Compound Words Are Clearer (4)

We describe winds as:

Copy from http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/glossary/beaufort.shtml

From table, we may understand how a concept is built from ancient time to now. We take 五级风5-degree-wind as example. From the back, the ancient time described it as “Moderate waves, taking a more pronounced long form; many white horses are formed - a chance of some spray”. And “Small trees in leaf begin to sway; crested wavelets form on inland waters”. Later it shorten to “Fresh winds” when metrology offer a scientific expression as “17-21 knots”, “30 - 39 km/h” but finally we choice the expression as五级风5-degree-wind. Perhaps in the normal conversation, we only want to know the wind weaker than 6-degree-wind and stronger than 4-degree-wind. May be we don’t familiar with a range as 30-39km/h, for our mind is easy to focus on a point not a range, beside the oral expression is too long.

Also the rain and snow can do the same thing. The main idea was a concept at the beginning it could be described by a sentence. We knew it by this sentence, and remembered it by a word which was the label of this sentence. Later we found that we could use two or three key words to represent the sentence. We called it as compound word. If we could, we would like to combine this compound word by a number. With a number we can compare with smaller and greater numbers, with an adjective we can compare with all the rest adjectives. Another benefit of Chinese character is that they don’t have the lexical category, or we may say, every character can be either noun or adjective, either verb or adverb etc. only the position tell us what they are. We will talk this later.