I don’t think it’s linguistic ignorance on Michael Meyer’s part. With a byline that reads “author of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Back Streets of a City Transformed“, it’s safe to guess Meyer knows his Chinese scripts: Hanzi and Pinyin. So then why, oh why, does his New York Times opinion piece about inflation, which tells its story via the character 涨 (zhǎng as in zhǎngjià 涨价, “rise in price”) — a character the article says was voted the netizen’s choice for 2010 — not print said character even once in the article, even as a graphic?

Sure, maybe local rags like the NYT don’t have the typesetting equipment to handle hieroglyphics. But are you telling me they couldn’t handle a few tone marks in the Pinyin, at least, for the Hanyu-studying kids in the 3% of US elementary schools that are offering Chinese, who almost certainly have a grasp of Pinyin? At least that would give users of Pinyin-based dictionaries a fighting chance at finding the right zhǎng among the 38,000 zhang syllable possibilities.

Complain, complain. To tell the truth, though, I could live without the foreign scripts — I mean, I realize it’s the US. It’s my native land. I understand the reluctance to broach foreign languages and scripts with an audience that mostly doesn’t remember even voy vas va from their one year of college Spanish. The kind of practice we see with the NYT and “zhang” is a form of dubbing in print and I might as well get used to it.

What’s genuinely worth ranting about, though, is the lack of linking. You cite an online study and don’t link to it?! Oh, sorry, that’s right: I’m supposed to get all my news from the Gray Lady and nothing else is fit to print.

In any case, happy inflationary New Year! And just for fun, here’s a link with a bit more on that 涨 thing. [Warning: target article contains inscrutable  hieroglyphics.]

UK Education Secretary Michael Gove is surprised to find that “a thick book with screeds of Chinese characters and the odd paragraph in English” is the homework of students which has been published in academic journals. In response, his op-ed calls for “a cultural revolution just like the one they’ve had in China”. Since it’s hard to know where to start in on the awfulness, I’ll just refer you to Shanghaiist’s take: “Suffice to say for now what really took the cake was his public fellation of communist China’s founding father…”

Laowai Chinese takes on another vocabulary question with prescriptivist overtones by asking “What’s up with Persuade?” — i.e. 说服, shuìfú or shuōfú.

Victor Mair on Language Log discusses “English Banned in Chinese Writing“. I have to admit that I was very dismissive about the whole proposal when it was discussed in April 2010 (here’s Mair’s take on it then). I don’t think I even bothered to link to it, considering it one of those seasonal political proposals that would come and go — like discussions about changing the name of the Richland Bombers (yes, as in atomic bomb) to something less destructive. But the fact that the ban has reached this level of formal implementation proves that I know nothing about Zhongnanhai machinations. If anyone has insight into the scope and significance of the ban, it would be great to hear from you. My guess is still that there’s a lot of smoke and a lot less heat to it, but what do I know…

A Naxi script must-read for those who think that “polishing one’s jade instrument” is an off-color euphemism.

To native Mandarin speakers (NSs), how salient is tone vs other phonemic features?

The question comes up a lot for me, a non-native speaker (NNS), just because tone is an order of magnitude less salient. That is, if I miss any feature of a word, it’s almost sure to be the tone before, say, whether the beginning sound was a /ch/ or /s/.

But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t apply to NSs. An incident I heard about had the NNS mispronouncing shòu as shǒu when attempting to say “她很瘦” (she’s so thin). What came out, then, was “tā hěn shǒu” which was unhappily understood as “tā hěn chǒu” (她很丑 = she’s so ugly) by the NS.

Still, I have some vague intuition that NSs are more flexible on tone than on other features. In that vein, this quote in China Media Project caught my eye the other day. It’s referring to how an online commenter sneaks in a reference to the Nobel peace prize by substituting characters:

the user replaced the characters for “peace” + “prize”, or hépíng jiǎng (和平奖), with the same-sounding characters “crane” + “level” + “palm”, or hè píng zhǎng (鹤平掌). [tone marks added to original Pinyin]

So here we’ve got a tone switch with matching phonemes, hé vs hè, but we’ve also got a phoneme switch with matching tone: jiǎng vs zhǎng. This is new for me. Of the online puns I can think of off the top of my head, all rely on matching phonemes with mixed-up tones, e.g. cǎo ní mǎ. But new-to-me doesn’t mean much. Anyone else have examples of phoneme-switching-tone-preserving puns?

More good work from carlgene.com: 33 Proverbs that translate well between Mandarin and English.

