Victor Mair
- Website: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/mair
Posts by Victor Mair:
- Seattle Times: "Those weird and wacky Windows 8 ads: What language are they in?"
- Forbes: "Microsoft's Asian Windows 8 Ads Are Relatively Insane"
- Mashable: "Windows 8 Releases Kooky Ads in Asia — But in What Language?"
Tabudish and the origins of Mandarin
In the comments to "Shanghainese", a lively discussion on the relationship between the Wu branch of Sinitic languages and early Mandarin has ensued. Quoting South Coblin,
This reminds me … of something Jerry Norman was wont to say, i.e., that there were three good criteria for identifying Mandarin and deciding how old the family is. These are the concurrent presence of the third person pronoun tā, the negative bù, and the subordinative particle de/di. Jerry called languages of this type “Tabudish”, and he sometimes used this name for them in correspondence with me. Read the rest of this entry »
Biden at Penn: did the Vice President insult the Chinese nation?
The Tea Leaf Nation online magazine posted this article on May 19, 2013: "VP Biden’s Penn Commencement Speech Inspires Viral Rant by ‘Disappointed’ Chinese Student." The article, by Xiaoying Zhou, offers an excellent account of this tempest in a teapot (as it were), and the comments that follow it are also germane.
Still, a closer look at what the angry student, Zhang Tianpu, actually wrote will help us put the controversy in a clearer perspective. Read the rest of this entry »
Racist Park
Liwei Jiao sent in a selection of signs from a Chinese website that was originally part of a collection assembled in the Daily Mail. We've seen most of these Chinglish signs before, and have already discussed several of them over the years. But this one is new, at least to me, and unusually inept:
Shanghainese
Just yesterday, in "The enigmatic language of the new Windows 8 ads", we saw how delicate and uncertain is the comprehension of forms of Chinese that one is not intimately familiar with. A significant part of the problem is the result of a psychological barrier to understanding that comes from unfamiliarity with the context and content of what is being said. Thus, even though there was a considerable amount of Mandarin spoken in the videos of my post about the Windows 8 ads, of the scores of native speakers whom I consulted, no one could pick it out from the stream of sounds they were hearing.
The most important obstacle to intelligibility, of course, is the sheer difference (in grammar, syntax, phonology, vocabulary, etc.) among the topolectal varieties of Chinese. In this post, to show how dissimilar Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is from one of the most important Sinitic topolects, we shall look closely at a text composed in rather colloquial Shanghainese.
The enigmatic language of the new Windows 8 ads
Everybody has been puzzling over the language of the series of online ads for Windows 8 that it recently released in Asia.
Native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean declare that it is not any of those languages. The first time I listened to them, the ads sounded as though they contained elements of some Wu topolect, a bit like mangled Shanghainese, but I could also definitely hear bits of Mandarin, albeit with unusual tonal contours and slurring. What was most perplexing of all to me was that, although I was certain that the ads contained Chinese phrases and sentences, every Chinese person to whom I showed them emphatically maintained that they could not understand a single word! In contrast, several non-native speakers of Mandarin said they could pick out a word of Chinese here and there. Read the rest of this entry »
Unknown Language #7: update
In "Unknown Language #7", I described the case of a woman in a refugee center in Kathmandu, Nepal who spoke in an unidentifiable tongue and who wrote in an odd mixture of languages and scripts. The post generated a large number of comments (173 at last count), with a tremendous amount of helpful information and analysis being shared by Language Log readers.
Now I have just heard from Son Ha Dinh, who first brought this case to my attention, that — with the help of Language Log readers and the diligent efforts of his colleagues — the identity of the woman has been determined. Read the rest of this entry »
"Chinese" well beyond Mandarin
A topic which I have raised here and elsewhere a number of times is that of Sinitic topolects and languages (www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf), and I have also called attention to the increasing domination of Mandarin in education and the media. Even native speakers within China sometimes don't appreciate quite how varied the Sinitic group of languages can be. People often say that someone can move from one valley to the next, or one village to the next, and just not be able to make themselves understood. But until you've been in that situation yourself, it doesn't really hit home. Before long, I'll post on Shanghainese and will provide audio recordings that will demonstrate clearly just how different it is from Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM). There are countless other varieties of "Chinese" that are just as different from each other as Shanghainese (or Cantonese or Taiwanese, for that matter) are from MSM. Read the rest of this entry »
Safety Handybar
This marvelous device is the pride of Hang Fung Industrial Co. Ltd of Shantou / Swatow, Guangdong Province, PRC. Here's a basic introduction to the tool:
Useful assistant tool Can helps some arthritis, the waist, the knee, the pregnant woman and also The luo river to solve the question. Multifunctional tool Multifunction tool for the accident situation security, reliable for the Escapes from the broken glass window and the safety belt cut off.
This information is provided under "Product Details" at this website.
Looking at the picture of this enigmatic tool and carefully reading over the explanation of its supposed uses only left me deeply perplexed, so I had no choice but to go in pursuit of yet one more Chinglish snark. Read the rest of this entry »
Bad odor are prohibited here!
David W. Donnell has brought this signage from Chinatown, NYC to my attention:
"From Forsythe Street." (VHM: that should be "Forsyth Street.") Read the rest of this entry »
Grilled sexual harassment
David Craig sent in this photograph and asked "What does it really say and why doesn't it?":
Hands, hands, two hands
Here's part of a page from a Chinese exercise book for learning English, with a student's notations added in blue ink:
Ramps, chives, garlic, and other members of the Allium genus
Four days ago, I had never even heard of "ramps" (in the sense of a vegetable), but on Friday the 26th, I had a great revelation. That morning I went up to the Swarthmore COOP to replenish my larder, which had been pretty much emptied out before I left on a trip to Kyrgyzstan and Turkey. Right while I was standing in the produce section contemplating whether to buy kale, baby bok choi, broccoli, spinach, asparagus, or some other vegetable, a lanky Irishman (I could tell from his accent) brought in two big bags of greens, the likes of which I'd never seen before. Read the rest of this entry »
Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet
The Dungan people are a group of Sinitic speakers whose Muslim ancestors fled to Central Asia (mainly in parts of what are now Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) over a century ago when the Qing (Manchu) government suppressed their revolt (1862-1877), one of many Muslim uprisings in the course of Chinese history since Islam arrived in East Asia during the Middle Ages.
When they came to Central Asia, the Dungans were mostly illiterate peasants from northwest China who spoke a series of topolects from Shaanxi, Gansu, and other areas. From 1927 to 1928, they wrote their language with the Arabic alphabet, and from 1928-1932 they used the Latin alphabet. In 1952-53, the Soviet government created for the Dungans a writing system based on the Cyrillic alphabet, which they continue to use till today.
He / she / it / none of the above
I missed this article in the Chinese edition of China Daily when it first appeared on June 20, 2012, but it raises an issue that is sufficiently important to warrant addressing now that William Steed has kindly called my attention to it:
"Qián Jīnfán: 84 suì hòu kuà xìngbié 'rénshēng de cànlàn qī cáigāng kāishǐ'” 钱今凡：84岁后跨性别 “人生的灿烂期才刚开始” ("Qian Jinfan: 'the most glorious period of a person's life only begins' after age 84 when one transcends gender")
Jumbled Chinese
I knew it wouldn't be long before someone came up with a Chinese equivalent to alphabetical typoglycemia:
