ИСТИНА

In alphabetic languages with phoneme-based writing system, palindromes are formed by rearranging letters (alphabetic palindromes, e.g., Eng. level, Ital. osso), or whole words (lexical palindromes, e.g., “Darling, my love // Is great, so great; // (...) // Great, so great is // Love, my darling”), demonstrate axial and/or linear symmetry. Since Chinese phonotactic rules do not permit free reverse phoneme order, resyllabification, and the usage of a consonant without reliance on a vowel sound, abilities of Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) in palindrome art are considerably limited. Moreover, Chinese lost over 50% of its syllables in the past 1500 years, and MSM employs a very small inventory of 1,334 syllables (including tonal distinctions), 200 of which are rarely used and probably on the way out (Duanmu 2008). Cfr.: in modern English, there are 15,831 syllables (Barker 2008), i.e., almost 12 times more. The paper aims to analyse morphosyntactic, semantic, and phonological characteristics of word- and phrase-length ambinyms (e.g., 互相 hùxiāng – 相互 xiānghù ‘mutual’) and reversals (e.g., 故事 gùshi ‘story’ – 事故 shìgu ‘accident’), both traditionally referred to as 回文 huíwén. I will argue that prosody not only constrains morphology, causing syntactic resegmentations and keeping the same rhythmic groups in phrase-length palindromes (e.g., 上海自来水来自海上) when reading in reverse direction, but it is also part of morphology, and as such, always operates with the central stressed syllable in both directions, each time subordinating different components. Some palindromes (e.g., 画上荷花和尚画) craftily demonstrate MSM words’ homophony and elasticity. Palindromes are often confused with chiasmus, a version of parallelism, which is either included into the 回文 huíwén category or referred to as 回环 huíhuán and usually translated into English as “regression”. Chiasmic structures occur in tongue twisters, sayings, antithetical couplets, and advertising slogans.