the animal’s name in front? This tradition changed the meaning of milk.