I’m cooking a lot these days. A lot. Like 小笼包 from scratch including gelatinising homemade broth and rolling out dumpling skins. Leaving no stone unturned in the world that is Chinese cuisine, I went ahead and picked up a moon cake (月饼 yuèbǐng) mould. It’s only just now 春节 so I figure I have 7 or 8 months to get really good at this.
The American Anthropology Association’s newsletter Anthropology News has a recent post called A Fork in the Chinese Road: Educating Τіbеtans in Τіbеtan?
It’s actually a shortened version of a post from the website of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology, found here.
Either is worth a read if you’ve any interest in bi-lingual education in China, minority language rights, and possible changes in those areas of Chinese governance.
While in Taiwan last August, I stocked up on some Mandarin reading material. In Seoul, you can buy books in Chinese, but a 3元 ($0.47) paperback will have been marked up to ₩20,000 ($17.42) by the time it hits the shelves at the local Kyobo. I just can’t bring myself to spend $18 on a book that screams 50¢ on the cover.
When I was about to hit Post on the first ”found characters” piece the other day, I could still hear that nagging voice: “Dude, you never write things clearly the first time. Just wait. Post it tomorrow.”
From the email, it appears I shoulda listened. I got some interesting photos, but only one example of what I had in mind. So now, belatedly, here’s my attempt at a definition:
Found Character: Something that can be recognized as a Chinese character but is accidentally such. That is, it is either made by nature or made by a person who had no intent of communicating with hanzi.
For what it’s worth, Found Character is a play on Found Art – not that I’m trying to compare hanzi to urinals… Continue reading
You’ll excuse the artist for hooking his 小 the wrong direction, since he’s a bit of a birdbrain.
Still, I liked the style, and the medium, since that’s about the best thing one could do with Beijing’s eighth-inch of dust-dry snow.
Does anyone know if “found characters” have a formal name? I’m sure there’s some internet hound who’s collected ten thousand, but I don’t know how I’d search for them. Continue reading
[No, not an invitation to be rude in the comments]
Out of the hot and heavy discussion of whether “catty” is a good translation of 斤 (jīn, which means half a kilogram), from the post a couple of days ago, talk in the Sinoglot lounge took a turn towards defining a whole category of catty words. To paraphrase Sima:
A “catty” word would be an English translation of a term that is in everyday use in China. In order to qualify as “catty”, though, the English word must be one so obscure that virtually no significantly-sized group of native speakers has heard of it.
The lounge consensus is that there has to be a lot of these words. An example that might qualify comes from a discussion long ago on Beijing Sounds: 莴笋 (wōsǔn). This is a common vegetable in China (Google images). It’s English name in the ABC Dictionary is “asparagus lettuce”, but it also appears to have been given a portmanteau of its own: “celtuce” from celery + lettuce.
Now it may be that there’s some large region of English speakers that does eat large quantities of celtuce and calls it such, which I guess would disqualify it as a catty word. But around the lounge, there’s no doubt that vegetables in general will be a productive category for catty words, along with fruits, various food products, and measurements.
Got a candidate for catty word of the year? Put it in the comments. (This is one of those moments it would be cool to have a Quora-like comment rating system…)
Winner of the contest is sure to receive free drinks of choice, served around the Sinoglot lounge pool table…
Honorable mention will go to the individual who can find the catty word for 白酒 that Sima is convinced he once saw but cannot now recollect.
——–
PS: This contest leaves behind the very intense debate (still in progress on the original catty post) over whether catty terms should be used in translations or not. Personally, I lean to the “not” side most of the time but can see arguments for including them in some instances.
I’m all in favor of using study of a non-native language to learn more about one’s native language. And it’s mildly interesting to learn, as I go through the “Pronouns, Pronominals and Pro-words” section of my new Chinese grammar book, that a catty is (OED)
A weight used in China and the Eastern Archipelago, equal to 16 taels, i.e. 11/ 3 lb. avoird., or 625 grammes.
But what possesses the writer(s) of a Chinese grammar to use catty as a translation for 斤 (jīn = 0.5kg, so 1.1 pounds)? It’s not as if 斤 is only found in ancient alchemist recipes. You buy pork belly by the jin for crying out loud! Continue reading
I’m in an airplane right now, flying over Lake Tahoe. I was thinking how it was kinda funny because “Tahoe” sounds kinda like 大湖. Then the pilot came on and told us that “Tahoe” was the Washo name meaning, yep, big lake. Ok so to be fair in Washo it’s actually pronounced /dáʔaw/, which is not so like 大湖 after all. But I thought it was an interesting coincidence all the same.
That and I wanted to brag that I’m online while flying in an airplane. It’s a first for me. I’ve published Sinoglot posts from moving public busses before, but never from moving commercial airliners.
I just got back from a nice rainforest hiking trip with my kids in Wuzhishan, Hanian. We managed to hike up to the first peak and even got back down before eleven o’clock at night! The locals were very impressed that an eight- and a ten-year old could make it up there (and after sundown, they were kindhearted enough to call every 30 minutes to see if we were still alive).
When we were on the bus on the way to Wuzhishan City, the 车长 (bus stewardess?) looked at my kids and asked me “Tāmen dǒng tīng hànyǔ ma?” Continue reading
The measure word for smells….