The measure word for smells….

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Anyone know 黛二, dài èr?

黛 itself isn’t that common. Maybe you know it from 黛绿, which the ABC Dictionary has as

dàilǜ attr. dark green ◆ id. beauty in full dress

That’s the only two-syllable word containing 黛 that I find in any dictionary, although it does appear in some foreign names, e.g. 史黛西 (Shǐdàixī) for Stacy. But I find nothing with 二. So why has 黛 hooked up with 二 in Jun Da’s corpus of “general fiction”, to compose bigram #1427 in frequency, the mysterious “黛二”?

Yes, I know it doesn’t matter. Yes, I know the Jun Da corpus has all sorts of limitations, and you often find oddball names and bits of party slogans in the bigram analysis at ridiculously high frequencies (e.g. the corpus also has the bigram 方怡, who Google images seems to indicate is a glamorous person I probably should’ve heard of).

But usually I can at least figure out why the bigram exists. Not so for 黛二. Is it a name, maybe a name from a different language? (That’s my daughter’s guess — you can only imagine what it’s like to be a ten-year-old whose father takes away from homework time to talk about corpora). A mistake?

It’s not as if #1427 is rarefied atmosphere for bigrams. 黛二 is preceded by 开车 (kāichē = drive a car) at #1426.

Any ideas, short of digging into Jun Da’s corpus itself?

Nèi doesn’t get much respect. Here in Beijing it’s undeniably the pronunciation of choice for 那  except when 那 is a pronoun*. But you wouldn’t know that by looking at most books: 那 maps to nà as surely as Beijing will officially meet its air quality goals for 2011. If you say it often enough it must be true, right?

It’s a dumb habit made even worse by the fact that the nèi/nà distinction in everyday speech so nicely shows different grammatical usage. Where 那 is a pronoun (A, below) it’s pronounced nà. As an adjective (B), though, it’s pronounced nèi.

A. 那是你的
nà shì nǐde
that is yours

B. 那件大衣是你的
nèi jiàn dàyī shì nǐde
that overcoat is yours

So why mix things up by pretending that it’s always pronounced nà? It’s not as if there’s no precedent for a Chinese character having more than one pronunciation… Continue…

Anyone who knows me knows how much I like graphical display of language. Some people call that “typography”.

I’ve been in Korea for the past few months, and I’m leaving tomorrow, at least for a little while. Before I go I thought I’d share a few of my favourite instances of lettering I’ve seen around Seoul and Busan. Some of these I liked for what they say, or how they look, or just because they’re representative of hangul calligraphy. Of course most of this is hanzi. A couple of these photos are from friends. Most are from my phone.

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Yesterday Syz posted about living examples of character simplification. Literally moments before he published the post I sent him a photo I’d just taken outside the immigration office in Seoul:

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There’s nothing better than mile three of a glorious late fall trek through Beijing, when the winds have brought a respite from the usual bong backwash that passes for air, and the green grocers have graciously provided a living example of character simplification, especially one as logical as

That is: 大白菜 (dà báicài is what I would call napa cabbage) but with 菜 written as 才+艹. Continue…

Can you call it a secret if everyone knows and no one cares?

Since 2007 I’ve blogged under the pseudonym Syz (the initials of my Chinese name). It started out with the best of paranoid intentions — in the early days I once begged Victor Mair to take down a Language Log reference to my real name, and he was kind enough to indulge me.

After a while, though, the pseudonym became a habit there didn’t seem to be any reason to break. Sure, practically anyone I had an email exchange with quickly learned my real name, but that was all the more reason not to make any big deal of it.

And I’m not trying to make a big deal of it now, it’s just that I want to get it done. Why? The most important reason is that Kellen and I are about to unveil a project we’ve been working on. It will involve a lot of online and offline collaboration and it just makes sense to use real names from the start. I want to get the Real Name Unveiling out of the way beforehand so it doesn’t add any noise to the project launch.

Then the immediate reason is like this: The good Steven Daniels of the Mandarin-learning blog Lingomi included me in an interview series he’s doing. The interview is up now, and in the introduction he mentions my first name… so what the heck, gimme a 干杯: Steve Hansen.

I’ll eventually get around to updating the About pages and so forth, but I’ll continue blogging using Syz here and on Beijing Sounds, just cuz he’s kind of grown on me.

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Update next day, since Claw was bored enough to do the sleuthing to match me to a photo…

Hi!

Note: This is an update of a post from May 2010 that never saw the light of day. It originally included audio, but with the recent passing of my computer, that’s been lost. Still, it’s an interesting topic (to me at least) so I thought better to post than to delete.

I’ve had the fortune these past few weeks while working on a few small projects, mostly for Sinoglot, to come into contact with some languages I’d previously given little thought to. One of those is Gan.

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You may not have heard of Sabriye Tenberken. I hadn’t. Unless you’re interested in Τіbеt studies and have a reason to learn Braille. It’s the combination of those two things that she’s now known for.

She’s got an interesting story, which I’ll sum up by pasting from Wikipedia:

Sabriye was born near Bonn, Germany, and she became gradually visually impaired and completely blind by the age of thirteen due to retinal disease. She studied Central Asian Studies at Bonn University. In addition to Mongolian and modern Chinese, she studied modern and classical Tibetan in combination with Sociology and Philosophy.

As no blind student had ever before ventured to enroll in this kind of studies, she could not fall back on the experience of previous students,so she developed her own methods of studying her course of studying. It was thus that a Tibetan Braille script for the blind was developed in 1992, which became the official script for the blind in Tibet.

Tenberken’s organisation, Braille Without Borders, is pretty damn cool. Their goal is to help educate visually impaired people in underdeveloped areas, which in many cases would involve creating a Braille script for the language of that area. With Τіbеtan Braille, it’s now the standard for the area. I’m a fan of standards when they allow for uniformity in education.

Unfortunately it’s somewhat difficult to find the full chart of Τіbеtan braille online. I even checked Tenberken’s book “My Path Leads to Tibet” on Google Books. No luck. If anyone has a chart that they can direct me to I’d love to see it.

A friend pointed me to a discussion on Quora about why foreigners in China don’t like 大山 (dàshān), [I was going to describe who that is, but if you don’t know who that is, go read something else].  I clicked on a link to Mark Rowswell’s (the guy who “plays” 大山) activity page and started reading some of the things he had to say, being very interested since he was saying them as Mark Rowswell, and not under the highly-censored-by-the-Chinese-media character of 大山.

I was shocked by how much one of his answers read like a perfect Chinese undergraduate English major’s writing assignment. Continue…