Live in the capital of China too long and you start to get suspicious when there’s not a crowd. So not long after lunar new year when I walked into my usual barbershop and found it empty, I asked the owner if business was looking down.

“Oh we just opened today after the holiday.”

“But then I’d have thought you’d have customers lined up to come in!”

“You’re not supposed to get your hair cut during the holiday.”

Hmm. And that from the same proprietor who’d sell hair conditioner to the bald. He half-laughed, and then he said that in Beijing they say

正月不剃头，剃头死舅舅
Zhēngyuè bù tìtóu, tìtóu sǐ jiùjiu
During the first month don’t shave your head or your uncle will die* Continue…

This is part 2 of 2 in a semantic space series about the bowlness of bowls, or the plateness of plates. Part 1 here.

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Next time you consider that one-word gloss in your Chinese-English dictionary,

碗 wǎn N. bowl

pause for a moment to contemplate this:

A couple weeks ago, when I invoked topology in the context of semantic spaces, I had no idea that the next discussion of semantic space would come from two objects that share the same topology. If you still want to vote on whether the object in the pictures above is a plate or a bowl, go back to the post with the survey. Otherwise, read on for results. Continue…

I’m not really sure how common this otherwise is, but for a while now I’ve been noticing a number of instances of intentional character replacements.

For example, all down the southern part of Hongmei Road 虹梅南路, whose name means “rainbow plum road” but is homophonous with “red plum road”, you’ll find places using the rainbow character in their Chinese name but then translating it as “red” for the English. There’s a housing complex called Red Hill in English but 虹山 in Mandarin.

There are also a number of places in Minhang 闵行 using the character for the Min 闽 nationality/language. A couple months back I bought some fruit at 闽行水果店 on South Lianhua Road 莲花南路, also in Minhang and not too far from Red Hill.

It’s surely a case of the frequency illusion. It’s highly unlikely that this isn’t limited to Minhang, but rather that I just first started to really notice it there.

I’m curious about other examples. If you have any, leave them in comments. I’m also curious as to why this is done, aside from the Chinese love of homophony. I’m having trouble thinking of any similar example in English that wouldn’t be immediately met with an eyeroll.

[Update:

Please see followup post and discussion here.  You can still vote, below, but I’ve closed comments on this post so everything can go to the followup post.]

Line up! Vote early, vote often. No one needs to register. Bring your spouses, kids and friends. Since Sinoglot readership is probably biased towards non-native speakers of Chinese, Zhonglish speakers please get your native-speaking friends to take a look at these pics and the question below:

Discussion coming soon, as soon as we have enough votes. The only rule is to please answer the question only for your native language! Continue…

This is a tangentially relevant response to Syz’s “Tang minus -ng, Tan minus -n“. More so it’s an addition to the comments on that post. Make sure you’ve read that and heard the audio.

Jiangnan (江南) is the name of the region around Shanghai. It’s every speck of Sunan (苏南, Southern Jiangsu province) south of the Yangtze (长江 chang jiang), plus Shanghai and northern Zhejiang province. It’s alternatively called Huaiyang, but more so as a cuisine and with less connection to language than the name Jiangnan. People from the area are traditionally Wu speakers, and as such their Mandarin is heavily tainted by Wu. One of the characteristics of a Jiangnan accent is an inability to distinguish between the nasal consonant sounds (/n/, /ŋ/, /ɲ/) in word endings. Thus for many speakers, words like “tang” and “tan” might be spoken exactly the same, however it’s far less common with -ang/-an endings.

Continue…

In his Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar, Pulleyblank (1995: 31) says that verbs of “giving, telling, teaching and the like” are ditransitive in classical Chinese, which he defines as the written language used roughly between 500 and 220 BCE. He states that in classical Chinese, the first object (OBJ1) of a ditransitive verb corresponds to the indirect object in English, with the second object (OBJ2) expressing the direct object.

This is indeed true for most sentences that contain a ditransitive verb, but not for all of them, or so it seems. I will first quote some of Pulleyblank’s examples, give some further examples, and then show there is at least one sentence which seems to do things the other way around. While writing this post it turned out ditransitive and indeed tritransitive verbs in the language of the oracle bones are complex enough to deserve a post in their own right, so that’ll be for next time. If only as a reminder that we should perhaps not complain too much about the vagaries of classical Chinese syntax…

Pulleyblank’s rule seems to hold…
First of all, some examples quoted and translated by Pulleyblank. Pulleyblank’s work does not include glosses, so I’ve included links to the relevant paragraphs in the Chinese Text Project (CTP) database. Its dictionary is still a work in progress, so for the odd place where its definitions do not seem to make sense, don’t hesitate to resort to a paper dictionary. Sadly, there are no good online classical Chinese dictionaries yet.

[…] 授孟子室。 (孟子，公孫丑下)
[…] to give Mencius a house.

