Language Log

[This is a guest post by Gene Buckley.]

I was catching up on my stack of New York Times magazines, and I came across a mini-article in their "One-Page Magazine" feature from January 15. I couldn't find it on their website, but here's the entire content:

How do you write that in Mandarin?
by Mireille Silcoff
Chinese characters comprise the world's oldest in-use writing system, but Chinese kids are forgetting how to get it on paper. The new term tibiwangzi ("take pen, forget characters") encapsulates the issue: nobody takes pen anymore. They type or text, often using Romanization. The China Youth Daily Social Survey Center says 4 percent of respondents are "already living without handwriting."

A fuller treatment of this subject may be found in an article entitled "In information era, handwriting growing obsolete in China" that appeared in the April 16, 2010 People's Daily.

In yesterday's South China Morning Post (Saturday, March 31, 2012), Education section, there is an article by Raymond Li entitled "US136b — Cost of Illiteracy on Mainland". Here's the link (sorry I can't send a link that provides full access for non-subscribers).

Yesterday I went to the Beijing Public Security Bureau (Gōng'ān jú 公安局) to renew my visa.  While waiting in the main hall for my number to be called, I had ample time to walk around and familiarize myself with the operations there.  One thing in particular piqued my curiosity.  Namely, I saw four gray, metal cabinets full of hundreds of passports (three for Chinese, one for foreigners) waiting to be picked up.

I watched a clerk filing passports into the slots on the mechanized, revolving shelves inside the cabinets.  Wondering how the passports were arranged so that they could be readily retrieved when called for, I asked the supervisor how the passports were ordered on the shelves.  Her reply left me both startled and pleased.

Judging from many comments on this post, "Annals of airport Chinglish, part 3", there is both tremendous interest in and massive confusion about how Chinese characters are constructed.

Jeremy Goldkorn sent me this clever complaint about the characters from Weibo (China's imitation of Twitter) which is circulating widely on the web; it seems to be relevant to our present discussion:

终于会读了，泪奔 三个土念垚（yáo）三个牛念犇（bēn）三个手念掱（pá）三个田念畾（lěi）三个马念骉（biāo）三个羊念羴（shān）三个犬念猋 （biāo）三 个鹿念麤（cū）三个鱼念鱻（xiān）三个贝念赑（bì）三个毛念毳（cuì）三个车念轟（hōng）不会读的转!

Near my hotel on the Plaça Imperial Tarraco in Tarragona, the indicators to tell pedestrians when they can cross the street have a countdown in seconds to the next green: a minute ticks by, the lights go yellow for the vehicular traffic at 6 seconds, then red at 3 seconds, and finally — 3, 2, 1, liftoff — the little green man is displayed and you can walk across. Only in Tarragona the little green man figure does not just pose in a walking sort of shape: he moves. Those little green arms and legs are working away: he seems to be race-walking. And that's not all: when there's only 7 seconds left, he begins to sprint.

I have asserted that the weird thing about the 27th letter of the alphabet, the apostrophe, is that it never actually represents a sound (see also here). Eric Smith has pointed out to me that if you take the e of fishes to represent the second vowel phoneme of that word, then you might want to say that in fish's the apostrophe represents that same vowel phoneme. Maybe that would be best. But I had been thinking of 's as being a representation of the whole genitive-suffix morpheme, which shares all its pronunciation with the plural-suffix morpheme, but not as giving a sound-by-sound spelling out of it. Notice that the genitive of cat is cat's, where there is no second vowel sound for the apostrophe to represent. It is possible that Eric's view is better, which would mean that the apostrophe sometimes represents nothing (as in don't or he'll) but sometimes represents a reduced unstressed vowel ([ə] or [ɪ]). But notice (important point!), this isn't a question about what the facts are. Statements about which letters in a spelling symbolized which sounds are theoretical proposals. The issue here is about whether Eric defends a better theory of the sound-spelling relationship than I was assuming. It's not about what the facts of English are, because Eric and I agree on those.

Mark's transatlantic reaction to the linguistic story of the week in the UK — the news that a major bookstore chain has changed its name from Waterstone’s to Waterstones (shock horror scandal probe!) — was simply to mock a ridiculously over-written barbarians-at-the-gates piece from the Daily Mail. Meanwhile, over here in the UK, I was listening to one of the stupidest discussions of language I've ever heard on the radio (and I've heard some beauties), one that stands a very good chance of placing as dumbest of 2012, early in the year though it is.

Since Westerners first encountered Chinese characters centuries ago, they have been confused over how the characters convey meaning.  It was obvious from the beginning that the characters are very different from a simple syllabary in that they do not directly and unmistakably signify the sounds of whole syllables on a one-for-one basis; all the more, they are unlike alphabets in not indicating phonemes.  The earliest Western interpreters tended to think of the characters as pictographs and ideographs that somehow indicated meanings directly without the intervention of sounds.  In time, however, as scholars came to better understand how the characters are constructed, many of them realized that sound plays an important role in conveying meaning, as it does in all other full writing systems ("full" in the sense of being able to convey all the main aspects of living and dead languages, including morphology and grammar).  John DeFrancis wrote two wonderful books that grappled successfully with the explication of these thorny issues:  The Chinese Language:  Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1984) and Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989).

With these words, Zarina Yamaguchi presents the following photograph, taken at Osaka's Shinsaibashi Shopping Street, on her Facebook page:

Having just returned from a month of living and teaching (in Chinese) on the Mainland (in other words, receiving an intensive dose of Putonghua), I was struck by how different Taiwan Guoyu *sounds* in this video.  It's about a subject that is dear to my heart:  the medieval caves at the Central Asian site of Dunhuang with their magnificent wall-paintings and multitudinous medieval manuscripts.

Of course, Taiwan Guoyu (National Language, i.e., Mandarin) is still basically the same language as Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]) on the mainland, but the sounds and a lot of the words and typical expressions are somewhat different (judging not merely from this one short video, but from other samples, both written and spoken, as well).  And, of course, the script has radically diverged.

We're waiting eagerly for the English Word of the Year for 2011 (to be announced on January 6, 2012) and have already had the Chinese "Morpheme(s) of the year".  Now arrives the Japanese Kanji of the Year:  kizuna 絆 ("bond").

Michael Carr writes, "While examining an iPhone dictionary app (KanjiDicPro), I got a laugh from the attached "bǐshùn biānhào' 笔顺编号." [VHM: bǐshùn biānhào' 笔顺编号 means "stroke order serial/code number"]

I just passed through security at the Xi'an airport (in northwest China) and was surprised to have my belongings searched by a young woman on whose snazzy black uniform, instead of an ID number as a regular worker would have, there was a label that said only SHIXI ("in training; practice"), with no trace of the corresponding characters 实习 anywhere about her.  When I read out the pinyin with correct pronunciation and indicated that I knew immediately and exactly what it meant, the young woman and her co-workers were obviously pleased that I could do so.

Even more thought provoking is the fact that many Chinese police cars and uniforms have written on them GONGAN ("public security") rather than "police", and sometimes not even 公安.