Regardless of your Mandarin level, inevitably you find yourself approached by a good friend to help “fix up” a translation from said language into, most often, English.

Do it! Don’t dither on the basis of your lack of familiarity with the terminology of thoracic surgery, with the procedures of analysis, with the conventions of medical journal writing. Dithering is for losers. You don’t think the original (paid) translator dithered, do you? Nah. He took the job and rendered 无皮下捻发感 as “no sense of subcutaneous hair-twirling”, maybe even with a straight face.

You’re not getting paid, and you’re waaaay outside your comfort zone. But at least, as a friend, you can help find a medical translation reference* with something slightly more plausible, say: subcutaneous crepitus.

——–

* Here it is, for the record. To describe the interface as “user-unfriendly” is like describing quantum mechanics as “unintuitive”

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 was recently speaking to a woman (in English, for what it’s worth) about her own language use. She was raised in Northeast China, though in a Korean speaking household. School was in Mandarin until university which was in Mandarin fading to Japanese, thanks to her major.

I usually have great faith in polyglots when it comes to pronunciation, but in this case she kept saying things in a very Korean way. “Sue” would come out ㅅㅠ xioo instead of su as in Suzhou. The su pronunciation was easily enough elicited, but not her default. so i asked her if, when speaking Mandarin, she had a distinctly Korean accent, to which she said yes. I found it a little surprising, but of course if most of the peers of her youth were also primarily Korean speakers, it makes sense.

I’m writing about it now to as the readers if you have had similar experiences with people among the less obviously peripheral minzu.

Have you typically found it to be the case than people of Zhuang, chaoxian or Hui backgrounds have exhibited different accents than their Han peers?

放假了！

In a recent Language Log post, Hanzi Smatter circa 1700, Victor Mair discusses what appear to be fake Chinese characters on a European work of art.  In the comments, he adds a reference to a 1666 encyclopedic Latin work on China:

The great polymath, Athanasius Kircher (1601/1602-1680) had himself never been to China, but had a deep interest in Chinese characters, which are featured prominently in his China Illustrata (images readily available on the Web). Although his depictions of Chinese characters are painstaking, they are often so fantastically elaborated that it is impossible to determine which ones he was trying to represent. Continue…

You could hear the sobs of relief from long-suffering Android users around the world when Mike Love announced yesterday that the Pleco Chinese-English / English-Chinese dictionary software is out in beta.

Finally.

I’m planning to install my version soon. But before I get all gushy* about Pleco’s virtues, I also want to point out a request that came in the announcement:

One area we’re still aggressively shopping for a dictionary is character etymology; if anybody has any suggestions for a good etymology dictionary (bilingual preferred, but even Chinese-only is helpful) we’d love to hear them. None of the online ones have been interested in working with us, sadly, so this would probably have to be something from a print publisher. We also very much appreciate suggestions for any other particularly-good dictionary that you think we should take a look at; the success of our OCR add-on has left us with quite a bit of of extra room in our budget, and we’d love to put some of that money towards acquiring more new dictionaries.

I’ve always been interested myself in getting a dictionary that had good, scholarly etymology work. If anyone has a good suggestion (or wants to suggest dictionaries to avoid) let us know in the comments. I can forward the conversation to Mike Love if we dig up anything.

——–

*Gushy starts here. I almost didn’t get my Android phone last year because I like Pleco so much. I like the product and I like the way Mike Love runs the company. Although I think Hanping has done very well with the CE-DICT based app for Android, and I even purchased the full-featured version, when push comes to shove it’s still CE-DICT, which has lots of limitations.

I’m so excited about helping Pleco (for free, let the conflict-of-interest snoopers note) that I’ve broken my almost sacrosanct vow to avoid the computer except on Tuesdays. The avoidance has been a boon for my offline reading and writing endeavors and makes a good excuse for not having posted much of anything to Sinoglot or Beijing Sounds. But all abstinence, I say, must sooner or later be abstained from — lest the abstinence be impure — and what better occasion for indulgence than a Pleco Android beta!