Learning Mandarin in India, from WSJ. No big surprises in the approach at the featured language school:

The school’s focus is strictly conversational. Rather than learn Chinese characters, Indian students work with the easier-to-look-at transliterations in the Roman alphabet, a system known as “pinyin.” Teachers use both Hindi and English to help students get the tones right, one of the biggest hurdles to learning the language.

From Frog in a Well, another Google Ngram post — and by the dateline apparently Alan beat Sinoglot to the punch. An interesting comment there from Vladimir:

if one tries to look at really early periods (before 1800), the data quality deteriorates because of a large number of comparatively recent books mistakenly assigned early dates.

Original title: The most fun you can have (legally) on a Saturday night in Beijing outside the fifth ring

If you haven’t already seen what Google has come up with…

…then you’re probably in danger of becoming an offline recluse who lives in Beijing exurbia and considers “social interaction” giving a nod to the elderly gentleman who walks by every morning as you exercise at 5:30am.

But if you’ve got that problem, then why not submit your favorite Ngram sets in the comments and win the Ngram challenge! (Award amount to be announced as soon as sponsor is finalized) Continue…

I was remembering something from my trip to Seoul in October, which then got me on to other things. The word for woman, or at least the important syllable when it comes to choosing the right bathroom (i.e. not the one that says ‘woman’ in my case) is 야 (ya). I thought of this because a friend who is studying hanja asked about 肉 which is 욕 (yok) in Korean (as far as the hanja is pronounced) but nyo’ in Wu, yuk in Cantonese and にく (niku) in Japanese¹. So basically I figured Mandarin r- becomes Korean hanja y-, though it’s ny- in Wu and Cantonese. Turns out I stopped one step too soon. the y- in Korean is actually only half the story. If the syllable is the first in the phrase, then it is in fact y-. Beyond that, however, it picks up an n-, making ny-. So the 肉 in 鸡肉 would actually be closer to nyok, bringing it almost perfectly in line with many Wu dialects.

Continue…

On chinaSMACK, another man-bites-dog story of foreign-looking people speaking Mandarin, in this case a white woman on a local news station. Those with a long memory might recall that the title of this post and wonder yet again at the impossibility of parody on the mainland.

Bruce Humes, on Paper Republic, translates a bit of what was apparently an unacceptable acceptance speech by Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun (慕容 雪村).

China Media Project translates an interesting piece of media analysis on “cross-regional reporting” (异地监督 yìdì jiāndū) that uses, as usual, the praiseworthy practice of not dubbing in print — i.e. plenty of reference to the original Chinese text.

A mystery of Garlic vs Cauldron at Duncan‘s Naxi Script Resource Centre.

A little late, but rishida.net has an interesting post up about rendering bopomofo, an alternative to pinyin previously used in China and more recently on Taiwan..

Since ’tis nearly the season: Chinese lyrics to Santa Claus is Coming to Town with fully tone-marked Pinyin.

Pinyin.info has scanned a section of a Pinyin book with a period (1963) blend of somewhat-simplified Hanzi orthography.

John Wells points to vowel inventories on the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) online. If you don’t think this sounds cool, check out the map here and mouse over some of the enormous differences you can see in vowel counts of languages across the region of Sinoglot interest.

edit: Don’t miss this awesome Rubick’s cube with Chinese movable type. I want one so bad. -kp

Earlier this week, Sinoglot’s Randy and Paweł posted the 15th instalment of The Book of Nishan Shaman.

For a bit of elderly Dongbei dialect, check out the documentary by C. Custer and the ChinaGeeks team, Kedong County. While you’re at it, check out his latest project.

John Pasden’s call for a public, large-scale corpus of spoken Mandarin gets a strong seconding from Sinoglot. The current corpuses/corpora are grossly inadequate.

The blog 一步一个脚印 (carlgene.com) has an informative post called “74 Switch-Around Words in Mandarin“. Here are just a couple:

蜜蜂 mìfēng (“bee”) & 蜂蜜 fēngmì (“honey”)
合适 héshì (“suitable”) & 适合 shìhé (“to be suitable”)

Finally, on the Omniglot blog, there’s a post up looking for help with the Endangered Alphabets Project. Among the scripts on which the project is focused: Manchu and Nüshu.

In Japanese they’re called ryakuji りゃくじ. In Korean, yakja 약자. The corresponding characters are 略字, pronounced lüè zì in Mandarin. They are the unorthodox simplifications that are seen in handwritten texts from time to time. They are not in any official list of approved kanji/hanja/hanzi, and you won’t really learn them in school. But they are used.

Think 仃 for 停 but lacking the authority once (briefly) held by 仃. Or, think of all those times you wrote 旦 in place of 单 蛋 or 弹 in your notes in class, because you couldn’t be bothered by all those strokes at the time. I know I’m not the only one to do this.

Continue…