Zhū Hǎijuān (朱海娟) is a native Mongolian speaker living in Songyuan, Jilin Province. She was born into a Mongolian speaking family and attended 1st through 3rd grade in Huanaoer Tun in one room with one teacher and all three grades mixed together, a total of about 15 students. All classes were taught in Mongolian. (Though of course as always, Chinese class is taught in Chinese.) Now the little school is no more.
YR Chao (赵元任) is my hero. Aside from being a self-described 常州人 and really getting the ball rolling on modern Sinitic linguistics, we share a university in our academic progession, down to the same department even. I’ve been slowly following him around Asia, though admittedly not in the proper order.
Ironically, the university was originally set up with money the Unites States gave back after the Boxer Rebellion in order to help Chinese students prepare for going to universities in the United States. More reversal. While in Taiwan to visit the school, I saw this:
in March of 2010 I wrote about a form of character substitution I’d seen around Minhang in Shanghai. On Hongmei Nan Lu 虹梅南路 there is a residential community called Red Hill in English but 虹山 in Mandarin. Minhang, written 闵行, often has the name written 闽行 in store names, such as 闽行水果店.
I just saw another example of this, though in this case in Taiwan. A store, either for baked goods or women’s clothing (jet lag prevented me from remembering which) is called “Field of Love” in English. The Chinese name: 艾之天. It was a manufactured sign, and the owner probably went in and bought each character separately (之 being rendered in grass script), so it seems unlikely that laziness was the reason. Being used to some people getting bent out of shape that 愛 is simplified sans-心, it seems too sacred to chop down into 艾.
Some possible reasons were given in the comments of the original post. Now two and a half years later and seeing this again, perhaps someone has other examples to share.
UPDATE: Thanks to ahbin in the comments, I’ve added “Ping Speech” (平话) as a dialect of Cantonese. Its omission was an oversight for which I owe maybe 2 million people an apology. That brings us to 50 “sub-fangyan” (次方言) under the original 7 fangyan. This makes the title of my post obsolete, but what the heck. The sub-fangyan vs fangyan decision follows the basic scheme of the Chinese Language Atlas (中国语言地图集)
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How should Chinese be categorized, linguistically?
Fundamentals of Chinese Dialect Studies (《汉语方言学基础教程》：李小凡，项梦冰) describes how in the first half of the 20th century, the proposed divisions of Chinese increased from four in early scholarship, up to eleven in one scheme. Now most scholars are back down to seven or eight. But between language change and debates about definition, it’s a question that guarantees academic employment for years to come.
7/49 is the plan I’ve just posted on the Phonemica blog. I’m pasting the chart below. Continue…
Copied from a 1997 letter to the editor of the New York Times:
Mandarin Isn’t a Dialect
Published: July 08, 1997To the Editor:
In your July 1 front-page story on the handover of Hong Kong to China, you say that China’s President, Jiang Zemin, delivered his speech ”using a Mandarin dialect as alien to Hong Kong’s Cantonese-speaking people as . . . English.”
Mandarin is no dialect. China has almost countless dialects, and Cantonese is one of them. But Mandarin is the standard Chinese language and the only one that can be rendered accurately in Chinese characters. President Jiang’s use of it in this moment was appropriate and inevitable, even if he might as well have been speaking English — or Greek — as far as much of his audience was concerned.
WENQING CHEN
New York, July 2, 1997
In a previous post I outlined some of the context and conditions of ethnic Chinese in Korea, known locally as hwagyo 화교. This is a follow up to that post.
While in Korea I was fortunate enough to speak to many hwagyo and learn a great deal about the history and conditions as well as the dialect of Mandarin spoken by the older generation. I conducted a number of interviews over the period of a year, mostly speaking with ethnic Chinese who’d grown up in Korea, but also with a number of recent Chinese expats about their own lives in Korea.
The following is an interview with Ethan Chiang, a Chinese who grew up spending time between Korea and Taiwan. This interview was done over email. My questions are bold.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s new movie The Dictator, which I haven’t seen, apparently draws a bit from our neck of the woods. In a recent interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Cohen explains a desire to get away from looking too Arabic in the film. One aspect of this was to create a writing system for Wadiya, his fictional dictatorship.
Conlangs are hard, and good ones, even if just an alphabet, take time. Cohen says in the interview that the short-cut in this case was to borrow some shapes from Manchu. You can see the name of the country on the flag in the image above. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Manchu is referred to by Cohen as a dialect of Chinese. Ah well. Looks like the 方言 argument may have finally spilled over fully into English.
Sorry Randy.
edit:
Here’s a better example than the flag:
With the mercury in Taipei rising incessantly (roads have started melting and all), it seemed as good a time as any to expand the horizons of Sinoglot’s coverage to the Pénghú 澎湖 archipelago, a group of islands in the Strait of Taiwan. Fishing and tourism are the mainstays of the economy on these islands, which are also known in Taiwan for their boisterous religious festivals and the well-preserved local culture.
So, with a little trepidation at flying in a little turboprop plane for the first time, your correspondent bravely went where no Sinoglot post had gone before. It soon turned out that the preservation of the islands’ local culture extends to its language: unlike in Taipei, Taiwanese (Mǐnnányǔ 閩南語 / Táiyǔ 台語) is still going strong on these islands – you hardly hear any Mandarin on the streets, even among the younger generations. I asked a few islanders and they all agreed that almost all kids are still learning how to speak Taiwanese and using it actively in everyday life, again unlike in Taipei.
I spent the last year in Korea doing (among other things) research on the situation faced by ethnic Chinese who grew up in Korea. The Korean term is hwagyo 화교, coming from the hanzi for huáqiáo 華僑, “overseas Chinese”. This is the first in a series of posts that is the result of this past year. This post will provide an introduction, while the following posts will be excerpts from interviews conducted over the past year.
The Korean peninsula is often believed by its inhabitants to be ethnically pure. This sense of identity has provided a foundation for group identity that is shared by ethnic Koreans around the world. It is a source of immediate trust and friendship between Koreans abroad meeting for the first time. Not surprisingly, the history of East Asia does not support the idea of ethnic purity going back for more than a few generations, for whatever that is worth. In truth, Korea, and the Republic of Korea in particular, has a fair degree of ethnic and cultural diversity. Despite historical precedents, changes in national law in the past 15 years have made it easier for foreign nationals to live and work in the country, though in the past year things might have begun taking a turn for the worse.
I’ll venture to guess that most readers of this blog have been in a position to help polish up the English language resume / CV of someone with a Chinese name, either that of a friend or your own.
The question of the day is: how, then, have you presented the name at the top of the document? Continue…