Archive for Diglossia and digraphia
Mother tongue is like mother's milk
Pro-Taiwanese language poster on a wall in Tainan (courtesy of Tim Clifford):
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Bilingual, biscriptal sign in Virginia
Sticker at a gas station near the Richmond airport, courtesy of Jonathan Smith:
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Justin Bieber OK infix
What's going on here? How did Justin Bieber become an infix (more precisely tmesis) inserted between the "O" and the "K" of "OK"?
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Chinese Communist Party biscriptalism
Hard core communist journal for Party members gets hip with English in the title of an article:
"@中共党员: 你该get的精神品质和追求!" (Qiúshì 求是 ["Seeking Truth"], 2018, #3)
I will translate and explicate the title fully below. For the moment, it needs to be emphasized that this article was published in the CCP's leading theoretical journal, Qiúshì 求是 ("Seeking Truth"), which is said to be "yòu hóng yòu zhuān 又红又专 ("both red and expert", i.e., "both socialist-minded and professionally competent"). It appears in "Dǎodú 导读" ("Guided reading"), a column on the official website of the journal. As far as communism in China goes, you can't get more serious than this.
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Further evidence of mixed script writing in Chinese
Michael Cannings relayed this tweet by Dave Flynn:
When did replacing 很 with "hen" become a thing in Taiwan? pic.twitter.com/IHX8b5EWLZ
— Dave Flynn 茶米 (@DaveFlynn) January 18, 2018
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Mixed-script letter written by an adult
The two notes below, as described in this article (in Chinese) were written around the same time and under similar circumstances.
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Keep on -inging
Jeff DeMarco writes:
From a Facebook post (timeline) by a young woman in HK:
卡拉ok ing ……😂🤣
GT deftly translates it as karaoke ing.
Sino-English grammatical hyper-redundancy
Adrian S. Thieret found this sign inside his brand new apartment complex in Shanghai a few days ago:
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"Let's" in Chinese
Advertisement recently spotted by Guy Freeman in the Central, Hong Kong MTR (subway) station:
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