In 2016, my university's Health, Safety, and Environment Office held a "Safety Week", and they invited students
and faculty to design a slogan for Safety Week (with a HK$3000 prize for the person whose slogan was selected!).
Below is the announcement they sent for this slogan competition:
Slogan Competition
To submit a slogan in English with not more than 10 words (and/or in Chinese with not more than 20 words) and be consistent with the theme of Safety Week 2016 - “Health & Safety PolyU Family”. Winning slogan may be displayed on the printing and other communication materials where appropriate for Safety Week 2016 and other activities organized by HSEO.
Why do you think they said English slogans could be up to 10 words and Chinese slogans up to 20 words?
I am 99% sure that what they actually meant was that English slogans should be up to 10 words, and Chinese
slogans should be up to 20 characters (not words!). In Chinese, the concept of "character" (字)
tends to be more salient than the concept of "word" (詞): Chinese speakers have a clear idea of what
is a character and what's not, but sometimes don't have a clear idea of what is a word and what's not.
In fact, even in English, the idea of "word" is not very clear. The simplest definition is that an English
word is written with spaces around it. So, e.g., the sentence "This sentence has five words" has
five words, because you count each thing with a space before or after it as a "word". (This is how Microsoft
Word counts words as well, which you may have noticed if you ever need to write, e.g., a 1000-word English essay.)
But this definition doesn't always work. English has some things like ice cream and hot dog,
which has a space in the middle but most people would consider it to be a single "word". It also has some things
that don't have a space but most people would consider to be two words: meat-eater, or the words
music-loving in a sentence like "She's a music-loving woman." (Again, if you've ever had to
write an English essay with a certain number of words using Microsoft Word, you may have realized that you
can increase or decrease the number of words by using hyphens; e.g., if I need to make the essay longer I
might write native language [which counts as 2 words in Microsoft Word], and if I need to make it
shorter I might write native-language [which counts a 1 word in Microsoft Word].)
For Chinese, it's even more challenging to know what's a word. Think about the examples below. Which ones are
"one word", and which are "more than one word"? What property do you use to decide if something is one word
or multiple words?
- 滅 ("extinguish")
- 滅火 ("extinguish a fire")
- 滅火器 ("fire extinguisher")
- 滅火器箱 ("fire extinguisher box")
- 滅火器箱維修公司 ("fire extinguisher box repair company")
The two papers listed below list some different strategies for determining what's a "word" in Chinese.
Browse either one of them (the first is a bit simpler, the second is a bit more technical). You don't need
to read every word, you just need to figure out the tests/diagnostics that they use. In each article, they
describe a lot of different tests for determining what's a word and not, but they also argue that some of the
tests don't work well; so you might also want to check the conclusion to see which tests are good and which are not.
When you're done, find any Chinese paragraph (from online, from a book, or whatever). Then, break the paragraph
into words.