[…] 能與人規矩 […] (孟子, 盡心下)
[…] can give a man a compass or a square […]

For these examples certainly, Pulleyblank’s rule that OBJ1 expresses the indirect object and OBJ2 the direct object holds true. And indeed, it is not difficult to find more examples in the CTP database. A search for 與 yields, among others, the following:

子華使於齊，冉子為其母請粟。子曰：“與之釜。”請益。曰： “與之庾。”冉子與之粟五秉。(論語， 雍也)
Zi Hua being employed on a mission to Qi, the disciple Ran requested grain for his mother. The Master said, “Give her a fu.” Ran requested more. “Give her an yu,” said the Master. Ran gave her five bing. (tr. James Legge)

由今之道，無變今之俗，雖與之天下，不能一朝居也。 (孟子， 告子下)
Although a prince, pursuing the path of the present day, and not changing its practices, were to have the throne given to him, he could not retain it for a single morning. (tr. James Legge)

…but there are exceptions
On the other hand, some passages seem to require a reading of OBJ1 as the direct object, with OBJ2 expressing the indirect object. Take a look at this sentence from the Zhànguócè 戰國策:

今王之地方五千里，帶甲百萬，而專屬之昭奚恤。 (戰國策, 楚策, 楚一, 荊宣王問群臣)
And now the King has a territory of over twenty-five million square miles, and a million soldiers, and he entrusted them all to Zhāo Xīxù. (Note that 地方 is not to be read as a compound. Wáng 2008: 111 explains the first phrase should be parsed as [[今][[王]之[地]][[方五千][里]]].)

Here, 之 is in OBJ1 position, but clearly expresses the direct object, and the OBJ2 昭奚恤 is undoubtedly the indirect object. So it appears that the rule Pulleyblank describes does not hold for all cases of ditransitive verbs expressing transfer of ownership.

It is possible that we are looking at a scribal error here. But perhaps there is more to it. 屬 does not seem to have been used as a ditransitive verb all that often. Perhaps this could be the reason for its unexpected behaviour, taking a direct object as its OBJ1 and an indirect object as its OBJ2.

Or perhaps it is used causatively: “He made it (OBJ1) belong to 昭奚恤 (OBJ2).” Does anyone else know of sentences where verbs that are usually not ditransitive are used causatively and take two objects? I imagine they would be few and far between, but would be interested to see any examples.

More on ditransitive and indeed tritransitive verbs in early Chinese languages next time. And a hat tip to Chris for pointing out the inconsistency in the Zhànguócè to me.

Pulleyblank (1995). Edwin G. Pulleyblank. Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995.

Wáng (2008). Wáng Lì 王力. Gǔdài Hànyǔ 古代漢語 [Ancient Chinese]. vol 1. Běijīng 北京: Zhōnghuá shūjú 中華書局, 2002.

With a first-ever (experimental!) poll at the bottom of the post, and with apologies to Garfield minus Garfield…

If Mandarin lost its -n and -ng suffixes overnight, would we all be eating phlegm and spitting candy tomorrow? It sure looks that way if you’re relying on a superficial view of Pinyin. I mean, once you take off the -ng and -n, what’s to stop you from doing tricks like this?

吃糖 = chī táng, eat candy
吐痰 = tǔ tán, spit phlegm / spit

morphs into

吃痰 = chī tán, eat phlegm / spit
吐糖 = tǔ táng, spit candy

But as any student of Mandarin phonetics knows, the /a/ in táng is not the same as the /a/ in tán. So as the -n or -ng fade out, which they are fond of doing in some people’s speech, the listener still has the vowel to help make the distinction. Continue…

I’m writing this while on the subway. I’ll of course have posted from somewhere else by the time you’ve read it.

A father and child are standing in front of me. The kid was admiring a rather bright light and saying “light (灯 dēng)” while pointing, in order to get his father’s attention. As his father looked, the subway doors began to close as the warning chime rang. Or dinged. Or denged in this case.

As the door went 噔噔, 噔噔* the kid went 灯灯, 灯灯.

– – –
* also dēng

This recent article by Ben Blanchard at Reuters states:

This week the government launched a new project to develop a vocal database of all China’s dialects and languages, to assist with preservation efforts.

I’ve written to Ben to see if I can find out more. In the meantime, if anyone knows about this, please comment! [UPDATE: he did write back and I’ve updated the story on this post] The rest of the article is a depressing but familiar read about the societal and family pressures that are resulting in parents not speaking to their children in their own native language. While the article is about China it could as well be almost anywhere in the world. Continue…

I recently found a stash of Tibetan books in my local Xinhua. By ‘stash’ I mean four different books: two grammar readers, a children’s puzzle book and a Tibetan/English translation of Buddhist poetry. But beggars cannot be choosers, especially when it comes to Tibetan books outside of Tibet proper.

The puzzle book, published by the Tibetan People’s Publishing House in 1996 for the grand old price of 2.2 RMB is extremely cool; it’s bilingual Tibetan/Chinese, and full of little games no doubt designed to entertain Tibetan kiddies (with the aim of helping improve their Chinese literacy, it would seem).

Continue…