Michael Rank has a fascinating review (h/t Danwei) of a book that’s now on my “buy when I go back to the US” list: Mandarin Blue: RAF Chinese Linguists in the Cold War.

I hope the book goes more into the difficulties of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization for Chinese, because this may be the one time in history that a large number of people used GR (let me know if you know of others!). Here’s a quote

An idiosyncrasy of the course was that the Romanization used was the now obsolete Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR), which uses an ingenious if complex system of “tonal spelling” rather than accents or numerals to indicate the four tones of Mandarin Chinese. This makes the tone part of the syllable, as it were, rather than an added-on feature, but the system is time-consuming to learn and even some of the Chinese instructors had difficulties getting to grips with it. But the powers that be were so committed to GR that two American military textbooks were transcribed into GR specifically for the RAF course.

Anyone read it?

How do you find precise translations for technical terminology? One of the convenient things about dealing with a mainstream language like Mandarin is that pretty much every English technical or trade term in every subject you could imagine has a Mandarin equivalent.

The devil is in finding it. Bilingual dictionaries are good for mainstream stuff, but they don’t tend to include the lingo that’s an inevitable part of any profession. Continue…

Apologies for the terrible state the site is in right now. I had stupidly been hosting the images on another domain, on which the directory holding those images was deleted.

Unfortunately it’s the end of my semester now and I’m quite busy with other things, so it may have to stay this way for a little while.

I’ll try to fix it this weekend, but I can’t promise anything.

Again, apologies.

update:
I’ve put up a quick temporary theme. I’m busier than I’d thought and probably won’t get around to fixing the theme proper for a while.

Thanks to Sinocism (go there to find the video), I see that the Daily Show has documented yet another case of amusing* reaction in the US to the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes (孔子学院). At the moment of the snapshot below,  one of the CI opponents is professing not to understand the message of this particular bit of teaching material propaganda because “I can’t read Chinese.”

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We’ve all decried the prevalence of dubbing in the foreign-language-phobic US (and maybe the rest of the world too, but what do I know). Is reading a few subtitles really too much to ask of those who can’t understand the foreign language being spoken?

But what about “dubbing” in print? I’m talking about articles whose subject matter clearly involves another language, but in which not a single term from that original language is offered for reference. Thanks to Konrad Lawson at Frog in a Well, today we’ve got a classic example of “print dubbing” in several articles on China’s recent revision of anti-torture laws. Continue…

Since I don’t know the answer, I’d like to forward a question left on an unrelated post. “Deany” asks:

How much “discount” can someone gets if she/he is already able to speak cantonese and want to learn mandarin (pu tong hua)?I’ve noticed that a friend of mine who is able to speak cantonese (raised in a family who is able to speak cantonese), he has a higher speed in learning mandarin. Is it true that mandarin is easy to master when you already fluent in one of chinese dialects? Continue…

We don’t have a specific policy about being political here, except to avoid it when possible. We don’t need any more uniformed sorts showing up at our corporate offices this year. Randy already made a full apology for that incident and promised to mend his ways. That said, the following is going to wade just ever so slightly into the kiddie pool of foreign relations, but it’s really for a linguistic reason so please forgive me my editorial comments, should any slip in.

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On a major street in a neighborhood not far from Sinoglot’s Shangdi offices:

Apologies as always for pairing a cheap cell phone camera with the world’s worst photographer. The text says:

红灯停车，违者必纠
Stop car on red / Violators prosecuted

Since I’ve heard a local or two giggle about this particular sign, I don’t think written stoplight instructions are terribly common, but feel free to tell me I’m wrong.

The important linguistic question, though, is: what does it mean?

From a purely descriptive standpoint, I’m going to offer the conjecture that the native drivers interpret this as a (written) speech act in the tradition of Protesting Too Much. That is, if someone took the trouble to write out instructions for stopping at a red light, there must be good reason to run it.

And run it they do. At first I thought I might try to get a better pic by stepping into the intersection when the light turned. It did, but I didn’t, because it would have meant doing battle with a never-ending stream of drivers in harmony with the spirit — if not the letter — of the speech act.

Last week I gave a talk on the Wu language and what I predict as the most likely future. Not really knowing my audience going in, I decided it was best to keep things a little simple and explain some things that may be taken for granted.

Some of these things, as I explained them:

· 方言 does not mean dialect¹
· 地方话 means topolect, but still not dialect
· Wu (吴语) is a language, bitches²

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It seems like a trick question:

左撇子的反义词是什么？
Zuǒpiězi de fǎnyìcí shì shénme?
What’s the opposite of left-handed?

The 21st Century Dictionary from China Renmin University Press dutifully offers definitions of “right-handed”:

1. 右手的 — “of the right hand”
2. 惯于使用右手的 — “accustomed to using the right hand”
3. 用右手做的 — “uses right hand to do/make”

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