Sinoglot has mentioned the curious idea (entertained by some speakers of Chinese) that the language has “no grammar.” It’s a pretty widespread feeling, often among folks you’d think would know better. Just to balance the scorecard a bit, here’s one bigwig law firm partner who begs to differ. Not only does Chinese have grammar, but newly arrived attorneys mess it up:

我们招聘的时候，很多都是先问英语好不好，但我看实际上很多人连中文都没写利落。… 最差的是连语文都没过关，因为法律文件，不管中文英文，为了表达清楚你的观点，就会写长句。这时候往往连主语、谓语、宾语都搞错了，犯很多语法上的错误。有时候我觉得这种事情很好玩，就是有些人写英文的时候，还会特别注意语法，但他写中文的时候，就不注意了，就像讲话一样。

When we’re recruiting, there are a lot of questions about whether someone’s English is good or not. But really a lot of people don’t even write Chinese well. The worst thing is their language isn’t even up to standard, because in legal writing — doesn’t matter whether it’s English or Chinese — in order to make your points clear you might end up writing long sentences. And then the subjects, predicates and objects all have errors. Sometimes I think this kind of thing is really funny: I mean there are people who are very careful with English grammar who pay no attention when it comes to Chinese — writing just like everyday speech. Continue…

Just had a brief but interesting linguistic exchange in a taxi. The driver was talking to us in Shanghainese. We were responding in a mix of Shanghainese and Mandarin. At one point the conversation veered off into what follows.

Driver (in Shanghainese Wu): … You said XX road near XX road, right?
Friend #1 (in different Wu dialect): Yeah, XX and XX.
Driver (in Wu): So… if I speak in Shanghainese, can you understand?
Us (in Mandarin): Yes / Yeah / Just can’t speak it.
Driver (in Mandarin): That’s ok. If I spoke in English you wouldn’t be able to understand it.
Driver: “bala bala chashy malagaba gaba. pasha katoo batabatee mala mala mala.”
Us: … ?
Me (Mandarin): Um… this is us up here.
Friend #2: (Wu): Yeah stop up here.
Driver (“English”): zang kayoo mala machee.

That is, “thank you very much.”

Clearly done in jest. At any rate, always interesting to see what English sounds like to non-English speakers.

Unfortunately I didn’t have the recorder running for this, and by the time I got my phone to the right setting, it had mostly passed. His English gibberish was truly priceless.

Sinologistical Violincellist does a fine job, as usual, of digging into what might have been said by North Korea recently. It has shown up in Business Week, for example, as “unprecedented nuclear strikes” — their quotation marks.

But where’s the original source? Missing in action, so far. So SV takes the indirect approach and translates a Chinese report on the same incident as:

“进一步加强自卫的核遏制力…”
strengthen the power of [our] self-defensive nuclear deterrent

He notes that this milder version doesn’t prove any case that North Korea wasn’t as provocative as reports suggest. It may just as well be Chinese media oversight directing writers to tone down the rhetoric. In either case it clearly shows the need for some original sourcing. Continue…

Language geeks love discussing taboo avoidance. It’s an opportunity to say the damnedest things, all in the name of furthering knowledge. Maybe that’s why Language Log has covered taboo avoidance in English so hilariously and extensively.

China’s taboos extend way beyond bad words, of course, so avoidance is something of an art here. But the following form, from the first line of a language discussion board message, was new to me:

有人问“⿱入肉”字的读法
Yǒu rén wèn “⿱入肉” zì de dúfǎ
There are people who ask how to pronounce “⿱入肉”

[Update: what’s in quotes above should look like this

apparently some fonts don’t render the dotted 日 properly] Continue…

On my second-grade daughter’s worksheet the other day.

Is this common in Chinese classes for foreigners? There’s also something like an oral version of this that I’ve heard her playing (with her mother or grandmother) from time to time. If I ever get a good recording I’ll post it.

It’s kind of amusing, but pedagogically it strikes me as a waste: awfully rote compared to much of the stuff they do and are capable of at this age.

