Koreans, like many Chinese, have a superstition about the number 4. In Chinese it’s because 四(4) and 死(death) are both pronounced “si”. In Korean, it’s because in Chinese they’re pronounced the same. The Sino-Korean pronunciation of both is 사. In native Korean, 4 is 넷 and “to die” is 죽다, though a Sinitic-root verb also exists, 사망하다. At any rate, anyone I ever asked about this gave the answer that it’s considered unlucky because of how it’s pronounced in Chinese, not in Korean.

As a result of this, and like in China, many Korean elevators lack a 4th floor. Most often it’s replaced with ‘F’ on the button. I don’t think I ever saw a lift that simply skipped 4 as they often* do in China.

Digging through some photos of the past year, I came across one of an elevator panel that I found a little curious. Here’s the photo, scaled down a bit.

For floors 3-5, the buttons read as follows:
3 ⠼⠉
F ⠴⠋
5 ⠼⠑

Note the difference in the first letter in F as compared to 3 and 5. In Korean Braille, ⠼ is the marker to show that the following glyphs are numbers. Also, consistent with many other languages written in Braille, ⠉ is 3 and ⠑ is 5. 4 is actually ⠙ and if it were a number, ⠋ would be 6. But in the second line, ⠋ is preceded by ⠴. That glyph, ⠴, is actually called 영어표. That is, it’s the thing that marks the following letters as English. ⠋ then corresponds to the English letter F.

It baffles me a bit that a superstitious homophone in a foreign language requires a remedy in another foreign language, when they could just write 4 and call it 넷.

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* I once lived in an apartment building that numbered the floors 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 … 11, 12, 15, 16 …, probably to accommodate the triskaidekaphobic foreigners who lived there.

relevant links:
– Site in Korean w/ the full alphabet
– More limited Wikipedia site, but in Engish

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.

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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.

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Yesterday Syz posted about living examples of character simplification. Literally moments before he published the post I sent him a photo I’d just taken outside the immigration office in Seoul:

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Can you call it a secret if everyone knows and no one cares?

Since 2007 I’ve blogged under the pseudonym Syz (the initials of my Chinese name). It started out with the best of paranoid intentions — in the early days I once begged Victor Mair to take down a Language Log reference to my real name, and he was kind enough to indulge me.

After a while, though, the pseudonym became a habit there didn’t seem to be any reason to break. Sure, practically anyone I had an email exchange with quickly learned my real name, but that was all the more reason not to make any big deal of it.

And I’m not trying to make a big deal of it now, it’s just that I want to get it done. Why? The most important reason is that Kellen and I are about to unveil a project we’ve been working on. It will involve a lot of online and offline collaboration and it just makes sense to use real names from the start. I want to get the Real Name Unveiling out of the way beforehand so it doesn’t add any noise to the project launch.

Then the immediate reason is like this: The good Steven Daniels of the Mandarin-learning blog Lingomi included me in an interview series he’s doing. The interview is up now, and in the introduction he mentions my first name… so what the heck, gimme a 干杯: Steve Hansen.

I’ll eventually get around to updating the About pages and so forth, but I’ll continue blogging using Syz here and on Beijing Sounds, just cuz he’s kind of grown on me.

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Update next day, since Claw was bored enough to do the sleuthing to match me to a photo…

Hi!

In the comments of a recent post, the Mandarin phrase “mama huhu 馬馬虎虎” came up. Used by first-year Chinese teachers when telling students how to say “so-so”, it is arguably not used much among actual native speakers.

In my opinion, that’s for good reason. It sounds absurd. It’s not some cool chengyu 成語 idiom with a neat story. It’s not bad ass in any way.

And, it turns out, it’s only just barely Chinese. It’s actually from Manchu lahū meaning unskilled, particularly in terms of hunting. Norman gives the following definition:

1. not adept, unskilled (especially at hunting and dealing with livestock) 2. scoundrel, hoodlum

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Through a family connection* I’m looking for an experienced tutor to teach English to a physician in Beijing near the Xizhimen subway stop. Probably 1-2 hours per week . If you’re interested, please contact me directly (hence closed comments): syz <at> sinoglot <dot> com.

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*I know, I know, this is the second ad in as many weeks. What can I say? In China you do things for people. Trust me, I’m not getting a cut of the salary.

Those of you in the NYC area might want to check out a new play by David Henry Hwang called ‘Chinglish’. Hwang, an American playwright from Los Angeles, should be familiar to you through his 1988 play ‘M. Butterfly’, later made into a film also written by Hwang.

Here’s the first paragraph of a New York Times article on ‘Chinglish’.

Even though much of the dialogue is in Mandarin, non-Chinese speakers should have no difficulty interpreting “Chinglish,” the sporadically funny new play by David Henry Hwang, which opened on Thursday night at the Longacre Theater. That’s not just because of the helpful supertitles — largely translations of mistranslations, in which English is merrily mutilated, and the principal source of this production’s mirth. Mr. Hwang’s comedy, about a bewildered American businessman hoping to make his fortune in capitalist China, is laid out with the frame-by-frame exactness of a comic strip.

Not being in New York, I won’t be going. But I’d be interested to hear from anyone who does see / has seen it. I myself would love to, being otherwise a fan of his.

It’s showing at the Longacre Theater, 220 West 48th Street, Manhattan. Call (212) 239-6200 for tickets.

Through a family connection* I’m looking for an experienced tutor to teach English to a prominent physician in Guangdong. Probably 1-2 hours per week in the Sun Yat-sen University (中山大学) area. If you’re interested, please contact me directly (hence closed comments): syz <at> sinoglot <dot> com.

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*Which is to say, no, we’re not turning Sinoglot into a web-based billboard, at least not until the price is right. Continue…

I’ve recently been reminded of a couple misconceptions about sign language. Many people believe that there is a singular sign language, and that all who sign to communicate are able to understand each other. It’s similar to the idea that all Sinitic languages are written the same (they’re not) and that if only they would write the characters anyone can understand anyone else with 100% efficiency (they can’t). For sign language, it’s actually much worse.

Another common misconception is that sign language is just a 1:1 replacement of spoken words with hand gestures. This is also not true. In fact the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL) differs significantly from that of spoken American English. Oddly, some people have expressed both of these misconceptions, despite being inherently contradictory.

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