Every morning at 8 and every evening at 6:30, I religiously delete the “news update” text sent by the mobile phone company here in Beijing. Little did I know that in the process of resenting the intrusion, I was denying myself the daily joke that comes with the afternoon update. My third-grader daughter is not so dismissive. She snags the phone once in a while and scans before I delete, pointing out the jokes she thinks I’ll get (not many). The other day there was one with a bit of grammar in it:

出租车司机深夜搭载一少妇去郊外，路上少妇递了一个苹果给他，司机边吃边说：“真好吃。”只听见少妇慢悠悠地说：“是啊，我生前也很喜欢吃的。”

Late at night a taxi driver picks up a young woman  going to an outer district. On the way, the young woman gives him an apple. The driver, eating, says “Delicious!” only to hear the woman slowly reply, ” Yes, before birth (in my past life) I liked them.”

司机听了吓得头皮发麻！接着少妇又说：“可是，生了孩子之后胃口全变了！”

The taxi driver is so scared his scalp tingles! The young woman continues, “But after I’d given birth to my child my tastes changed completely!”

The joke’s twist depends on an ambiguity that also exists for some verbs in English, but not for this particular verb. Continue…

note: This post was originally published by Daan on the Sinoglot daughter site “Nothing Undone”. Today that site is being absorbed by the main blog and all the posts and comments have thus been brought over. We are therefore re-posting this today to introduce you to Daan and his work. Enjoy. -KP

When we think of the languages used in traditional China, we almost always naturally think of Classical Chinese first. After all, it is the language which we need to learn in order to read most of the well-known philosophical treatises and histories from the Warring States period and the Qín and Hàn dynasties. But that does not mean it was the only language in use in traditional China.

First of all, as Norman (1988: 83) points out, Classical Chinese is a written language, used in China from roughly 400 BCE to 200 CE. It is not a spoken language (or vernacular), but it was based on the vernacular of the era in which it emerged. After the fall of the Eastern Hàn dynasty in 220 CE, Classical Chinese was codified and remained in use among literati as as a written language until the early 20th century. It was not the only written language to be used, though, as the language used in later written works reflected the enormous changes in the spoken language as time went by, not least because of the influence of the rise of Buddhism on the Sinitic languages. I should write a bit on that another day, as it’s an interesting story in its own right. For now, let us restrict ourselves to the languages in China before the collapse of the Eastern Hàn dynasty (which I’ll call early China).

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If you’re not up on your eggcorn lit, take a browse through the stacks at Language Log — the eggcorn section is immense. The gist of eggcornism is that a word gets respelled based on an incorrect but plausible analysis of its origins. To quote the founding post:

It’s not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.

It’s not a malapropism, because “egg corn” and “acorn” are really homonyms (at least in casual pronunciation), while pairs like “allegory” for “alligator,” “oracular” for “vernacular” and “fortuitous” for “fortunate” are merely similar in sound (and may also share some aspects of spelling and morphemic content).

It’s not a mondegreen because the mis-construal is not part of a song or poem or similar performance.

In any case, Mandarin is chock full of possible eggcorns, primarily because nearly every possible spoken syllable has more than one (often many) characters that could be used to represent it.

Here’s one my daughter came up with tonight. Instead of writing

向日葵
xiàngrìkuí
“sunflower” or, sort of character-by-character: “facing-sun-plant”

she wrote:

像日葵
xiàngrìkuí
“resembling-sun-plant” Continue…

While looking up some obscure thing from Zhuangzi 庄子 this week, I fired up Pleco on my iPod and stumbled across something I liked, though I may be the only one.

燕 yàn means swallow, as in the bird.
嚥 yàn, also written 咽, means swallow, as in what I’m doing with a cold bottle of maibock as I write this.

That’s freaking amazing! Or maybe just slightly amazing. Two homophones in English are also homophonous in Mandarin, internal to each language. How often does that happen? Maybe often and I’ve just never noticed. So I thought I’d post it here and see if anyone had other examples of this sort of thing.

It reminds me of another interesting but obviously different thing that happens sometimes, which is two words that sound the same in two languages, mean the same thing, but have no etymological connection. For example the word “and” in Arabic is written وَ while Korean has a word meaning “and” written 와. Both are pronounced “wa”. There’s some better example between Japanese and English that I’ve encountered before but I can’t recall what it was. Suggestions of that sort are also welcome.