Fine wine for the month of May:

• Before you click thru to Pinyin.info, guess what English word is being borrowed with: 欧菲香 ōufēixiāng
• A modern humanities prof could take a semester to deconstruct iamxiaoli’s “learning Chinese” videos. See John Pasden’s intro here. At least they’re better than the video that came in #1 on this Beijing Sounds post
• Autonomous region points to Google & Wikipedia in Uighur
• Green pea tofu (wāndòu dòufu 豌豆豆腐) and other delectable food terms from Beijing Haochi
• ‘ngè’ — is it about eating, or pooping? Depends on the dialect… — at Bezdomny Ex Patria
• How do you dry your clothes in Mandarin? Carl Gene says it depends on whether you’re from the north or south
• In case you need to brush up on your evil cult publicity poster vocabulary and need a long list of vocabulary — China Hope Live
• I’ll be the first to give the National Palace Museum a break for pinyin-typoing a “捍” instead of a “撼”. Maybe we should just eliminate one: there’s no shortage of hàn in China anyway… — China Hush
• Homeboy in Chinese? Sinologistical Violincellist retranslates Kevin Garnett’s Chinese blog

and from Sinoglot’s own writers:

• Drug-dealing in Dongba script — Duncan at Naxi Script Resource Centre
• More on Yanqing dialect (from Beijing’s outskirts) — Syz at Beijing Sounds

From the Sinoglot mailbag:

Hello !
My name is Minkyu and I’m from Korea.
I am enjoying your blog a lot. I am currently learning Chinese as my fourth language and I am very interested in linguistic view on Chinese language.

I was randomly looking up for a Kana (Japanese phonogram) transcription chart of Mandarin Chinese by their pinyin (Romanization of Mandarin) [Link] and I came up with this question.

But here, you can see (I suppose you can read Japanese at least its Kanji (Hanzi) parts) that “you, miu, diu, niu, liu” are transcribed into “イウ/iu/, ミウ/miu/, ティウ/tiu/, ニウ/niu/, リウ/riu/” when it has either First tone (high) or Second tone(rising), and transcribed into “ヨウ/you/, ミョウ/myou/, テョウ/tyou/, ニョウ/nyou/, リョウ/ryou/” when it has either Third tone (dipping) and Fourth tone (falling).

I knew that the vowel part “iou” can be pronounced either way, [jow] or [jiw]–or even their middle– but I was never heard that this variation is according to their tones.

Could you tell me how “iou” varies in modern Madarin phonology please? Or is this difference just based on hearing cognition of Japanese-speakers?

And could you also tell me why “jiu, qiu, xiu” have no difference in their transcription and are transcribed into “チウ/chiu/, チウ/chiu/, シウ/shiu/” solely?

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Minkyu Kim

The Japanese Wikipedia page to which Minkyu directs us has two tables – the upper one for first and second tones and the lower one for third and fourth tones. Move over to the right to see the entries for pinyin iou.

Would any of our readers like to offer an explanation?

I’ve written about colour a bunch before. really. a bunch. But I’ve recently come upon an interesting argument. If it were just one person who I’d heard it from, I’d not be bothered, but since it’s come up on three separate occasions in the past month, I feel it’s at least worth addressing.

It’s essentially this:

[Language X] is inherently more difficult to learn, all other things being equal, because of the number of colour words it has.

Continue…

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 been a month or so, but rumors of the demise of the Links post are still just rumors, dammit:

1. In a piece on terms for “missing” in Japanese, some interesting discussion of Japanese vagaries of what we would call 多音字 (duōyīnzì = characters with multiple pronunciations) in Chinese. If you thought it was tough in Mandarin…
2. What promises to be (when I get to read it online) an interesting article on ethnic groups — and presumably their languages — in Taiwan from Bruce Humes.
3. Also from Humes: how much difference a 才 can make in a Dylan lyric translation
4. Nuanced semantic discussion as always, from Carl Gene, this time about speech sounds that are not quite words
5. Longest fourth tone sentence contest from Lingomi, which pairs nicely with some stats on which tone pairs are most common
6. Maybe Frog in a Well should offer a “longest string of -isms / 主义 in a Chinese sentence” contest. First entry: “共和主义，革命主义，流血主义，暗杀主义，非有游侠主义 不能担负之“
7. Since you were wondering how to translate “扑街少女”, Roll, Roll, Run explains why “drop dead maiden” might work
8. Pleasantly not dubbed, snapshots of “ordinary” Chinese in M. Scott Brauer’s “We Chinese” / “我们中国人” on The China Beat
9. Weibo iPhone app interface offered in English (slightly against the usual linguistic/technology currents)
10. Finally, a possible venue in case you’re having trouble getting that new interpretation of 道德经 published.