A friend asked me a simple question today:

How might I translate incidental vocabulary acquisition and intentional vocabulary acquisition into Chinese?

There are obviously a number of expressions out there, as a quick Google search will confirm, but can anyone suggest a pair of expressions which they feel are either well enough established to exclude other possibilities, or particularly pleasing in their ability to convey the same concept?

This first question raised a couple of others:

1. Are intentional and incidental opposites?
2. Might the expression vocabulary acquisition be translated into Chinese in such a way as to allow modification by a single additional term?
3. How much of our vocabulary acquisition, either mother-tongue or foreign-language, might be incidental?

This final question led to an observation, which might require some modification or qualification:

In a Chinese primary school, every child is required to have a Chinese dictionary on his or her desk: in an English-speaking country, no child at primary school is required to have an English dictionary on his or her desk.

Is this a reasonable claim?

I’m a month late, but I took a month off so I think it’s ok.

On April 1st, the BBC aired their last Mandarin-language broadcast. Their first broadcast in Mandarin was in 1941, which, as the article to which I just linked points out, was before the actual founding of the People’s Republic of China. Personally, I was sorry to hear about the cancellation since I made it a point to include the BBC in my listening practice. From the article:

Shortwave programming in Mandarin is a casualty of spending cuts announced by the BBC World Service in January.

From now on, Mandarin-speakers will be served only by the BBC’s Chinese-language websites; a weekly radio broadcast in Cantonese will continue.

Continue…

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.

Continue…

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…

Ever have one of those days when Chinese characters twist the dagger and shake on salt? In this case the weapon of choice was a sharp chisel:

There I was, in the botanical garden near the beautiful Xiamen offices of Sinoglot, Inc during a pre-Chinese New Year visit. My host, Xiamen head enchilada Randy, was too far down the trail for me to ask, so I was left with only my inflexible brain and its all-too-meager store of Chinese characters, wondering what in the heck 互 was doing on this stone and why it was missing part of its innards.

Naturally, I was completely wrong, as my first available informant laughed and told me. She said it was 工 and this was a common stylized way of stone-carving the character.

Ouch. Not only is 工 (gōng = work) one of the first characters any learner acquires, it was also in a word and context I should have recognized: 竣工, jùngōng, means to “complete work”, and 日期, rìqī, is just “date”. Yet there I was, as dumbfounded as Caesar when he saw Brutus with the dagger*.

Not to worry, though, it was just one little character slip-up, right?

I’m afraid the long-term prospects aren’t any better — no hope of a merciful end to this character assassination business. With thousands of characters making cameos in endless and weird fonts, handwriting, cursives, brush script… there’s only a future that seems closer to, well, slow slicing. In the meantime, if you’ve got an unkind cut story of your own, the sharing might at least be analgesic.

– – –
*Oh yeah, about that post title and theme: Chinese characters as assassins of my limited brainpower? The hyperbole might be indulgent, but at least I didn’t bring up Nazi Germany.

If you’re not up on your eggcorn lit, take a browse through the stacks at Language Log — the eggcorn section is immense. The gist of eggcornism is that a word gets respelled based on an incorrect but plausible analysis of its origins. To quote the founding post:

It’s not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.

It’s not a malapropism, because “egg corn” and “acorn” are really homonyms (at least in casual pronunciation), while pairs like “allegory” for “alligator,” “oracular” for “vernacular” and “fortuitous” for “fortunate” are merely similar in sound (and may also share some aspects of spelling and morphemic content).

It’s not a mondegreen because the mis-construal is not part of a song or poem or similar performance.

In any case, Mandarin is chock full of possible eggcorns, primarily because nearly every possible spoken syllable has more than one (often many) characters that could be used to represent it.

Here’s one my daughter came up with tonight. Instead of writing

向日葵
xiàngrìkuí
“sunflower” or, sort of character-by-character: “facing-sun-plant”

she wrote:

像日葵
xiàngrìkuí
“resembling-sun-plant” Continue…

It’s always good to see that the news business is getting the most out of its content producers.

Here’s an article from a textbook of mine, publishing date 2006:

And here’s the Xinhua article (link) from October 2007:

Continue…

Animal prints are often fun. This sinoglot.com x dress-lace online skater lace dress has a silky feel scuba style with a crew neckline. You will see gentle pleating from the waist that allows this dress to flow when you wear it. It is completed by zip back fastening that ensures the dress fits just right against you. The dress has been made from 96% polyester and 4% elastane. What is really great about the design with this dress is the simple fact that it is always easy to find accessories with the same print. You can wear this dress with flats or with heels and both would look gre

Since Sinoglot is “language in China, eclectically” with all of us here on the group blog doing some language/dialect-specific work on individual blogs, it makes sense to highlight some of what’s going on with those: Recently, we’ve got…

1. The bad-ass Nisan Shaman saving Sergudai Fiyanggo from an untimely death: “May he live until the hair of his head becomes white, until the teeth of his mouth become yellow, until his back bends, until his eyes grow dim, until his legs are frozen in their tracks, and he is urinating on his feet and defecating on his heels!”
2. Singing and Dancing in Wu, for when you need to number one or number two
3. And of course:

Apologies for the terrible state the site is in right now. I had stupidly been hosting the images on another domain, on which the directory holding those images was deleted.

Unfortunately it’s the end of my semester now and I’m quite busy with other things, so it may have to stay this way for a little while.

I’ll try to fix it this weekend, but I can’t promise anything.

Again, apologies.

update:
I’ve put up a quick temporary theme. I’m busier than I’d thought and probably won’t get around to fixing the theme proper for a while.