Hanyu pinyin is a pretty easy system of romanization to learn.  There are very few “rules” that stray from its connection with Chinese phonemes.  One of the rules is that the final iou is contracted to iu (unless there is no initial, in which case the i changes to y).  Other than for the sake of brevity, I’m not sure why this rule was adopted, but sometimes we can see the original pop through as a mistake.

My younger son was writing his journal today about Alice in Wonderland, which we saw yesterday, and after him telling me that he thinks it’s not good to write pinyin when he doesn’t know a character, and me telling him that that’s one of the best uses of pinyin, he wrote how Alice, after drinking water from a little bottle, “jiòu biàn 小了”.

It’s not just China that has debated romanization. In a number of other countries and times, romanization has both succeeded and failed. The following bit is from an article by İlker Aytürk called “Script Charisma in Hebrew and Turkish: A Comparative Framework for Explaining Success and Failure of Romanization“. Continue…

Digraphia is DeFrancis’s term, I believe (please correct me if it was coined by someone else). In The Chinese Language he says,

This term is intended to suggest a parallel in writing to Ferguson’s well-known concept of “diglossia” in speech: the use of two related but quite different forms of speech, High and Low, in different situations.

I was struck by the completeness of Serbian digraphia as reported by John Wells, first quoting from Wikipedia:

“Serbian is a rare and excellent example of synchronic digraphia, a situation where all literate members of a society have two interchangeable writing systems available to them.”

and then anecdotally

On the streets of Belgrade some advertisements or names of businesses are in one alphabet, some in the other. The same shop window may display written messages in both. Many road signs show names of destinations in both, first in one and then in the other, thus for example Београд Beograd. Continue…

In the States I once worked with a group of programmers who were all (mainland) Chinese. During one of their daily arguments over some point of software architecture, a colleague (with zero background in Mandarin) asked me: “So what does ‘nèige’ mean?”

As probably everyone reading this blog knows, it literally means “that” or “those” but it’s far more commonly used as a parallel to “uh” or “well”. In linguistic terms it’s a disfluency, a filler — something you say when you’re thinking about what to say next.

Since we use fillers a lot, it’s funny but maybe not all that surprising that nèige is one of the first individual words that a non-Mandarin speaker would pick out of a conversation that is otherwise, to them, just a stream of sound.

It makes me feel a little better about my own astounding disfluency. On my most recent Beijing Sounds post I noted that what I said during the first few seconds of speech with a cab driver seemed to contain a huge number of neiges. Now that I count them up, it’s even worse than I thought:

Total: 70 words (at least the way I split them up in the Pinyin)
Nèige: 10 instances (14%) Continue…

While reading the Lùnyǔ, I came across a grammatical feature of classical Chinese that I hadn’t noticed before: 也者. Apparently, when offering interpretations, you can put 也者 after the noun, verb or adjective that you are discussing, as opposed to merely using 者, the normal particle of nominalisation. The Chinese Text Project (CTP) database returns 318 hits for the combination 也者, and it’s found in almost all major works from the late Spring and Autumn period and the early Warring States period. Here are some examples, with links to the relevant CTP pages that provide the entire text, an English translation and a link to its dictionary that can give you Pīnyīn readings and useful, albeit not perfect, glosses (to see these, click the blue button).

純也者，謂其不虧其神也。(Zhuāngzǐ)

夫達也者，質直而好義，察言而觀色， 慮以下人。(Lùnyǔ)

友也者，友其德也。 (Mèngzǐ)

或也者，不盡也。(Mòzǐ)

This made me even more curious: why didn’t the author simply use 者 in these sentences? So I turned to Edwin Pulleyblank’s Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. No luck there, however, as I was unable to find anything on 也者. I then grabbed my copy of 古代漢語語法學 by 李佐丰, a wonderful 550-page reference grammar. As with many Chinese academic works, there is frustratingly no index, but after a couple of minutes I found a bit on 也者 and two example sentences, on page 258. It devotes a majestic 19 characters to 也者, explaining that in sentences where speakers offer their own interpretations of a concept, 也者 rather than only 者 can also be used after the subject.

Of course, I’d already figured that out myself, so that wasn’t really helpful. Does anyone know if there’s been any further research into the differences between 也者 and 者 in this context? And is there a difference in meaning between 也者 and 者也, which also seems to be used in similar contexts? Is 也 a topicalisation particle in both cases? It would be good to find out more.

By the way, I’ve still got quite a few topics I plan to discuss in the coming weeks, but if there’s anything you’d like to see a post on sometime, be sure to let me know in the comments!

lǐ fángpái chèi qù guà te wùzi fa? Continue…

While killing an afternoon in Henan last week I decided to go with my father to a Daoist temple. The photo below is from the temple, called 中岳庙 / 中嶽廟 (Zhong Yue Miao) and found at the rather wide-reaching foot of Mt. Song 嵩山. Note the five glyphs/characters/symbols at the top.

Continue…

Victor Mair has an article on Language Log that discusses a favorite Sinoglot topic: the scope of language in China. The information on Tibetan is fascinating:

Tournadre estimates that there are 220 “Tibetan dialects” derived from Old Tibetan and currently distributed across five countries: China, India, Bhutan, Nepal, and Pakistan. In a forthcoming work, Tournadre states that these “dialects” may be classed within 25 “dialect groups,” i.e., groups that do not permit mutual intelligibility. According to Tournadre, the notion of “dialect group” is equivalent to the notion of “language,” but does not entail standardization. Consequently, says Tournadre, if the concept of standardization is set aside, it would be more appropriate to speak of 25 languages derived from Old Tibetan rather than 25 “dialect groups.” Continue…

Porfiriy over at New Dominion has translated an article on Mandarin-Uyghur bilingual education. Here’s a snippet:

The so-called “bilingual” education policy, based on forcing Uyghur children to speak Chinese, has aroused intense discontent among Uyghur intellectuals both within and outside the Uyghur homeland. Critics draw attention to the potential of “bilingual” education to threaten the normal development and healthy thinking of immature children and accuse bilingual education of being a planned and deliberate assimilation policy. Continue…

I’ll bet someone’s internet manifesto already contains this commandment: Link to original documents if possible.

I seem to recall something like that; it’d be great to have a link.

The reason this is important in the context of China is that — in the course of translating, paraphrasing, and summarizing from one language to another — sensitive subjects often get filtered. In the direction of English to Chinese they might get filtered quite literally by the censorious eye. Black and White Cat and others document this kind of airbrushing quite nicely. In the direction of Chinese to English, words sometimes get a dose of rhetorical viagra, all the better to serve a particular constituency.

This kind of thing is unavoidable. But, but… if everyone would just link original sources, eventually someone besides the unfaithful translator might go back to the original in a disinterested way, to look at what was actually said and write it thus.

In this way, linking becomes a Good Thing in and of itself. I may have my biases in translation — I may not even know that I have them, right? — but if I link to the original source I’ve opened my work up for criticism and am prepared to consider alternatives. Continue…