Sinoglot

fuˈʦɑʊ

2010-09-01T17:05:31Z

Accent pop quiz:

You go to one of the many offices at your school or workplace. These are offices that deal in official business. Administration type stuff.

The nice but somewhat overly energetic woman behind the counter makes demands regarding an item referred to as “fuzao” (IPA: /fuˈʦɑʊ/)* which she’s expecting you to produce.

1. What is it she’s asking for?
2. Where is she from?

Answers in the comments, please.

- – -
* It might have also been /ɸ/ in place of /f/, though in this case it was pretty clearly labiodental and not bilabial.
edit: I changed some of the IPA for readability purposes after initial publication of this post, dropping a bar and using in a ligature for /ts/. I know it’s non-standard. We do that around here from time to time.

Xinhua recycling program

2010-08-31T02:22:39Z

It’s always good to see that the news business is getting the most out of its content producers.

Here’s an article from a textbook of mine, publishing date 2006:

And here’s the Xinhua article (link) from October 2007:

The titles differ by one word and the articles have changed a word here and there, but they’re virtually the same.

I know, I know, it’s hardly the first time this kind of thing has happened in the news business. It’s just that it’s more fun when it happens close to home. Here are the details, side by side:

Source: Textbook for foreign learners of Mandarin

Title of article: Learn to make use of food products to regulate your mood (学会利用食品调节情绪)

Date: April 2006 (book published)

Source: Xinhua

Title of article: Learn to make use of foods to regulate your mood (学会利用食物调节情绪)

Date: 2007.10.25

In Xinhua’s defense: October 2007 was pre-financial crisis, pre-Olympics — pre-history, practically, so you can hardly blame them for reaching deep into the files during a slow week. Still, you’d think they might have picked something a little newsier.

But Sinoglot’s about language, not about creative re-use of language, right? Well the only reason I even discovered the online article is that I was curious about the “expert” quoted in the article:

帕特里克 • 霍尔福特
Pàtèlǐkè Huòěrfútè
Patrick ??? ___ford [update: thanks, Tony, for finding the answer within 10 minutes of the time I posted. See his comment below for the spoiler]

The article was such nonsense I wanted to look up the fellow to see if he was anyone of note in the nutrition business. Apparently, though, 霍尔福特 is either not that common a name or not that common a hanzification of a common name. Searching Google you get mostly references to various Fords, since 福特 (Fútè) is how that’s written. Then if you search using quotes around “霍尔福特”, one of the first results is actually the Xinhua article above and several other plagiarized versions of the same article.

None of which satisfy my original curiosity. Who’s 霍尔福特? Anyone know if there’s a database somewhere dedicated to foreign names written with Chinese characters?

Unhippest Mandarin word

2010-08-23T23:44:08Z

Forty-year-old, fashion-blind, popular-press-eschewing recluses are generally excused from petty infractions of regulations against fuddiduddiness.

But some violations are inexcusable, apparently. So when I used the word 语言伙伴 (yǔyán huǒbàn, “language partner”) in a piece of writing the other day, my language partner grimaced. Her correction went something like this:

“Maybe you could just use the English word, ‘language partner’.”

“But isn’t the whole point to write Chinese?”

“Or you could use LP.”

“And Chinese speakers would know what ‘language partner’ or even ‘LP’ means?!”

“Well, my friends would. Nobody uses 语言伙伴. It’s sounds so, well, weird — kind of like some old-fashioned made-up word.”

I couldn’t get a more nuanced explanation out of her, but clearly, no matter how straightforward the translation looked, this word was not going to work for a design student in her early 20s.

I changed it. But as I did, I started doubting my sense of the connotations even in English: hell, maybe an American 20-something would find “language partner” just as cringeworthy, an unholy alliance of terms that borrows a bit too much from the ‘marriage lite’ associations of the second word.

Oh well. Since much of my vocabulary is that of a Beijing woman in her late 60s, it’s probably not the unhippest Mandarin word I’ve ever used. Anyway it got me thinking: maybe we could build a list. I don’t have much off the top of my head, but one word I realized I had to change when I moved to Beijing permanently was my use of 计算机 (jìsuànjī) for “computer”. 电脑 (diànnǎo) is the hip term here, as far as my experience goes, except from aforementioned late 60s mother-in-law.

Got better ones?

