If you’re on the Chinese mainland and have recently been wishing to visit websites in lands beyond, you’ve no doubt noticed that internet maintenance has slowed many sites to a crawl. No surprise here, we netizens have long grown accustomed to internet maintenance efforts that coincide with important political events, as well as unimportant non-events.

So at present, with 十八大 (the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China) in full swing, it shouldn’t be the least bit surprising that the government has also redoubled efforts on other business, including internet maintenance.

Still, like the Beijing cab driver complaining about traffic, I found myself muttering unharmonious thoughts to a friend when a site didn’t open in timely fashion.

“Have you tried doing a search for 十八大?” Continue…

In Taiwan no less. On the chalkboard he’s written 歺庁 for 餐廳.

Really I should say “Late Round Simplification plus Shinjitai”. It’s worth mentioning that 庁 has widespread use in Japan, which may explain it’s use over 厅 in Taiwan. Normally we’d see 餐厅 in the mainland and 餐廳 in Taiwan (only in most cases for both). Admittedly, 歺庁 looks weird now that I’m seeing it next to 歺厅 but at the time it was written I didn’t even notice.

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m really enjoying seeing all the permutations of hand-written characters that all pass for acceptable here.

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Let’s say you’re a ten-year-old. Your teacher gives you the following Chinese sentence and asks you to fill in the blanks in the English:

这本书很有趣，很多人都从图书馆借阅过。(Zhèi běn shū hěn yǒuqù, hěn duō rén dōu cóng túshūguǎn jiè yuèguo)
The book is ______ interesting _______ many readers have borrowed it from the library

I’ll let you make your guesses before reading on beyond the fold for competing answers from my daughter and her teacher. Continue…

I’m posting this here because we have a few readers who’d really know about this sort of thing, and I’m hoping to pick their brains.

I’m doing a ton of data entry these days for Phonemica. This week that means typing city names all over China.

Here’s the setup:
I’m on a Mac, OS X 10.8, using the default simplified character input method for hanyu pinyin.

So, I type W-U and the first choice is 无. Makes sense because I type that character quite a bit, probably much more than 五.

Normally, I type W-U-X-I and get 无锡, which makes sense as well. It’s a city that speaks Wu and is next to Changzhou with a similar dialect. It’s a city name I type more than most other city names.

Continue…

Note: This is a cross-post from the recently revived Annals of Wu, one of our sister blogs looking at language in the Yangtze Delta. Cross posting will not become habitual. In this case it is to fulfill a specific request. Commends are closed. Please head over to the original post to comment.

Unlike Mandarin or Cantonese, spoken Shanghainese tonality operates as a pitch accent system similar to Korean or Japanese. However this does not mean that syllables in Shanghainese do not have tones. They do exist in the traditional sense, and we’ll address their importance in a moment.

The thing we have to consider when addressing tones is whether we’re going to be looking at them in terms that are simple and easy to understand and thus immediately useful, or in terms that offer a much more comprehensive but less intuitive understanding of the rules that determine how they manifest in the language of native speakers. In this case we’ll do both, starting with a more simple way of thinking about tone in Shanghainese.

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I’ve been shopping. It’s time to replenish the pantry and get the rest of the kitchen as stocked as it can be. I’ve gone to three different supermarkets to find what I need, but not without some difficulties.

Regionalisms often kick my butt. You’d think I’d have my head wrapped around it by now, but unfortunately I can never remember just where on the Mainland it’s ok to call the waitress 小姐 and which place calls a wok 大勺儿. That second one made me look like a complete idiot in Korea a year or so back. I was looking to buy a wok, which I had been taught was a 大勺儿 in Northern regions. Thinking “hey Korea’s in the North”, I went ahead an asked at the local Chinese supermarket. No no, she said, this isn’t a big spoon. It’s a wok (鐵鍋/铁锅). Also, for what it’s worth, the driver (call him 先生, not 司机) of your Taiwanese taxi (计程车, not 出租车) won’t have any clue if you slip up and ask him to take a 大拐 instead of 左转. Then again, no one outside Shanghai would probably understand that anyway.

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We’ve written at length about different stages of character simplification on the mainland. What we haven’t talked about is simplification on Taiwan. It’s definitely around, and chances are in just one day in Taipei you’re bound to see it. Possibly the most common simplification is Taiwan itself, able to be written 臺灣 but in reality it usually appears as 台灣. Not too long ago, Taiwan Beer began using a logo with full simplification, 台湾啤酒. Not everyone was thrilled. The company’s explanation was that it’s not simplified, it’s just a logo. Indeed other companies use the 湾 form in their logos, Taiwan Mobile 台湾大哥大 being one of them. Note that on the site itself, when text is used, the name of the company is 台灣大哥大.

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YR Chao (赵元任) is my hero. Aside from being a self-described 常州人 and really getting the ball rolling on modern Sinitic linguistics, we share a university in our academic progession, down to the same department even. I’ve been slowly following him around Asia, though admittedly not in the proper order.

Ironically, the university was originally set up with money the Unites States gave back after the Boxer Rebellion in order to help Chinese students prepare for going to universities in the United States. More reversal. While in Taiwan to visit the school, I saw this:

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in March of 2010 I wrote about a form of character substitution I’d seen around Minhang in Shanghai. On Hongmei Nan Lu 虹梅南路 there is a residential community called Red Hill in English but 虹山 in Mandarin. Minhang, written 闵行, often has the name written 闽行 in store names, such as 闽行水果店.

I just saw another example of this, though in this case in Taiwan. A store, either for baked goods or women’s clothing (jet lag prevented me from remembering which) is called “Field of Love” in English. The Chinese name: 艾之天. It was a manufactured sign, and the owner probably went in and bought each character separately (之 being rendered in grass script), so it seems unlikely that laziness was the reason. Being used to some people getting bent out of shape that 愛 is simplified sans-心, it seems too sacred to chop down into 艾.

Some possible reasons were given in the comments of the original post. Now two and a half years later and seeing this again, perhaps someone has other examples to share.