If anyone has different versions of this, you can send them to me (bjshengr <at> gmail <dot> com) and I’ll add them to the post.

Whatever the reason for this unexpected behaviour of 屬 in the sentence discussed in my previous post, we can take comfort in knowing that the syntax of the language of the oracle bones (± 1500-1000 BCE, the Shāng 商 dynasty) was far more complex still. According to the account given by Yù (2002: 20-21), it features tritransitive sacrificial verbs, with OBJ1 indicating the person on whose behalf the sacrifice is being made, OBJ2 indicating the spirit to which it is made, and OBJ3 indicating the sacrificial items. And its ditransitive sacrificial verbs can take any of six assignments discussed below, although it is not clear from Yù’s examples whether any given verb always takes the same assignments. Shěn (2002: 79-122) seems to suggest that is not the case.

Sadly, Yù’s account does not include glosses, which made this post rather hard to research. I did not have an oracle-bone dictionary at hand, so I had go to the National Central Library here in Taipei. And even their dictionaries didn’t define all the characters used in Yù’s examples, which are in modern characters and thus structurally different. So I assume I probably just couldn’t find them. Anyway, this certainly makes it difficult to confirm his analysis, especially for a beginning student such as myself. If any readers are more familiar with the language of the oracle bones, please don’t hesitate to correct the mistakes I have certainly made. In the examples quoted below, I’ll only quote and gloss the relevant verbs and their objects, not the entire sentences.

A) OBJ1 = personal matter, OBJ2 = spirit
求生妣庚 ‘ask Bǐ Gēng for longevity’
V 求: not defined in any of the dictionaries, but the later meaning of ‘ask’ seems to fit.
OBJ1 生: ‘longevity, to live’. Direct object.
OBJ2 妣庚: ‘[an ancestor]’, probably the wife of king 大乙. Indirect object.

B) OBJ1 = spirit, OBJ2 = personal matter
祝夔事 ‘pray to Kuí for instructions’ (not employment, if this is the king praying?)
V 祝: ‘to kneel before a spirit and pray, name of a worshipping ritual’
OBJ1 夔: ‘[an ancestor]’. Indirect object.
OBJ2 事: ’employment, service, instructions’. Direct object.

C) OBJ1 = spirit, OBJ2 = sacrificial items
御母庚牢 ‘sacrifice cow(s)/sheep to Mǔ Gēng’
V: 御 ‘to sacrifice’
OBJ1 母庚: ‘[an ancestor]’, probably the mother of king 大乙. Indirect object.
OBJ2 牢:  ‘cow(s)/sheep used in sacrifices’. Direct object.

D) OBJ1 = sacrificial items, OBJ2 = spirit
燎白 羊豕父丁妣癸 ‘[burn] one hundred sheep and pigs for Fù Dīng and Bǐ Guǐ’
V 燎: not defined in the oracle-bone dictionaries, but the later meaning of ‘to burn’ does not seem an unlikely reading.
OBJ1 白羊豕: ‘one hundred sheep and pigs’. 白 was used to write both the word for ‘white’ and the numeral, but white pigs do not exist, or so I think. Direct object.
OBJ2 父丁妣癸: ‘[two ancestors]’. Indirect object.

E) OBJ1 = personal matter, OBJ2 = sacrificial items
寧風三羊三犬三豕 ‘[???] three sheep, three dogs and three pigs for the wind’
V 寧: only defined as ‘peaceful, composed’ in the dictionaries I consulted, which does not make sense here. Yù says it is a sacrificial verb, which would probably rule out reading this as ‘to calm down’.
OBJ1 風: ‘the wind, [name of a spirit]’. Unsure whether this means the wind was worshipped, but that’s not really relevant here either. Indirect object.
OBJ2 三羊三犬三豕: ‘three sheep, three dogs and three pigs’. Direct object.

F) OBJ1 = sacrificial items, OBJ2 = person
卯十牛年 ‘to sacrifice ten cows for [a good] harvest’
V 卯: ‘to kill an animal as a sacrifice’
OBJ1: 十牛 ‘ten cows’. Direct object.
OBJ2: 年 ‘harvest’. Indirect object.

