On a recent trip to Sinoglot HQ, for my annual review, I was appalled to find the chairman sitting on a large sack of unopened mail. After brief negotiation, during which my past year’s productivity was called into question, it was agreed that I would work my way through the letters. The following item was undated and I’m not sure how to respond.
Dear Auntie Sinoglot,
I write in the hope that you can help me.
I’ve developed an irrational hatred of helicopters. Continue reading
We’ve all heard that in 2010 China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (中华人民共和国新闻出版总署) started worrying about the purity of “Chinese” and asked the press to rid themselves of the unseemly habit of using English names and abbreviations in their reports. See, for example, this BBC report from December.
But if school gate conversations* are to be believed, there’s a new front in the Chinese purity movement. A fellow parent at my daughter’s Beijing grade school reports that the standard old names in her apartment complex — A座, B座 (i.e. Building A, Building B) — are getting changed. Why? She claims the regulatory authorities are requiring it. No more “English” letters to be used in the naming of buildings, they say. She also says it’s not just her apartment — that she’s heard from friends of this happening elsewhere in Beijing.
I don’t read much news at all, let alone local Beijing news. Has anyone else come across this?
[Update -- don't miss the links in jdmartinsen's first comment below. They include the proposed regulations and some newspaper articles about them]
During the conversation, thinking of Kellen’s ordered lists post, I asked her, “So what are they replacing it with? Is it 甲，乙?”
Alas, nothing so interesting. She says they now have 东南西北 (east, south, west, north) and some directions in between.
——–
*It’s taken me two years of participation in the daily school-gate-pickup circus — complete with double parked gridlock, shady sausage vendors, and heartfelt reunions at the emotional level of “hostages released after days in captivity” — to be able to find my own equanimity, groove to the cacophony, and just chat obliviously with fellow parents.
.
*Seriously, I measure in right at six feet, but next to John I feel like I lost my lifts.
It’s really about race, not nationality and not foreignness. I joked with my friends back in China that if I were ever abroad and encountered a Chinese person, I’d be sure to call them 老外 laowai. It was only ever a joke, as anyone who knows me knows I detest the word and all it carries with it. In the derogatory-vs-not argument among expats in China, I was always squarely with the former.
In a recent conversation with a Northeasterner I made a similar joke about how now they were the laowai. With clear certainty in their expression they told me matter-of-factly that no, in fact they were not a laowai, and that it was still me.
The author is a postgrad in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia. He received a “2nd Class Prize” in the 2010 Chinese Bridge, a worldwide Mandarin speaking competition heavily rigged in his favour. He is also an occasional contributor at Danwei.org
As Sima and Syz’s recent pieces have noted, written Chinese is a wonderfully compact language. Indeed, as the huge wave of microblogging (微博/wēibó) swelling in China reminds us, you can say much more in 140 Chinese characters than 140 letters.
But how compact is spoken Chinese?
There’s a post on ‘Baidu Knows’ titled, “Do foreigners speak English at the same speed we speak Chinese?”. The “Best Answer” goes as follows:
Some wandering around led me back to an old Language Log post that mentioned a site that shows a state by state comparison of English search terms. It turns out that it does it for Chinese province by province too! Continue reading
Sinoglot is getting another facelift. More on that later.
One of the things that we’re going to great pains to ensure is cross-everything compatibility. Unless you use Opera. More on that later too.
Part of this cross-browser, cross-system, cross-whatever-else compatibility is making sure everything is HTML5, CSS3 compliant. This in turn has had me poring over standards references to find the goodies that would make it all work regardless of the device the person reading the posts (you) was using.
W3C, in a reference dated November 2002 and re-done in 2009, provides a few nice ways to sort numbered lists. These include “cjk-ideographic” (一 二 三 四 五…), “japanese-formal,” “-informal” and a few other names which end up being “壹 貳 參 肆 伍 陸 柒 捌 玖…”. There’s also cjk-earthly-branch (子 丑 寅 卯 辰 巳 午 未 申 酉 戌 亥) and cjk-heavenly-stem (甲 乙 丙 丁 戊 己 庚 辛 壬 癸), which are nice to have.