My daughter (PBS), now 8, has been Mommy’s girl since day 1. Sure, Dad is a reasonable substitute when Mom’s not around. And we did have a long honeymoon last year when I moved to Beijing after a several-month stint of separation. Still, I’ve got no illusions about where her center of gravity is.

Even so, I draw the line at being discussed as if I’m not there. So the other day after I’d told her to clean her toys off the stairs — and added a long, dull parental lecture about how someone might slip and break open their skull — and PBS responded by looking at her mother and saying…

爸爸在说什么？
Bàba zài shuō shénme?
What’s Daddy saying?

… I groused at her: “Why don’t you just ask me instead of talking to your mom as if I’m not here.”

“But Daddy,” she countered, “I was talking to you!”

Then it struck me: she could have been talking to me. That is, a perfectly grammatical translation could also be:

爸爸在说什么？
Bàba zài shuō shénme?
What are you saying? [where bàba is a title and used in place of “you”] Continue…

Syz and I were placing orders at a coffee house in Shanghai recently when we both heard something a little odd. I ordered my mocha and he a latte. The woman behind the counter repeated the order, speaking his instead as “natte”, at least how we heard it.

Sure enough, there on the menu it read “Latte 拿铁”, ‘na tie’. I’ve never really taken the time to learn much more than “mocha” when it’s come to coffee, so it wasn’t something I’d seen before. Firing up Karan Misra’s “Qingwen” CC-Dict on my iPhone, again we read 拿铁.

Continue…

In the previous post I talked about punctuation in the 道德经. This is the response post.

Randy said:

Your “Buddhist” reading is very interesting. It seems to ring true with the paradoxes in the rest of the text. I wonder if there is any strong reason not to consider such a translation.

As Daan said,

My two cents: perhaps 道可道非常道 cannot be parsed as [[道可][道非]][常道] because for the sentence to mean “The Dao that is and the Dao that is not, that is the Eternal Dao”, as you suggested, you would expect [[可道][非道]][常道]. After all, if we parse it as you suggested, in 常道 the adjective precedes the noun, but in 道可 and 道非 it does not.

Which is right on the money, it turns out. The reason the “Buddhist” reading doesn’t work is basically because the grammar of Guwen doesn’t really work that way.

I’m told that to someone who’s really familiar with classical Chinese, there’s actually little difficulty in knowing when one thought ends an another begins, thanks to the use of 也, 者 et cetera.

Much of the rest of the discussion was on specific words and how they’re used in the verse, but more for the philosophy than the language, so we’ll skip it here.

Just to remind all you northerners, as you stamp the slush off your boots and wait in your traffic jams, that only a few weeks ago, actually prior to the unprophetically-named Spring Festival, you could have stumbled across this in your xiǎo qū (小区 = apartment complex):

For those outside of China, using plain water and a brush to script away the hours is as common a park activity as frisbee in the US. This was my first sighting this year, and I was struck by the clarity and durability of the characters visible even with a cell phone camera and an incompetent photographer. Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t do handwriting unless it’s of the second-grade variety, so I’ll offer Sinoglot subscription extensions to the first commenter to elucidate the text itself.

UPDATE: Prize has been claimed! Thanks, Ahkow, for the text from 千字文, and for the warning that you have to read from left to right.

As soon as you step into first grade in a Chinese elementary school, you are required to keep a journal for the teacher to check.  This continues until you graduate from high school.

My older son (9) doesn’t like to talk a lot, and hates writing, and can’t see the point in this exercise.  I constantly have to give him ideas, and throughout the two month winter holiday I just let him copy paragraphs from an encyclopedia of the animal world, just to keep his hand moving.  Continue…

I’ve just been to see Avatar in all its nauseating 3-D glory. I’ll spare the review at this stage, but something caught my ear.

For anyone familiar with the film, I apologise for the following description.

At some point, in the first half of the story, on an alien world, an interloper (American, would you believe) encounters a bunch of locals (aliens, no less). Now the aliens have their own alien language (helpfully subtitled) and wouldn’t be expected to speak English, but then one of them addresses the interloper in English. A surprised interloper turns around and asks:

“Where did you learn to speak English?”

Or at least, that’s probably what happens. Continue…

I was cleaning out all my camera phone pics as I switch phones, when I came across the image below from a Shaanxi 陕西 restaurant here in Shanghai.

Continue…

In one of my classes this term, an independent study really, we’re going over the 道德经 chapter by chapter, going over all the little details of each word and possible translations. I’ll be posting on that as the weeks go on.

Thinking about this got me thinking about the issue of punctuation. One of the big issues that comes up in things like Qur’anic interpretation (from my former life before coming to China) is that at the time of writing, there was no such thing as punctuation in the language. Fortunately, Arabic is a highly inflected language and so for the most part it’s really not that much of an issue. But it seems we’re not so lucky with Wenyan, which if I had to describe in a single word, I’d say “vague”.

Specifically I was thinking about the first line of the first chapter of the 道德经. Sans punctuation, it’s as follows:

道可道非常道

Typically this is then broken up as follows:

道可道，非常道。

With some translation like “the Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao”. I recently picked up Victor Mair’s translation which I rather like for the more road-based translation, “The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way”.

However an alternative (Buddhist?) reading could be

道可，道非，常道。

That is, something like “The Dao that is and the Dao that is not, that is the Eternal Dao”. To me at least, that’s not a minor difference. This sort of thing extends throughout classical Chinese philosophy. Maybe not great for the amateur philosopher, but damn interesting to me for linguistic reasons.

I’m not going anywhere with this. I just find it fascinating. The good news is if gives plenty of practice thinking about how sentences and ideas are constructed.

Other examples are welcome.

First, an aside:

It’s bad enough when you catch yourself using the jargon you used to scorn, like in that business meeting where, in the heat of the moment, you come up with, “Right! And there will be great synergy between their brand name and our back-office capabilities.”

Right.

Is the choice of 吗 or 么 — to write Mandarin’s yes-no question particle “ma” — a register issue? Continue…

In English, spelling pronunciations have a long history, sometimes of bitter conflict. I recall a grade school teacher who insisted that “often” be pronounced with /t/ in the middle (ignoring the obvious phonetic parallel to soft->soften).  She was not the only one. This spelling pronunciation has spread to the point that some people — including my own brother, 10 years younger than me — pronounce it that way naturally.

In Mandarin it’s more difficult to call something a spelling pronunciation, because of course the characters give only, at most, a hint about how they should be pronounced. Still, the language is rife with words that are “supposed to be” pronounced one way, yet are almost always pronounced another way. Continue…