Just procrastinated my way into a (sort of) recent Language Log post by Victor Mair. The subject is whether Chinese characters are “necessary” for writing Chinese. There are 62 comments at this writing and a frenzy of emotion. One of the key quotes from Mair:

My rule of thumb is always this: if homography were a problem in (more or less) phonetic scripts based on real, spoken languages, then homophony would be a problem in the speech of such languages.

I’m not trying to pick on words, but this looks to me more like a tautology than a rule of thumb. By definition, spoken language written in a phonemic script is not going to have homophony problems unless the spoken language has homophony problems.

So why the big debate over whether Mandarin “can” be written in Pinyin? It’s helpful to parse the question a bit. The real issue is whether Mandarin as it is currently written could be written successfully using Pinyin. That’s the only case of serious interest. The other two — (a) writing Classical Chinese in Pinyin, or (b) writing spoken Mandarin in Pinyin — should be universally acknowledged as (a) impossible, and (b) a cinch. Continue…

Upon returning from the holiday I found my internet had been cut. I knew it would happen, but not so soon. I pay ever 6 months and I figured it was due to expire.

So I trudged over to the closes place to fix that by paying a few hundred kuai to a guy to make a phone call to China Telecom for me. A bystander decided it was a good time for a chat, and began by asking me how long I had lived in the North (北方 beifang) before coming to Shanghai. Confused, I told him I’ve not spent more than 6 days in the North in all my time in China. I explained I’ve spent all my time in Jiangnan where I’m quite comfortable and had no interest in living up north.

Stepping back a second, I should say I pride myself on the small bit of Shanghainess in my Mandarin accent. I proudly pronounce 十 as “si” and 44 as “si si si”. Unfortunately it means I often go about my day with many people not quite understanding what I’m saying. In fact, moments before my internet issues, I had been speaking to a local aiyi who, for some reason, thought I said I had been to 法國 fǎgúo this past week instead of 韓國 hángúo. I’m still not why she thought she heard that. So when I went to fix the internet, I corrected.

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The photo on the right is one of three seen in the subway in Shanghai. They’re advertisements for Phillips appliances. The image shows a young child chillaxin’ as a breeze goes by. The caption, in childlike handwriting, says 我家的房子会呼吸 wǒ jiā de fángzi huì hūxī, “my family’s house can breathe”.

Another in the series has a kid freaking the heck out at the shadow of a dinosaur and the caption, which I’m sure I don’t remember perfectly, says something like 哇！恐龙来啦 wa! kǒnglóng lái la, which translates as “holy crap! there’s an effing dinosaur!”

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While looking for information for a source list on Shanghainese resources, I came across the page for the Lonely Planet phrasebook I’d mentioned before. Turns out you can buy individual chapters for about 5USD. So if you’d like to browse the Uyghur section or see what they have on Sichuan hua, now you can.

Here’s the link:
http://shop.lonelyplanet.com/china/china-phrasebook-1

I was trying to watch a movie this evening. By watch I mean use as background noise while I wrote papers. Ideally then it would be in English. Looking for “Shanghai” with Gong Li and John Cusack, I was stuck with the Mandarin dubbed version. That’s 谍海风云 dié hǎi fēngyún for anyone interested.

There are a few things you’ll find when browsing the videos available on Youku, Tudou, 56 or whathaveyou. First, when dealing with the spoken language, Mandarin is called 国语 over 中文 or 汉语 by a large margin. A quick few searches on Tudou returns these numbers (Thits?):

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Class has just begun for me. Another fun year of too many credit hours and too many papers to write at the end. The good news is with the amount of exposure I’m getting, I damn well better be mistaken for Dashan’s (大山) Southern kid brother by the end of the year.

To jump start that exposure I’ve been listening to the BBC’s Mandarin broadcasts. There’s a podcast for it that you can find on the iTunes store if you’re interested. One of the things that threw me off is when they give the website address or email address, some people are saying 点 dian and some are saying 点儿, which sounds more like “deer” or “d. r.”. I hear people say “diar” often enough, but “deer” was new to me. Keep in mind I live in an erhua-free zone, and have made it a point in my own speech to never utter a single “-r” be it a 本儿 or a 块儿 or even telling him to stop 在这儿. The first time I heard it I thought they were saying

b. b. c. d. r. c. o. d. r. u. k.

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