K.M. Lawson has an interesting post up over at one of the many geographies covered by Frog in a Well. This is on the Korea site but the subject is easily not limited to the peninsula.
The post covers the story of Kim Yong Hyun, an interpreter for the United States who was later captured by the Chinese army. Have a look.
I spend lots of time confusing Chinese characters I half-know for others I’m vaguely familiar with. But I’ve never had trouble identifying where a character started and finished. At least that part is straightforward, right? Everything in a box, one size fits all.
Until, that is, I did a bleary double-take as I came to this…
I’m still not sure what three characters I was trying to make out of it: 相那鬲, maybe? Continue…
The first word I ever learned to read in Japanese was クラブ, derived from and meaning “club”. There were 5 such Japanese clubs to be passed in my five minute walk to work last year. But my favourite use of foreign languages in a business façade is probably the massage parlour. A number of them say 안마¹, massage and マッサージ², but not always the Mandarin equivalent.
Northeast China is hoary in winter (and the winter lasts at least ten months) and torrid in summer, which means that you have to have a lot of different kinds of clothes, not to mention that you have to wear many layers of them all throughout the winter, which makes it difficult to bathe frequently.
The predominant language there is the northeast topolect of Mandarin, 东北话 (dōngběihuà), and that has some interesting features, which I might from time to time continue to blog about.
But I got sick of having it be 12ºC indoors for five months (and the average outdoor temperature all year is less than 5ºC!) and moved south to an island on an island…. Continue…
Accent pop quiz:
You go to one of the many offices at your school or workplace. These are offices that deal in official business. Administration type stuff.
The nice but somewhat overly energetic woman behind the counter makes demands regarding an item referred to as “fuzao” (IPA: /fuˈʦɑʊ/)* which she’s expecting you to produce.
1. What is it she’s asking for?
2. Where is she from?
Forty-year-old, fashion-blind, popular-press-eschewing recluses are generally excused from petty infractions of regulations against fuddiduddiness.
But some violations are inexcusable, apparently. So when I used the word 语言伙伴 (yǔyán huǒbàn, “language partner”) in a piece of writing the other day, my language partner grimaced. Her correction went something like this:
“Maybe you could just use the English word, ‘language partner’.”
“But isn’t the whole point to write Chinese?”
“Or you could use LP.”
“And Chinese speakers would know what ‘language partner’ or even ‘LP’ means?!”
“Well, my friends would. Nobody uses 语言伙伴. It’s sounds so, well, weird — kind of like some old-fashioned made-up word.” Continue…
Even if you don’t drive yourself, in Beijing pretty soon you learn to spot the xīnshǒu (新手), literally the “new hands”, the greenhorns, the folks that made it through cryptic questions and an irrelevant “road” test and now possess that coveted, slightly-too-big-for-a-credit-card-slot, laminated green card that entitles them, for the next six years…
Whilst on an informative jolly around Shaoxing’s lántíng 兰亭 (orchid pavilion) in the sweltering heat, I came across the following stele:
It reads 鵞池 é chí, ‘goose pond’ (it probably loses something in translation). The guide told me that the é is a painstaking reconstruction of a character written by Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361), whilst the chí was written by one of his descendants. And aparently Wang loved geese because he felt that, in profile, they resembled the shape of the character 之 in his name. Continue…
The Chinese writing system is incredibly efficient, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a pain to learn and we all forget how to write the odd character from time to time, but you can cram so much into such a small space. It’s not just things like the Analects which, in translation, require lines of English to represent the briefest of the sage’s utterances; even making simple arrangements by SMS/text message seems so much more convenient in Chinese.
Then, as Bryan pointed out, there are signs in your local hospital which protrude unreasonably far, simply so that they can helpfully accommodate the English translation.
Watch out. That thing could take your eye out! Continue…
