Then you might respond the same way folks did to the 1977 proposed-but-never-accepted “second round” character simplifications. I mentioned these a couple of posts ago in response to a hand-painted sign that used one of the rejected simplifications (仃 for 停).

Apparently the nu speling wasn’t well received.

Thanks to Zev Handel, who volunteered his scans in the comments, we now have a fuller picture of what was proposed. In the pics below, the simplifications are on the left and the original(s) on the right in brackets. Continue…

The latest post on the (highly recommended) China Media Project site has some fascinating history and analysis on phrases from China’s “discourse on greatness.”

A whole new set of terms is emerging in China to describe the country’s growing national power. Taken together, these form what might be called a “discourse of greatness,” or shengshi huayu (盛世话语). China’s discourse of greatness includes such terms as “China in ascendance” (盛世中国), “the China path” (中国道路), “the China experience” (中国经验), “the China pace” (中国速度), “the China miracle” (中国奇迹), “the rise of China” (中国崛起) and, last but not least, the “China Model” (中国模式). Continue…

I’ve been approached by a few people in the last week asking about the books I’m using. I said I’d do a quick post to list the ones I’ve got once I was back from the spring festival break. Well I’m back, so here are the books. Note a number of them may be philosophical in focus.

古汉语常用词词典
　ISBN: 978-7-540-31066-0

古文语法　－　史存直
　ISBN: 978-7-101-04585-7

古代汉语　－　王力
　ISBN: 978-7-101-00082-5

文言文启蒙读书　－　杨振中
　ISBN: 978-7-532-62950-3

Classical Chinese Reader, Book I
　No ISBN. Too old.

A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese
　ISBN: 978-0-673-02270-6

Those are the main ones, though I end up buying another about once a week. I also have a couple copies of the 古文观止, plenty of copies of 老子，孔子，孟子 et cetera.

There are also a few dictionaries around that aren’t mine but that I use. So no information on them in this post.

Suggestions? I’m open to other texts.

Size certainly matters, when it comes to making handwritten characters look pretty on the page. Take a look at this second grade diary entry: Continue…

One of my grittier walks in Beijing meanders through crooked streets where the most common sign advertises, in glorious neon, “成人用品24h” [chéngrén yòngpǐn / Adult Products]. So when I stumbled across this No Parking sign*…

… 禁止仃车 (jìnzhǐ tíng chē), in which the third character is 仃 instead of the proper 停, I immediately assumed it was an uneducated mistake propagated by one of society’s fringe characters.

But it turns out to be a fringe character of a different sort. Continue…

Thanks to a song performed a this year’s New Years Gala (as well as earlier performances), the term 亚克西 yàkèxī has once again popped into the vocabularies of the netizens. It’s a very rough transliteration… translogisation?… erm, well it’s the closest you’d get to the Uyghur word for “good”. The actual word is of course not quite “yàkèxī”.

First some background on writing Uyghur. At least in China, there are two systems for writing the language. The one you’re more likely to find online is called ULY, Uyghur Latin Yéziqi, or Uyghur Latin alphabet. The other, modelled on the Arabic script as used in Persian, is called UEY, Uyghur Ereb Yéziqi, or Uyghur Arab script. I’ve written before on xiaoerjing on transliteration with uyghur (here and here), and the information is readily available on Wikipedia, so I’ll skip the details here. The third option, though far less common in China, is the use of the Cyrillic alphabet. This is more often found in the former Soviet states where a large number of Uyghurs reside.

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Every learner of Mandarin has, at some point in time, been stymied in their attempt to ask: Is the sentence I just uttered grammatical? The stymying* response is usually along the lines of this: “Welllll, you could say it that way, but maybe you should say it like this.”

You: “But is it grammatical?”

B: “Or you could say it like this…”

You: “Suàn le” (算了 = fuggedaboutit)

Before you start thinking that this is somehow unique to this language community, though, consider that you might just be at the point of trying to ascertain the unknowable. Check out these Chomsky sentences and then visit Jabal Al-Lughat‘s followup post on them Continue…

Most of what follows is the product of several discussions I have had over the past few weeks with Naxi scholar Dr Li Jingsheng 李静生, former researcher at the Dongba Culture Research Centre here in Lijiang.

When we think of Chinese character classification, I guess it’s normal to think mostly of the preface to Xu Shen’s  许慎 Shuowen Jiezi 说文解字.

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From a business standpoint, I don’t fault the NBA at all for playing to the China crowd. Naturally they get a player to try out some Mandarin

video here

(h/t truthfromfacts — I’d never find the video on my own, since, truthbetold, I have a hard time telling one ballgame from another)

Two moderately noteworthy items from the video:

1. Dwayne Wade, to my ear, gets most of the tones right most of the time in his multiple renditions of gōngxǐ fācái. Beginner’s luck? Without any further info, I’d argue not. He might just have an ear for this kind of thing. There’s no doubt that most complete beginners get the tones completely wrong when trying out a Mandarin phrase.
2. The newscaster is from… where? You have to watch to the end of the video clip to here her switch to Mandarin. My guess, purely on accent, is that she did not grow up in China, although Mandarin might be a native language for her.

I seem to remember, but can’t find it now, a good post someone did recently about how it’s silly to learn gongxi facai if you’re coming to the north. If anyone remembers this, I’d appreciate a link.

I’ve recently been directed to the blog “autonomous region”, new as of this past December. It’s a fairly Uyghur/Xinjiang centric site, with a fair number of posts on the music of the area. But that is only a portion of the content so far. The about page says it is “a personal weblog on music, images, travel, and translation of the Uyghur people in Central Asia. “

A couple posts in particular caught my attention, both regarding the use of 古丽 gǔlì as a catch-all name for Uyghur women.

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