[This is a guest post by David Moser] Just when you thought CCP propaganda couldn’t get more absurd, China Central Television (CCTV) has aired a short TV series in which Confucius and Karl Marx actually meet up for comradely chat about ideology. In typical fantasy time-travel style, Marx simply appears miraculously at the Yuelu Academy […]
Or, to put it another way, in the words of Douglas Hofstadter, Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late AI translators may seem wondrous but they also erode a major part of what it is to be human. The Atlantic (7/13/23) Hofstadter recounts how he spent years of painstaking, hard labor learning more than […]
That's the title of this YouTube video (12:39; 4,572 views Nov 18, 2022) by ABChinese (34K subscribers):
[This is a guest post by David Moser] I happened to notice the following bit of character-shape play on a YouTube site called "Wen Zhao tangu lunjin" 《文昭谈古论今》。 He's talking about the tourists on Hainan island who were stuck there after a sudden Covid breakout. In expressing the observation that these sudden incidents occur time […]
I've been digging into the digitised holdings of the National Archives of Singapore to find posters of the Speak Mandarin Campaign which decimated "#dialect" use in favour of Mandarin. Launched in 1979, here is one of the earliest posters from the same year: (1/16) pic.twitter.com/gIOWhIa0Qi — Shawn Hoo | OF THE FLORIDS (order now!) (@hycshawn) […]
We've just been through the problems of standard language versus the vernaculars in Arabic (see "Selected readings" below). Now we're going to look at a photograph, a caption, a book review, and a letter to the editor that encompass these contentious issues in spades — but for Chinese. Here's the photograph:
Trying to clear up the confusion between the two is a battle we have been waging for decades, and nowhere is the problem more severe than in the study of Sinitic languages and the Sinographic script. The crisis (not a "danger + opportunity"!) has come to the surface again this month with the appearance of […]
In Asian Review of Books (10/20/21), Peter Gordon reviews James Griffiths' Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language (Bloomsbury, October 2021). Although the book touches upon many other languages, its main focus is on Welsh, Hawaiian, and Cantonese. … That Speak Not is more politics than linguistics is telegraphed by the title. For […]
The PRC authorities have always policed human behavior and thought, but especially during the last half year or so and particularly toward young people, for whatever reason, they have been coming on more gangbusters than usual. First they went after the phenomenon of tǎngpíng 躺平 ("lying flat"), i.e., those who chose to opt out of […]
Valerie Hansen is Director of Undergraduate Studies for East Asian Studies at Yale. Yesterday she was talking to a sophomore who had taken 1st and 2nd year Mandarin online and is about to start 3rd year. Valerie writes: After a while, she told me that she did have one worry about taking 3rd year: she […]
The particle "ge 個/个" is one of the most frequent characters in written Chinese (12th in a list of 9,933 unique characters). It is generally thought of as a classifier, numerary adjunct, measure word. Indeed, it functions as the almost universal, default classifier when you're not sure what the correct / proper measure word for […]
Something extraordinary happened on May 4, 2020. Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger delivered an extremely impressive speech in virtually flawless Mandarin. Here it is:
[This is a guest post by David Moser] This little Stück of piecemeal wordplay has been making the rounds on WeChat. It seems to be an amalgam of several little coronavirus memes that had appeared in isolation. gélí rénquán méile 隔离人权没了 bù gélí rén quán méile 不隔离人全没了 tiānshàng biānfú, dìshàng Chuānpǔ 天上蝙蝠，地上川普 yīgè yǒudú, yīgè […]