Snide comments have a way of getting outed sooner or later. But since a couple of months had passed since I compared Chinese characters to English spelling, neither in very favorable light, I thought I’d gotten away with this one:

I nominate 练 vs 炼 for membership to the Unnecessary Distinction in Hanzi category. Both say liàn and both mean, roughly “exercise” — as in 训练，锻炼.

And I had gotten away with it — until yesterday, when 练 vs 炼 got a public defender who noted* some quite different senses of 练 and 炼. Fair enough, I’m not trying to say there’s no difference. I’m saying that

1. Chinese characters make lots of distinctions in written language that do not exist in spoken language. [This is not remotely controversial]
2. I am claiming that, in many cases, they do this for no good reason [this is sure to be controversial] Continue…

The thick of a game of poker is no time to pull out of the vernacular and use foreign borrowings, so how do Beijingers deal with the Roman letters on a set of poker cards?

I don’t play the game myself, but since it came up in a conversation, here’s one native Mandarin speaker’s version:

It’s not just China that has debated romanization. In a number of other countries and times, romanization has both succeeded and failed. The following bit is from an article by İlker Aytürk called “Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization“. Continue…

Digraphia is DeFrancis’s term, I believe (please correct me if it was coined by someone else). In The Chinese Language he says,

This term is intended to suggest a parallel in writing to Ferguson’s well-known concept of “diglossia” in speech: the use of two related but quite different forms of speech, High and Low, in different situations.

I was struck by the completeness of Serbian digraphia as reported by John Wells, first quoting from Wikipedia:

“Serbian is a rare and excellent example of synchronic digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them.”

and then anecdotally

On the streets of Belgrade some advertisements or names of businesses are in one alphabet, some in the other. The same shop window may display written messages in both. Many road signs show names of destinations in both, first in one and then in the other, thus for example Београд Beograd. Continue…

While killing an afternoon in Henan last week I decided to go with my father to a Daoist temple. The photo below is from the temple, called 中岳庙 / 中嶽廟 (Zhong Yue Miao) and found at the rather wide-reaching foot of Mt. Song 嵩山. Note the five glyphs/characters/symbols at the top.

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On my second-grade daughter’s worksheet the other day.

Is this common in Chinese classes for foreigners? There’s also something like an oral version of this that I’ve heard her playing (with her mother or grandmother) from time to time. If I ever get a good recording I’ll post it.

It’s kind of amusing, but pedagogically it strikes me as a waste: awfully rote compared to much of the stuff they do and are capable of at this age.

If anyone has different versions of this, you can send them to me (bjshengr <at> gmail <dot> com) and I’ll add them to the post.

I’m not really sure how common this otherwise is, but for a while now I’ve been noticing a number of instances of intentional character replacements.

For example, all down the southern part of Hongmei Road 虹梅南路, whose name means “rainbow plum road” but is homophonous with “red plum road”, you’ll find places using the rainbow character in their Chinese name but then translating it as “red” for the English. There’s a housing complex called Red Hill in English but 虹山 in Mandarin.

There are also a number of places in Minhang 闵行 using the character for the Min 闽 nationality/language. A couple months back I bought some fruit at 闽行水果店 on South Lianhua Road 莲花南路, also in Minhang and not too far from Red Hill.

It’s surely a case of the frequency illusion. It’s highly unlikely that this isn’t limited to Minhang, but rather that I just first started to really notice it there.

I’m curious about other examples. If you have any, leave them in comments. I’m also curious as to why this is done, aside from the Chinese love of homophony. I’m having trouble thinking of any similar example in English that wouldn’t be immediately met with an eyeroll.

Just to remind all you northerners, as you stamp the slush off your boots and wait in your traffic jams, that only a few weeks ago, actually prior to the unprophetically-named Spring Festival, you could have stumbled across this in your xiǎo qū (小区 = apartment complex):

For those outside of China, using plain water and a brush to script away the hours is as common a park activity as frisbee in the US. This was my first sighting this year, and I was struck by the clarity and durability of the characters visible even with a cell phone camera and an incompetent photographer. Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t do handwriting unless it’s of the second-grade variety, so I’ll offer Sinoglot subscription extensions to the first commenter to elucidate the text itself.

UPDATE: Prize has been claimed! Thanks, Ahkow, for the text from 千字文, and for the warning that you have to read from left to right.

First, an aside:

It’s bad enough when you catch yourself using the jargon you used to scorn, like in that business meeting where, in the heat of the moment, you come up with, “Right! And there will be great synergy between their brand name and our back-office capabilities.”

Right.

Is the choice of 吗 or 么 — to write Mandarin’s yes-no question particle “ma” — a register issue? Continue…

I’m in the process of typing out a book from the 1930s. Actually I’m in the process of typing from mostly legible copies of a book from the 1930s. I’ve had a few snags in being able to figure out the characters in part due to the bad quality of the copies and in part because I’ve only recently really begun to cram traditional characters into my head.

This isn’t quite the way to do it, I’d imagine.

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