Xiao’erjin (alternatively xiao’erjing¹ 小儿经) is the name of a form of transcription for Mandarin and related languages. Rather than using Cyrillic or Roman letters, the Arabic script is used. China has had a large Muslim population for about as long as there have been Muslims, and it was among those of them who were less likely to have a traditional classical education that the system was used.

The structure is fairly simple. Syllable initial consonants are written with a single Arabic letter. The final then was primarily done with harakat or vowel diacritics. Before Annals of Wu, was blogging on xiao’erjin and Chinese Islam in general on another site, appropriately enough called xiao er jing.

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Rejoice! Top Gear, the massively popular UK driving programme in which overfed manchildren do stupid (and often genuinely hilarious) things with cars, is coming to China.

The British newspaper and bastion of right-wing reportage, The Telegraph, has this to say concerning the Chinese version’s title:

The Chinese show will also retain the pun in its name. It has been titled Zui Gao Dang, which translates literally as “Top Quality”.

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Note: If you see the title of this post as anything other than “ Text Messages”, it means you don’t have proper Yi syllables font support. Click here to remedy that.

I posted last week on Tibetan keyboard support on the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system. I’m a big fan of progress with personal computing when it comes to script support, so Tibetan keyboards are a good sign, even if I have no reason to type Tibetan. Hell, I still can’t easily type IPA on my iPod, though I did find a way to cheat. And I get really frustrated when something as simple and common as Arabic gets mis-rendered as late as 2011. We should have figured out how to make this consistently work by now.

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Syz recently posted an image from a gravestone in Beijing. Emblazoned atop the stone was a word in Arabic, written in what is known in Arabic as Sini script (خط صيني) which really just means Chinese script. The calligraphic style is found throughout China anywhere Hui Muslims live. It ornaments mosques and memorials as mentioned, but also restaurants and the grill of your local chuarwalla.

In the case of Syz’s photo, the script lends a particularly Islamic touch to a gravestone that might otherwise be missed as that of a Muslim.

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Explorer, n. one who digs through his* own rubbish pile (or someone else’s) for the hidden treasure he never found as a kid

Tourist, n. One who favors packaged over live, who inches squeamishly past the teeming fauna of his own backyard — with its outrageous comedies, its epic contests, its tawdry intrigues — in order to reach the specimen cabinet at his neighbor’s place.

I like exploring almost as much as I hate tourism. The recent trip to Sinoglot’s Xiamen office, thankfully, was 80% exploring and only 20% t**rism. Even better, my parents, who have been visiting over the new year, are both more explorers than tourists. So when I take them on a hike in the western hills of Beijing, trying to find “a different trail that I’m sure could get us up to that pagoda,” and we end up on a desolate road squeezed between the base of a hill, abandoned development projects, and some rather weedy graves — they’ll enthusiastically tell me they had a great time.

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Businesses all over get flack for abusing and inventing vocabulary to fit their needs, or, as some see it, to deceive their customers. See the Starbucks Venti saga for a model of word rage.

The Chinese service industry is not immune.

Last night at the famously poorly-managed 鸿毛饺子 restaurant, the waitress managed to elicit near-shrieks of indignation during the ordering process when she said, in response to the request for one dish:

“… qìng le”

The first customer response was, 什么？ (“Shénme?” = what?) Continue…

Remember the question Sima brought up about how much surface area was needed to communicate equivalent amounts in Chinese vs English?

Looking back through that article and the comments, I’d conclude the following:

1. For unpearly prose at any rate, the surface area needed is probably about the same between the two languages.
2. It still might be the case that non-prose signs (e.g. a sign with succinct phrases or just a word or two) could be shorter in Chinese than English
3. “Native readers” of Language A can read Language A from a greater distance than they can a non-native Language B (whether A = Chinese or A = English)

All this came to mind at the Xiamen Botanical Gardens (also mentioned here) when I saw the sign below*:

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Is it really time for Monday link roundup? Only the calendar says so. Otherwise, here in China, it’s unequivocally “The fifth day of New Year” (初五 chūwǔ), a time when the obsessive day-tracking of modern life fades into a blur of sloth and grog and dysfunctional family dinners. Even my parents, visiting from the States, have started using the X-day-of-new-year terminology since the days of the week have become meaningless.

• Check out the Character Rotation Game from Sinosplice. 凶风区 (“Fierce Wind Zone”) should give you the idea.
• Political vocabulary work from Justrecently, Learning Chinese with the CCP: Dangwai.
• Chūnyùn (春运 = Spring Festival Travel) song and translation from ChinaHush. Sample:

每当在这个时候习惯点支烟
想起家乡的老母仿佛又在眼前

Every time I light up a cigarette at this time
Thinking about home town and mother, as if they are in front my eyes

• CCTV performance of Abdulla Abduréhim from Autonomous Region
• White House still doesn’t get Chinese names, from Donald Clarke at the Chinese Law Prof Blog. In White House’s defense, no one else in the country does either.

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.

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*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.

[The following is a guest post. Yi Chonsang lives in Seoul where he works as an anonymous grunt for a multinational.]

I spend most of my time at work. I would love to enroll in a language program but it’s just not an option with my schedule. Meanwhile a friend here in Seoul is studying Korean full time, and he’s gotten pretty good at it. Now he’s looking to learn hanja, the Korean name for Chinese characters. He recently showed me the book he’s using for this, Learning Hanja the Fun Way.

He said it has been very useful so far for learning hanja. It must be because he’s going through it fairly quickly. I had a different idea. I thought it would be a good way for a Mandarin speaker to learn Korean grammar by going through the book in reverse. Since I studied Chinese before, that’s exactly what I’m now trying to do.

The book is divided into lessons, each composed of a list of vocabulary words followed by a reading comprehension paragraph in Korean and English. The words from the vocabulary show up in the reading as hanja (漢字 hànzì); the list of hanja are given with hangul (the native Korean writing system), a definition, and a little picture to show you what it’s supposed to be representing. This is like what you find in books like Remembering the Kanji/Hanzi.

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