Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
As I've opined elsewhere, 的, de, is one of a bare handful of morphemes that can't easily fit into my paradigm of Chinese grammar as having only two parts of speech: nouns and verbs. As illustrated in your example, its purpose is strictly to eliminate ambiguity and help parse sentences. It is a particle with a virtually null definition, meaning only, "there is a relationship between what is described by the preceeding group of morphemes and what is described by the following group of morphemes, and the groups are separated at this particular point."女朋友 (nǔ péngyou) = girlfriend in the American sense. A male has a sexual/loving relationship with their 女朋友.
女的朋友 (nǔ de péngyou) = female friend. Simply a friend that happens to be female.
The 的 has to be emphasized when talking about a "female friend". 的 is a particle that usually connects nouns and their adjectives when the adjectives are >2 syllables. They break this rule in order to force the distinction between a "girlfriend" and a "female friend." It is required even though the adjective is just the one syllable 女 (female/woman).
One might also say ni de gou for "your dog" (sorry I don't have the Chinese character set on this computer and in any case my written vocabulary is tiny). In writing the de might not be strictly necessary because the characters would specify which of the many morphemes pronounced ni and gou are intended, to avoid confusion with a compound word ni gou built up from homophones that would be indistinguishable in speech. (I'm making up this example so perhaps there is no ambiguity in this particular case but in general it can be a major problem.)
We're not quite so far along in the USA but still the ambiguity exists. I would say that the primary meaning of "partner" is still an artistic, business, sports, etc., relationship. But the other meaning, "domestic partner," is gaining ground. When someone refers to another person as his/her partner, we have to spend a split second deciding from context which meaning is intended.actually i got into a really confusing conversation because of the word "partner". Partner in Australia is used to refer to a defacto however the word is still used in the emergency service type fields to refer to your crew (ie in a 2 person crew they are your partner). So anyway i was having a chat to someone and the story i was telling involved both my sexual partner and my proffessional one which left it highly confusing to me telling the story let alone the person i was talking to
Coincidentally just yesterday I made that mistake when a friend recounted an acceptance speech he heard a colleague make at an award ceremony. At the ceremony he had enough context to understand that the fellow was talking about his domestic partner. But out of context, unacquainted with the business of the organization dispensing the awards, I assumed it meant "business partner" and I asked a lot of questions that puzzled my friend until he realized the source of my confusion.
Many years ago the U.S. Census Bureau used the tongue twister "Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters" to establish a new census category for unmarried domestic partners. (Of course gays were still in the bueaucratic closet back then.) Since the citizenry was struggling to come up with a word for that relationship, a newspaper columnist suggested that we simply turn that into the acronym posslq, pronounced POSS-'l-cue. It never caught on but it could have easily been extended to mean "person of either sex..."