Language Log

Under the above rubric, my friend Apollo Wu sent around a note (copied below) about the economic impact of the use of Chinese characters in the operation of his business.  Since Apollo was for many years (from 1973 to 1998) a top translator in the Chinese Translation Service at United Nations headquarters in New York, he knows whereof he speaks.  Among other interesting tidbits that I heard from Apollo over the decades was that, of the official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Castilian Spanish) Chinese was by far the least efficient and most expensive to process.

Usually an unintelligible or partially intelligible Chinglish sign is due to faulty translation, whether human or machine. But not always. Recently, when I was rushing from my room at the Kucha Guest House in Xinjiang (the Uyghur Autonomous Region in the far west of China) through a huge greenhouse to the dining room for breakfast, I was stopped in my tracks by the following sign:

There is a widespread misconception that Chinese languages are monosyllabic.  That is purely an artifact of the writing system, since most Chinese words average out at about two syllables in length.  Typical examples:  zhuōzi 桌子 ("table"), fēijī 飛機 ("airplane"), péngyǒu 朋友 ("friend"), qìchē ("car"), huǒchē 火車 ("train"), fángzi 房子 ("house"), and so on.  Even in Classical Chinese (or Literary Sinitic), there were many words that were greater than one syllable in length, e.g., húdié 蝴蝶 ("butterfly"), fènghuáng 鳳凰 ("phoenix"), shānhú 珊瑚 ("coral"), wēiyí 委蛇 / 逶迤 ("sinuous; winding; meandering"), jūnzǐ 君子 ("gentleman; superior man; person of noble character; sovereign; ruler; lord; m'lord"), and so on.

It will probably come as a shock to most readers of Language Log that not even all Chinese characters are monosyllabic.

After being inundated with Bruce Lee movies in the 1970s and saturated with Kung Fu Panda films and TV series in the 2000s, only a zombie would be numb to the call of the Kung-fu masters.  Unless you are a tea aficionado, however, you may not have heard of Kung-fu Tea.  (N.B.:  Kung-fu is Wade-Giles romanization, gongfu is Hanyu Pinyin.)  For those who do know about Kung-fu Tea, even tea specialists among them are divided over both the meaning of the term and the way to write it in Chinese characters.  Should it be gōngfu chá 工夫 茶 or gōngfu chá 功夫茶?  And does the name mean "tea that requires a lot of effort and skill to prepare" or "martial arts tea"?

David Moser sent me this photograph of a sign on the side of a Beijing bus:

The Daily Mail reports that a visit by Justin Bieber to the beach revealed a new tattoo. Here's a screenshot showing the Daily Mail's description of the tattoo as "a row of mysterious symbols under his left arm". Here's the Daily Mail's close-up, captioned "What is it? It's unclear exactly what Bieber has had tattooed under his arm".

The "mysterious symbols" are perfectly ordinary and legible Hebrew letters. They spell ישוע "Yeshua", the Hebrew name for "Jesus". I understand that not everyone can read Hebrew, but that no one at the Daily Mail can even recognize Hebrew writing is pretty bad.

[For those of our readers who do not know who Justin Bieber is, he's a teen idol. A lot of teenage girls are crazy about him. When I teasingly told a 15-year old friend on Facebook that he looks like a dork, she unfriended me for three weeks!]

Over at "Pinyin news," Mark Swofford has just made a very welcome post entitled "Spreading the good news." As a long-time, strong advocate of phonetically annotated character texts, it is indeed good news to note that great strides are being made in the automatic insertion of pinyin annotations in character files.  What is even more heartwarming is that, as Mark reports, the people who are most actively engaged in this work have an awareness of the necessity for word parsing, capitalization, correct use of apostrophes, and proper orthography for tense-marking particles.

I'm trying to imagine a novel such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting being written in Chinese.  Trainspotting consists of a number of voices, all of them Scottish-accented in one way or another.  It's difficult enough to write in unalloyed Pekingese, for example, much less several varieties of Pekingese or of other Sinitic topolects.

Gadafi, Gadaffi,  Gaddafi,  Gaddaffi,  Gadhafi, Gadhaffi,  Ghadafi, Ghadaffi, Ghaddafi, Ghaddaffi,  Ghadhafi, Ghadhaffi, Kadafi, Kadaffi, Kaddafi,   Kadhafi,  Khadafi, Khaddafi, Khaddaffi, Khadhafi, Khadhaffi, Qadafi, Qadaffi, Qaddafi, Qaddaffi, Qadhafi, Qadhaffi, Qadhdhafi, Qathafi, … I give up.

The last hold-out for the Elizabethan approach to spelling. One of the few reasons that he'll be missed.

Update — see R.L.G. at the Economist's Johnson Blog for an exegesis…

Chuck Cook, PANDA Group Cooperation Officer of the European Bioinformatics Institute, called to my attention this Blackberry ad that he spotted on the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) in Hong Kong:

Chuck was particularly interested in finding an explanation of zi3 ging3 hai6 nei5 至勁係你 which, as he said, "I still do not understand, despite asking my wife's cousin, a native speaker of Cantonese who is fluent in Mandarin and competent in English."

The other day, just before going through security at the international terminal at the airport in Melbourne, Australia, I noticed a second sign beside the sign of instructions on what you couldn't take onto the airplane.  The second sign was (I assume) the same set of instructions in Chinese, and it was headed "Chinese – Traditional".

In a recent LL post, I wrote about Northeast and Northwest Mandarin borrowings from Russian that — in the mouths of those who are not highly literate in characters — seem to have escaped the phonotactic constraints of the sinographic script. In this post, I write about a Beijing street name that began as a sinographically writable expression, but which — again in the mouths of those whose speech is not strongly conditioned by the characters — devolved into a form that cannot readily be written in characters.

My previous post was about "dialects" that are often not really dialects, but bona fide languages, and the efforts of the Chinese government to phase them out.  In this post, I'll be talking about "etymology" that is not really etymology, but character analysis.

The occasion for these ruminations (see especially the last two paragraphs below) is this brief news item that occurred in the Beijing Morning Post on January 13 (pardon the somewhat peculiar English of the following paraphrase, which is taken from a daily Chinese newspaper digest [so far as I know, the BMP is published only in Chinese]; it conveys the sense and tenor of the original in a serviceable, though abridged, fashion):