On the English name

2010-08-23T02:22:39Z

A quick post while I incubate some others in the works. Yesterday I was served at a nearby Tea Storm by Judy and Andrew. Not their legal names to be sure. It reminded me of something I’d meant to look into.

I know plenty of Chinese who use their English names among their Chinese friends. But does this happen the other way around? I never use any of the Chinese names I’ve been given. When someone uses one to refer to me, I usually ask that they just call me Kellen.

Are there people who use a name assumed for life abroad? I admit I do this in the Middle East where I’m not Kellen Parker but كمال بركة (Kamāl Baraka). It’s close enough and easier for people to say. But that’s not the same as asking people to call me the equivalent of Apple of Blackman (not kidding on that last one). And I certainly don’t have my non-Arabic speaking peers call me Kamāl.

I’d love to hear anyone’s stories of Westerners using significantly different names borrowed from time abroad.

“Illiterate”?

2010-08-22T01:50:39Z

Even if you don’t drive yourself, in Beijing pretty soon you learn to spot the xīnshǒu (新手), literally the “new hands”, the greenhorns, the folks that made it through cryptic questions and an irrelevant “road” test and now possess that coveted, slightly-too-big-for-a-credit-card-slot, laminated green card that entitles them, for the next six years…

to drive around the 47 cars waiting in the left turn lane and position themselves in front of the first car, even if that means placing themselves in the middle of an intersection during a red light
to reverse for 500m in the right lane of the freeway after passing the exit ramp they decided was appropriate after stopping and deliberating (in lane) for several minutes
to maneuver their car through a 10-minute long, 17-point U-turn on a street hardly wide enough for bicycle traffic

I don’t believe that exhausts the possibilities.

[For the record: None of us should scold this behavior. You know you're happy when your cab driver does it.]

The funny thing about new drivers is that their presence is advertised all over the place. The ubiquitous 实习 (shíxí = “in training”) sticker is required by law for a year after you get your license. But it’s usually pretty useless for spotting the newbies. The real “new hands” you can identify by their body/vehicle language: hesitant, so very hesitant; stopping for no reason; proceeding in reverse as if they’re on a bomb defusing assignment.

So it was kind of amusing, while waiting an eternity for one such “new hand” to pull out from a parking spot, to see that it had this bumper sticker:

You’ll just have to believe me that it says “才上路，让让我把”. This is what you get by combining the world’s worst photographer with a rainy windshield.

Cái shàng lù, ràng ràng wǒ bǎ
just on road, yield a bit to me [roughly word for word]
New to the road, give me a bit of a break [rough gloss]

Feel free to help fix the awkward translation of 让让. “Yield” is too imperative — I think overall the bumper sticker has kind of a cutesy “forgive my awful driving” feel to it.

But what caught my eye was the 把. Hey, shouldn’t that be 吧 (used in imperatives to give a “how about it” sense)?

My first informant thought I’d mis-remembered and that it said 一把, which would make it a measure word and mean something like “give me a break this time“. But there’s no 一, and as the picture and my daughter (who was in the car) are witness, it really is 把.

My second informant was more dismissive: “should have been 吧 — it’s just illiterate.”

Seems unlikely to me, but what do I know. Ideas?

Loosey-goosey characters

2010-08-24T02:12:18Z

Whilst on an informative jolly around Shaoxing’s lántíng 兰亭 (orchid pavilion) in the sweltering heat, I came across the following stele:

It reads 鵞池 é chí, ‘goose pond’ (it probably loses something in translation). The guide told me that the é is a painstaking reconstruction of a character written by Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361), whilst the chí was written by one of his descendants. And aparently Wang loved geese because he felt that, in profile, they resembled the shape of the character 之 in his name.

Anyway, you’ll notice that Wang’s é has the 我 and the 鸟 in different places compared with how we normally see it. What’s going on? Well, Mrs. tour guide told me that the normal horizontal line up (鹅) isn’t particularly aesthetic and the vertical line up (鵞) gives the character a better balance in Wang’s beloved cursive script (行书) – especially in the traditional vertical columns – so that’s why he ‘invented’ this new way of writing it.

She then went on to say that Chinese calligraphy doesn’t demand that you pay too much attention to how things are supposed to be written, what counts is what looks good, because it’s an art form. But according to the Kangxi Zidian http://www.kangxizidian.com/kangxi/1491.gif, and the Taiwanese Ministry of Education’s Variant Character Dictionary (异体字字典) http://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/yitia/fra/fra04732.htm, 鵞 is listed as a variant character. 鵞 is also used in Japanese and Korean, so I’m guessing it was an early import from China. Was this variant born out of a desire for proper calligraphic balance? Or is that just a nice little story to tell tourists?

