Here’s a simple action, in three steps, which I guess most people will recognise:

I imagine most English speakers will be thinking of the same expression to describe this action and, if that expression were given as a command, they would all perform the same action without hesitation.

So, I ask a simple question. How would you say this in Chinese?

Please, put the dictionary back on the shelf. No need for an online search. Just tell me how you would say this in whichever Chinese dialect or language you happen to be most familiar with and, if it’s not Standard Mandarin, please indicate which language or dialect it is. Interrogation of native speakers encouraged.

Free Sinoglot T-shirt* for the best answer.

* Subject to HQ releasing the necessary funds, arranging printing and delivery, etc.

Just after I’d been thinking about the tone changes of yī (hanzi: 一) the other day, I happened to get momentarily puzzled over a word I say practically every day. Seeing this:

一单元

I asked my friend, a native speaker of Chinese:

“Is it yī dānyuán or yì dānyuán?”

“Huh? It’s yī dānyuán of course. Why would it be yì?”

In this case, as I should have known, it’s pronounced yī because it’s functioning as a number, something like “Unit #1.”

But after further discussion as followup to her “Why would it be yì?” comment, it became clear that she wasn’t aware that yī could change tones at all. It took only a few examples to demonstrate the phenomenon, but the phenomenon up until that point had been completely subconscious.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. Native speakers of every language do similar things. Still, sandhi seem pretty salient to me… I’d like to know if this is an isolated case.

The kind of dual-script format (Pinyin above, hanzi below) kids’ book I showed the other day…

…is quite common for books targeted at early elementary kids. Since my daughter has been hiding under the covers with a flashlight to read this one, I thought I’d ask her if she ever read the Pinyin:

“Read what?”

“The Pinyin,” I said, pointing. “I mean, it’s right there, above the characters.”

“Oh yeah,” she laughed. “I kind of don’t really even notice it. It’s like a blurry line.”

“But what if you come to a character you don’t know? Do you look at the Pinyin to learn the pronunciation?”

“Oh no. I just skip it or sometimes I guess it.”

Ah, to be a kid learning Hanzi. Sounds a helluva lot easier than what I’ve gone through. If only I could relax and just guess.

Every second-language student of Mandarin is told pretty quickly that yī (hanzi: 一) is subject to “tone sandhi”, meaning it changes tone depending on the tone of the following syllable*. HOWEVER, the founding rules of Pinyin say that the tone sandhi should not be marked and that you should continue to write yīgè, for example, even though it’s said “yígè.”

Sometimes this “rule” feels really awkward. In this comment on Beijing Sounds, Randy Alexander took me to task for writing bùshì (as the rules would have it) instead of búshì (as it’s pronounced).

He’s not the only one. Check out this page from my daughter’s new favorite book:

Here we have yígè, yìshēng, and yí going over to some word on the next page. All sandhi are marked.

Now before Pinyin.info takes me to task, let me note that the usage on the page above violates a much more important rule: i.e. that it sep ar ates each syl la ble instead of putting syllables together into words. Well, you can’t have everything, and anyway the use of Pinyin here is not so much as a script in itself as it is just a way to get kids past the characters they don’t know.

Still, does anyone know if this is going to become the new standard for Pinyin? Or is it just a single publisher’s idiosyncrasy?

——–

*Instantspeakchinese puts it succinctly (h/t Sinosplice, where John follows up with some other good comments on tones):

Rule 4: Rules concerning the word “yi.”

• “The word “yi” is 1st tone when used as part of a number (yi, er, san, … shiyi).
• The word “yi” is 4th tone when preceeding 1st, 2nd, or 3rd tones. (yi ge ren)
• The word “yi” is 2nd tone when proceeding a 4th tone.

For some reason that’s always been hard for me to incorporate into everyday speech, and I continue to make mistakes.

Most advanced students of Mandarin, even if they’ve never dabbled in Classical Chinese, will probably have seen the famous sentence 君君，臣臣，父父，子子 (CTP) from the Analects at some point during their studies. This is Confucius’s reply to Duke Jing of Qi’s enquiry about the essence of good government, and means “Rulers act as rulers, ministers act as ministers, fathers act as fathers and sons act as sons.”

This sentence is often upheld as an example of a process in Classical Chinese which turns nouns into verbs without any change in form, known in linguistic terms as zero-derivation. In 君君, for example,  the first 君 is a noun meaning “the ruler”, and the second 君 is a verb meaning “to act as a ruler”, derived from the noun 君. Both are pronounced as jūn in Mandarin, and thus it appears the noun 君 has indeed been verbed without any change in form.

