Language Log

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.

It's not just young people who are apparently losing the ability to produce and interpret cursive writing. I missed a striking example a few months ago when a reporter for the Daily Mail demonstrated ignorance of the standard way to write a cursive capital "G" ("Some 'genius'! Suspect on assault charge pictured with misspelt tattoo", 2/4/2011):

It's wrong on so many levels.

As if covering your face with ugly DIY tattoos wasn't a dumb enough thing to do, this suspect in an assault case even managed to misspell the one that runs right across his forehead.

Jerome Smith had the word genius written with a 'j' instead of a 'g'

Bert Vaux posted this on his Facebook wall, "From Ed Pulford's recent trip to Silk Road towns in Southern Xinjiang":

Whitney Calk submitted a request to the state of Tennessee for the following license plate:

According to Nick Carbone, "Tennessee Veggie Lover's Vanity License Plate Banned for 'Vulgarity'", Time 9/16/2011:

A Tennessee woman just wanted to share her love of vegetarian eating. The state thought she was expressing her love for a more explicit activity.

It's a battle of semantics – implied spacing, really. Whitney Calk innocently (or perhaps not) requested a vanity license plate from the state of Tennessee, one that read “ILVTOFU.” But her personalized plate reflecting her fondness for bean curds was rejected on the grounds of "vulgarity.” There's nothing vulgar about tofu, right?

In a great use of comic art, Roy Boney Jr. has created a graphic feature for the magazine Indian Country Today about the history of the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah in the early 19th century. Boney begins with the syllabary's inception and early use, and continues all the way through technological developments like the Selectric typewriter and Unicode standardization. Check it out here.

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"?