If a variant character is a character that has the same phonetic and semantic values as the original, only a different form, are all characters written differently for aesthetic effect variant characters? What about a character written wrongly by accident?

Museum Signs

2010-08-11T15:32:05Z

The Chinese writing system is incredibly efficient, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a pain to learn and we all forget how to write the odd character from time to time, but you can cram so much into such a small space. It’s not just things like the Analects which, in translation, require lines of English to represent the briefest of the sage’s utterances; even making simple arrangements by SMS/text message seems so much more convenient in Chinese.

Then, as Bryan pointed out, there are signs in your local hospital which protrude unreasonably far, simply so that they can helpfully accommodate the English translation.

Watch out. That thing could take your eye out!

I guess this all first came to my attention whilst wondering around museums and other tourist attractions. The sign below is pretty typical.

To my eyes, the sign is dominated by English. Just a handful of Chinese characters do the job.

Occasionally one would see lengthy pieces explaining the history of a monument in some detail, but the accompanying English text would be laughably brief. Obviously, you just couldn’t fit that much on the signs without the foreign language overwhelming the whole show.

But does Chinese really compress more information into a given space?

Perhaps we can do a little experiment, if you’ll indulge me.

If we take an article, on a general topic, for which a translation is readily available, and place the English and in Chinese texts side by side, we might then adjust the font size of the texts until each occupies approximately the same surface area. If we then step back and gradually approach the texts, one would imagine that one of the texts might become legible before the other. This would be a crude test of which language required the greater space to convey a given amount of information.

So, in the interests of linguistic inquiry, I have borrowed an article from the website of the British Embassy in Beijing, in English and Chinese. And, for the sake of harmony, there’s a second article, from the website of the Chinese Embassy in London, in Chinese and English. Apologies to readers less familiar with simplified Chinese characters. I will set up a similar experiment with traditional (non-simplified) characters, should there be demand.

Before you rush to enlarge the following two images, please read on.

Upon clicking each image:

Immediately move away from your screen to a distance from which you *cannot* read the text at all (maybe 3 metres or 10 feet).
Move slowly toward the screen until you can *just* begin read a few words or characters.
Try to read *both* texts without moving your head any closer to the screen and note how far you can read and with which text you read further.
Advance, a little at a time, trying to read both Chinese and English, until you find a comfortable reading distance.
Make a mental note of places in the texts that cause you problems.

Click on the first article and retire to a safe distance.

Now the second article:

Please leave a comment with the following information.

The language, English or Chinese, you consider yourself to be normally better at reading.
As you first approached the screen, the language you were able to start reading first. (for each article)
As you moved closer, the language which became comfortable for you to read first. (each article)
Any other information you think relevant (e.g. words or characters you found most difficult to identify).

Pinying Issues

2010-08-10T00:09:01Z

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m planning a trip to Korea this year. After failing to find truly cheap airfare, I ended up buying from one of those online sellers where the price looks great and then you’re suddenly hit with a thousand kuai in “fees”. I’m still working through the bitterness.

It turns out there were still some issues once the ticket had been purchased. The flight I had signed up for didn’t actually exist. They were kind enough to email me and let me know though, offering an alternative flight at close to the original time.

The original flight I had was to land in Gimpo 김포, and the only other one I knew of was landing in Incheon 인천. Gimpo is in a better location but either would work. The problem was that the new flight was to land in Rengchuang.

Rengchuan? What?

Oh, 仁川. I was doing my best to not read it as Mandarin as I have a tendency to do when confronted with new words in Korean. Turns out that was the wrong thing to do. Not only that, but that extra g pretty much killed any ability I might have otherwise had to make sense of it. 仁川, rénchuān, is the Mandarin reading of the hanja (漢字) that in English we spell Incheon. Having known the hanja would have probably helped as well. It wasn’t until I emailed the agent back to ask where the hell Rengchuan was that I realised the mistake.

But here’s the thing. The misspelled pinyin is in their system. The new timetable I was given was not done by hand. That means that this company, a Chinese company, is daily seeing on their computers mis-spelled pinyin.