A quick summary of the structures seen in the above examples, then:
A) V-DO-IO
B) V-IO-DO
C) V-IO-DO
D) V-DO-IO
E) V-IO-DO
F) V-DO-IO

Among these, structures A, C and D are all quite common, according to Yù. There’s only one known sentence for assignments B and F, however. Yù also notes that normal verbs of giving, which might be expected to work differently from sacrificial verbs, can also be observed to take V-IO-DO and V-DO-IO assignments in the oracle inscriptions.

From the examples given in Yù, then, it looks as if the V-IO-DO word order, which is quite firmly established in the texts commonly accepted to have been written from the late Zhōu 周 dynasty onward, was not yet universal in the language of the oracle bones. Shěn treats the subject in quite a bit more detail than Yù, but I do not have the time nor the space to summarise his work here. What’s important here is that from a quick glance through his work, it seems to me his analysis is consistent with Yù’s.

Shěn (1992). Shěn Péi 沈培.  Yīnxū jiǎgǔ bǔcí yǔxù yánjiū 殷墟甲骨卜辭語序研究 [Research into the word order of the oracle inscriptions from the ruins of Anyang]. Táiběi 臺北:  Wén​lǜ​ chūbǎnshè 文律出版社, 1992.

Yù (2002). Yù Suìshēng 喻遂生. Jiǎjīn yǔyán wénzì yánjiū lùnjí 甲金語言文字研究論集 [Collected essays on the language and script of the oracle bones and the bronze inscriptions]. Chéngdū 成都: Bāshǔ shūshè 巴蜀書社, 2002.

I know you’ve all got character peeves. You must, because I do, and I’ve got all the visual aesthetic of the Generic Brand product line manager. The character 罚, for example, always seems strained to me, with the lower half looking like one of those typesetting snafus where a single word gets j   u   s   t   i   f   i   e   d across an entire line.

You probably already read about it, but it’s hard to keep Google’s very public withdrawal announcement out of any blog that involves foreigners and China. I don’t know if it’s evidence of anything, but to find a news result in Chinese I actually had to go search Baidu this morning instead of Google, even though the subject is clearly on the minds of Google China searchers [highlighted search suggestion: 谷歌退出中国 = “Google withdraws from China”]:

Continue…

In the discussions that started Sinoglot, my cobloggers and I were all adamant about emphasizing that we’re not a comprehensive resource for the languages of China. We don’t want to mislead folks into even thinking that’s an aspiration: hence the word “eclectic” in our approach to China and language.

But hardly a day goes by that I don’t wish I knew more, e.g. the other day when I came across Evenki, a language spoken along the Russian border by (at least formerly) nomadic folks for whom, as Bruce Humes pointed out, ” ‘Russia’ and ‘China’ are rather abstract terms.”

With my own ignorance in mind, there’s a bit of cold comfort in seeing this rather plaintive question posed on a message board I frequent: Continue…

As Syz will attest, children are a lode of linguistic gold.

One Chinese grammar pattern I find especially interesting, mainly because it is so much more flexible than its English cousin, is called a complement of result. The English version belongs to a structure called a predicative complement.  An example is she called him an idiot.  The verb called is followed by two noun phrases, but they are not both objects, as would be the case in I gave Sally my book.  The noun phrase an idiot is a property that is assigned to the object him in that clause.  In English, predicative complements can be noun phrases, like an idiot, or adjective phrases, like stupid (she called him stupid).

In Chinese as well, complements of result are a kind of predicative complement that can be an adjective phrase, like 我吃饱了 (wǒ chī baǒ le; I’m full), 他累坏了(tā leì huaì le; he’s exhausted), or 玩儿腻了(wánr nì le; bored of playing (with this)).  All of them show the state of something after something happens; you eat until you’re full, are tired to the point of exhaustion (note that 累 is an adjective—adjectives can serve as complete predicates in Chinese), you play with something until you’re bored of it.

But they can also be verbs! Continue…