We’ve all heard that in 2010 China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (中华人民共和国新闻出版总署) started worrying about the purity of “Chinese” and asked the press to rid themselves of the unseemly habit of using English names and abbreviations in their reports. See, for example, this BBC report from December.

But if school gate conversations* are to be believed, there’s a new front in the Chinese purity movement. A fellow parent at my daughter’s Beijing grade school reports that the standard old names in her apartment complex — A座, B座 (i.e. Building A, Building B) — are getting changed. Why? She claims the regulatory authorities are requiring it. No more “English” letters to be used in the naming of buildings, they say. She also says it’s not just her apartment — that she’s heard from friends of this happening elsewhere in Beijing.

I don’t read much news at all, let alone local Beijing news. Has anyone else come across this?

[Update — don’t miss the links in jdmartinsen’s first comment below. They include the proposed regulations and some newspaper articles about them]

During the conversation, thinking of Kellen’s ordered lists post, I asked her, “So what are they replacing it with? Is it 甲，乙?”

Alas, nothing so interesting. She says they now have 东南西北 (east, south, west, north) and some directions in between.

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*It’s taken me two years of participation in the daily school-gate-pickup circus — complete with double parked gridlock, shady sausage vendors, and heartfelt reunions at the emotional level of “hostages released after days in captivity” — to be able to find my own equanimity, groove to the cacophony, and just chat obliviously with fellow parents.

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• You’ve already read the English version. Now, check out: 为什么中文这么TM难？ [Thanks, pinyin.info]
• Bilding, cubbard, and more. A call for looser attitudes towards English spelling from famous phoneticist John Wells. What does this have to do with Chinese? I’ve long thought the primary obstacle to any script reform in English and in Chinese is primarily one of attitude: whether entrenched powers are willing to allow some diversity of form. Diversity of form, in the long-term, is what obviates the need for abrupt and wrenching change. I’m glad to see a linguist of Wells’ stature taking up the issue for English.
• Mandarin learners: estimate how many words you know, from zhtoolkit
• The meaning of 味儿大, “big taste”, from Shanghai’s big* language blogger, John Pasden
• 装修, or “renovation with Chinese characteristics” — and other post-Chinese-New-Year traditions
• An interesting historical perspective from The China Beat for any who have pondered the underdeveloped state of Chinese civil society (公民社会)

*Seriously, I measure in right at six feet, but next to John I feel like I lost my lifts.

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.

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The author is a postgrad in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia. He received a “2nd Class Prize” in the 2010 Chinese Bridge, a worldwide Mandarin speaking competition heavily rigged in his favour. He is also an occasional contributor at Danwei.org

As Sima and Syz’s recent pieces have noted, written Chinese is a wonderfully compact language. Indeed, as the huge wave of microblogging (微博/wēibó) swelling in China reminds us, you can say much more in 140 Chinese characters than 140 letters.

But how compact is spoken Chinese?

There’s a post on ‘Baidu Knows’ titled, “Do foreigners speak English at the same speed we speak Chinese?”. The “Best Answer” goes as follows:

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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…

Sinoglot is getting another facelift. More on that later.

One of the things that we’re going to great pains to ensure is cross-everything compatibility. Unless you use Opera. More on that later too.

Part of this cross-browser, cross-system, cross-whatever-else compatibility is making sure everything is HTML5, CSS3 compliant. This in turn has had me poring over standards references to find the goodies that would make it all work regardless of the device the person reading the posts (you) was using.

W3C, in a reference dated November 2002 and re-done in 2009, provides a few nice ways to sort numbered lists. These include “cjk-ideographic” (一 二 三 四 五…), “japanese-formal,” “-informal” and a few other names which end up being “壹 貳 參 肆 伍 陸 柒 捌 玖…”. There’s also cjk-earthly-branch (子 丑 寅 卯 辰 巳 午 未 申 酉 戌 亥) and cjk-heavenly-stem (甲 乙 丙 丁 戊 己 庚 辛 壬 癸), which are nice to have.

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• Practical details for successful online book shopping in mainland China from Maggie Green at the China Beat. Her salespitch for online shopping isn’t overdone at all — it is really that good  (and in-store is really pretty bad, in my personal experience).
• A comparison of Mandarin and English air pollution terms, from the air quality sleuth, Live from Beijing.
• Some have alleged sexism in Chinese characters, but can they be gay? Sinosplice has graphic details.
• A conversation about Yanqing (exurban Beijing) dialect on Beijing Sounds
• Sinoglot’s Xiamen office points to a local newspaper publicizing a call for bilingual sign standardization, in which are mentioned problematic translations such as the one pictured below. However, since that picture is from 2006, we believe it more likely that the would-be standardizers are responding to a wave of negative publicity incited by this much more recent Xiamen sign photo on Sinoglot.

You're reading that right: "concentration camp"

A lot has been said on the topic already, but I thought I’d take a look myself.

A good number of words we would deem negative have the 女 woman radical. I got to thinking about this again today while writing an email to a friend. In it, I wrote jídù 嫉妒, “jealous”. 女疾, 女户. So I popped open Pleco, went to the Unihan dictionary and found the 女 radical. Here’s what I could come up with:

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You might remember the discussion we had last year about the peculiar usage of the exclamation “!” and other punctuation marks in modern mandarin. I bring this up again because in yesterday’s news there was a remarkable piece of writing that illustrates the phenomenon.  Interesting too because the author is an admired member of the internet elite, speaker of English and used to working with foreigners: none other than Jack Ma, the founder of the Alibaba empire.

You can read all about it in this Forbes blog post. To make a long story short: Mr. Ma was slightly annoyed when he found that dozens of his employees were using the company to collude with outside swindlers, and he wrote a circular letter containing, in its Chinese original:

– 11 periods
– 21 exclamation marks.

In the first half of the letter it is even more pronounced, with a total of 12 exclamations for only 4 periods, and then those 4 look like they’ve been forgotten there  at the end of the paragraphs. Continue…

The first two entries today illustrate the constant tug of language preservation and dominance in China. On the one hand, there’s a proposal that Mandarin should be renamed 中国语, Zhōngguó yǔ (a Danwei translation by Joel Martinsen) and given more “strategic” prominence than the “equal footing” it has with other languages these days. On the other, the People’s Daily publicizes a proposal by the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC) “to promote the use of [Zhuang language / Vahcuengh], which, unlike many languages belonging to ethnic groups, is still in wide currency.” H/T to Liuzhou Laowai, who acerbically notes that “almost no Zhuang speakers know the written form” and that Zhuang language includes “mutually unintelligible groups known as Northern and Southern Zhuang”.

Elsewhere:

• A well-written account of the relative value of “dialect” (read: essentially a different language) vs. The Standard Language. Although the setting here is Morocco and the language is Arabic, the themes will be quite familiar to anyone familiar with China’s linguistic situation. (h/t Jabal al-Lughat)
• Another review of Wenlin 4.0, the software for learning Chinese, this from Sinosplice. The first one we linked to was from Pinyin.info
• Try having a non-Cantonese speaker read “至勁係你” and see how far they get — from Victor Mair on Language Log.
• To be “high-speed railroaded” — creative use of the 被 passive construction, also from Mair
• 胖人服侍 as “Fat people apparel” — a nice example of the great divide between superficial meaning and cultural expectations
• Blended Mandarin / Uyghur rap