As a Shanghailander I have a particular appreciation for this particular n/ng issue. My regional friends don’t make the distinction in speech and so I have a great many words where I couldn’t tell you if it was an -n or -ng final syllable. Put it with another like 应该，因为, and I’m just dead in the water.

It’s got me wondering about how common this mistake, or in fact any other pinyin mistake, is in the world around us. Despite typing with pinyin, and possibly thanks to the availability of fuzzy pinyin input methods, most people don’t really think with pinyin. They’re oblivious to it almost every minute of the day. And again at least with my friends who grew up in or around Shanghai, asking them how to spell a word won’t give you much consistency when it comes to nasals in syllable final position.

Have you seen other examples of pinyin being mis-spelled in a place where it should have been noticed by now? It’d be great if people had photos of such mistakes.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

2010-08-11T02:05:19Z

I’ve just had a week on the road with a bunch of guys, a sports team, to be a little more precise. I’ve been coaching them for about eighteen months and we’re all on pretty familiar terms, but this is the first time we’ve all been away together.

We travelled from home in NE China, down to the South – 30 hours plus on the train. Plenty of time for everyone to get into the tour spirit.

Having played various sports for most of my life and having been on a number of tours, I ought to be pretty familiar with how these things pan out. And sure enough, this tour was like most others; plenty of laddish humour, lots of card playing, a certain amount of drinking. People take up various roles in the group; the worrier, the flirt, the joker, the quiet one, the leader, the guy who can never find his stuff, the one who’s always last to breakfast.

Then there’s always tour language. Maybe someone says something really dumb on the first day and it becomes a catchphrase for the tour…

…or maybe one of the group has an unusual accent and this becomes much imitated.

And so it was. They all did their impersonations of me. Some just occasionally, some near incessantly. It was kind of amusing; sometimes flattering, sometimes pretty uncomfortable, but mainly just intriguing to hear how I sound to them. I only managed to capture a few phrases on the final day and here they are:

你好吗？

就到这里吧

放松点吧

[Descriptions of above recordings added, 11 Aug 2010. Sima]

I’d love to pretend that I never say any of these things and that it certainly sounds nothing like me, but I guess the big question is…

Is this clear evidence of girlspeak?

But beyond that, does anyone have any experience of being mimicked? Is there a general comic accent which most people would recognise as the foreigner speaking Chinese? Would anyone care to describe what they hear in the above recordings that sounds foreign?

Next Monday, Next Week

2010-08-04T08:40:17Z

In the schadenfreude category, here’s an example of a college-aged native Mandarin speaker mis-parsing a sentence that would have been clear if it had been spoken or if writing with Chinese characters indicated word boundaries.

I wrote:

我下星期一直跟小孩在家

I meant:

（我下星期）（一直跟小孩在家）
(I next week) (continually with kid at home)
Gloss: “I’m home with my kid all next week”

But she read:

（我下星期一）（直跟小孩在家）
(I next Monday) (continually with kid at home)
Gloss: “I’m home next Monday with my kid”

The central ambiguity is in how to parse these four characters: 星期一直. Is it (i) or (ii)?

星期一 (Monday) plus 直 (continually)
星期 (week) plus 一直 (continually)

Now if I were more careful writer, I might have included a comma after 星期, week, or something to indicate that 星期 was to be read as a word separate from the next character. But in meager defense of my intended meaning, I wrote the text on a Sunday which meant that in accordance with a Chinese week, “next Monday” would actually have been “tomorrow”. That would have been an odd way to phrase a request to meet tomorrow.

And in fact, when I told my correspondent that I actually meant “all week” she responded sheepishly that her original interpretation didn’t make much sense and that she had been riding on the subway, somewhat distracted, and not paying attention.

So where’s the schadenfreude? Maybe it’s just me. As a non-native speaker I’m always mis-parsing and misreading sentences because of word boundary issues. My mistakes are usually laughably dumb, mis-parsings that a better reader would never make. This one was fun just because it is living evidence that the ailment is not just my own and not just limited to non-native speakers.

Still, this can hardly be the best example of Mandarin mis-parsing by native speakers. Anyone got others from real life? I seem to recall whole series of jokes that relied on mis-parsing, but I can’t seem to find a single one right now.

——–

FYI: Lots of good comments about Mandarin word parsing on this post, including the idea, which I now heartily believe, that the syllabic nature of Chinese characters makes them much easier to parse without spaces than Englishwouldbeifitwerewrittenwithoutspaces.