Some might not be familiar with the great W.G. Grace but he was a sporting legend. He dominated English cricket for a good portion of the nineteenth century and tormented many a bowler. Now he torments me.

Grace features fairly heavily in something I’m trying to translate into Chinese. In the English, he’s often referred to simply by his initials, W.G., so I’d like to find a way to do this in Chinese, but obviously it’s not strictly possible.

As far as I can tell, I have the option to call him either:

William Gilbert Grace      威廉·吉尔伯特·格雷斯
Grace                             格雷斯

Surely that can’t be it, can it?

Where the English sometimes says W.G. Grace, sometimes says, Grace and sometimes says W.G., do I really have to say 格雷斯 every time? Continue…

Deerawn asked, in the “learning Chinese” article linked to yesterday:

Why does it seem to be completely taboo to teach a language like Wu, Hakka, Min?

Maybe it was rhetorical. But Kellen takes it beyond rhetoric in Annals of Wu :

I was poking around my long-dormant CouchSurfing profile last week when I realised Wu isn’t an option for languages on one’s profile, though Cantonese is and of course Mandarin as well. So I sent them an email. They asked for the ISO code (”wuu” in this case), a link to the Wikipedia article on the missing language and maybe an explanation beyond that. So I sent it all in, and sure enough a few days later, Wu is now available.

There you have it. Spread the word, drop-down box by drop-down box.

Lameen Souag has a post up at his blog Jabal al-Lughat^* (hosted on Blogspot and thus blocked in China. Apologies to the proxiless) on efforts to preserve a Berber dialect called Tabeldit or in Arabic Shelha شلحة. One method was the creation of an Arabic-Shelha dictionary. I highly recommend taking a look at the post which bring to the front a common debate on the topic of dialect preservation. Namely, the resistance of protection by the very speakers of the endangered language/dialect.

Continue…

Read down to verify that the use of shit is quotative (if gratuitous) here, sorry for the pattern.

The political and personal ramifications of Han Han’s recent post on his famous blog cannot be entirely negligible when it includes quotes like this (translation from C. Custer on Chinasmack)…

I feel we should permit the Fifty Cent Party to exist; everyone has the right to hire someone else to speak for them and those hired have the right to speak anywhere they please. If you can beat Xiao Ming once, and then with the money stolen off of him hire someone to curse him once, that counts as a talent. Every government has a mechanism for propagating their perspective, [so] that is excusable.

Add this to the intro he gave recently to a speech at Xiamen University: Continue…

Deerawn, who more often does translation of fiction, discusses learning Chinese:

I thought doing the foreigner-in-China study program would be some straight bullshit. I pictured myself finger painting characters, dressed as a Qing eunuch, learning to write my new Chinese name. I thought it would be like that unless I did the HSK and started regular undergraduate Chinese courses, but, I was already done two years of an undergraduate degree and my image of studying Chinese literature at a Chinese university wasn’t exactly flattering.

Despite what any beginning Mandarin student will tell you, there’s a severe limitation on the number of available characters, and it’s an historically recent occurrence. Though it’s only been a short time in the history of the language since any real systemic effort towards standardisation has occurred (秦始皇 mythology aside) I believe it to have had a significant impact and a potentially greater impact in the future.

There was once great variety in the written language even during the later stages of modern simplification. Up until recently the only real limitation was the ability to carve a block for printing. Even today some regional characters exist (e.g. 俺 ǎn), though they’re not used in any formal settings, although in at least a couple cases the simplification process took advantage of these regional variations or pronunciations1. Continue…

Each of Masha Bell’s entries at her spelling-reform oriented site, English Spelling, reads a bit like this:

… he covered himself with his buckler, couched his lance, charged at Rozinante’s full gallop and rammed the first mill in his way. He ran his lance into the sail, but the wind twisted it with such violence that it shivered the spear to pieces, dragging him and his horse after it and rolling him over and over on the ground, sorely damaged.

I love a good tilt at the windmill, and part of me believes in the righteousness of the fight, so I keep reading, even though I’m pretty sure I know how it ends. The blog is also fun because nearly every entry could be written practically identically for Hanzi. In fact, just for kicks, here’s her latest entry with a few substitutions: Continue…

Lazily borrowing everything from Language Log, I offer up “mistakeholders” for contemplation:

The people who have come to rely on features that are actually implementation errors are called ‘mistakeholders’.

My assertion: there has GOT to be an example of a Chinese character created in error through mis-copying, mis-remembering, what-have-you, that subsequently was accepted into the realm of legitimate hanzi. The existence of such would make us (users of the script) all mistakeholders.

Sounds like a job for a hound of hanzi history. Anyone?

Does the launch of the World Loanword Database (WOLD) solve that pesky “it’s a language / it’s a language family” problem? You know, the one that leads to asserting the existence of mutually unintelligible sub-“dialects” of Cantonese. WOLD says

“Languoid” is a (relatively new) cover term for “language” and “language family”.

The Mandarin languoid, anyone? Continue…

I’ll try not to link too often to blogs you already read regularly, but this snippet of an excerpt from the book Diamond Hill by Feng Chi-shun is too characteristic not to comment on. From Danwei:

He ran an illegal gambling den, and sometimes took Umbrella and me on a tour of all the joints where he had “influence,” including a dance hall in Yau Ma Tei where he talked to the manager in a dialect I couldn’t understand even though it was Cantonese.

So if you can’t understand it, is it a language or a dialect? Continue…