But when analysing the grammar of early Chinese texts, we should be careful not to jump to conclusions based on readings in Mandarin, which are of course completely different from the original readings in the language of the Spring and Autumn Period. To be certain that a verb was derived from a noun without any morphological changes in form (which is to say, by zero-derivation), we need to look at the reconstructed pronunciations of the noun and the derived verb. This is necessary because recent research into the phonology of Old Chinese, a language phase slightly earlier than Classical Chinese, has made it clear that derivational morphological affixes were a feature of at least some early Sinitic languages/dialects, which are however generally speaking not reflected in the script.

We cannot, therefore, be certain that what appears to be zero-derivation in this famous passage was, in fact, zero-derivation (and not just normal derivation by morphology which is not reflected in modern Mandarin) without reference to the massive body of literature on the historical phonology of the Sinitic languages. 君 君 may well be pronounced as jūn jūn now, but what about two thousand years ago? The advances made in the field of Old Chinese phonology mean views on syntactic and morphological analysis of the early Sinitic languages such as those put forth by William Dobson in his Early archaic Chinese: A descriptive grammar (1962) are now no longer tenable. He writes:

In short, a description can be extracted from EAC [Early Archaic Chinese, i.e. Old Chinese] material of the morphology and syntax of the language, without reference to its phonology, because the script system is based upon an empirical, and empirically useful, morphemic analysis of the language. (p. xviii)

Now that we know the script system does not fully and accurately reflect morphology in early Sinitic languages, analysing their grammar without reference to their phonology can no longer be done. All the same, in the case of 君君 at least, it appears that the theory suggested by the Mandarin reading is true, for a reading *kun is given for both the noun and the derived verb in Axel Schuessler’s ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese (2007). It seems unlikely, then, that this will have been different in the slightly later language phase of Classical Chinese, by which time derivational morphology was probably already on the way out. At least, that’s my, admittedly limited, understanding. Thoughts?

This just popped up on Twitter from @freddint via @raykwong. It’s a dictionary of Cantonese slang used by gang members, dated 1994 and intended for law enforcement. From the file:

The purpose of this project is to provide a “starter” dictionary that can grow with additions from law enforcement officers investigating Asian criminal activities as well as academic and community sources interested in Asian gang culture.

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What is the popular view of the Chinese language(s) in English-speaking countries? I’m interested in the answer, but I don’t think I have any good intuition anymore.

And of course there’s not just one answer. The popular view varies depending on where you look. At the Hanzismatter level, the perception is that Chinese is a bunch of mysterious strokes and dots and boxes. On the other hand, lots of folks in more international circles realize at least that Cantonese and Mandarin are different Chinese languages.

You might suppose a BBC radio program would be closer to the latter, so when Language Log recommended one recently, I decided to listen*.

But now I’m torn.

I want to like the program. It talks about nuances of Chinese that don’t get much air in the popular English-language media. For instance, it talks about Chinese computer input with Pinyin and about how kids start first grade by learning Pinyin. This is already way more depth than the “Chinese characters communicate meaning directly” kind of nonsense we usually hear. Continue…

For those interested in a non-hanzi-script-in-China challenge, surf on over to Randy Alexander’s new Echoes of Manchu post, where his pics show some “Manchu” script that’s not far removed from some “Chinese” tattoos. He didn’t say it directly, but I’m sure the usual prize money is involved for successful explication of the text.

Snide comments have a way of getting outed sooner or later. But since a couple of months had passed since I compared Chinese characters to English spelling, neither in very favorable light, I thought I’d gotten away with this one:

I nominate 练 vs 炼 for membership to the Unnecessary Distinction in Hanzi category. Both say liàn and both mean, roughly “exercise” — as in 训练，锻炼.

And I had gotten away with it — until yesterday, when 练 vs 炼 got a public defender who noted* some quite different senses of 练 and 炼. Fair enough, I’m not trying to say there’s no difference. I’m saying that

1. Chinese characters make lots of distinctions in written language that do not exist in spoken language. [This is not remotely controversial]
2. I am claiming that, in many cases, they do this for no good reason [this is sure to be controversial] Continue…

Qian Nairong 钱乃荣 is a pretty big name in the world of Shanghainese. He’s compiled a dictionary or two and is fairly respected for his work with Wu. And he has a blog.

The following is from a post he wrote at the end of December giving different linguists views of the relationship between dialecs/languages (“fangyan,” basically) and Standard Mandarin. They’re a couple quotes from YR Chao 赵元任. More are available here.

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