Language Log

Boris Kootzenko was intrigued by this sign in China:

Zhou xiansheng,

You were my dear friend for decades.  I wish that you had gone on living forever.  You will be sorely missed, but yours was a life well lived.

As the "Father of Pinyin", you have had an enormous impact on education and culture in China.  After you passed the century mark, you spoke out courageously in favor of democracy and reform.

Now, one day after your 111th birthday, you have departed, but you will always be in our hearts, brimming with light, as your name suggests.

Tearfully,

Victor

For several days I've been aware of a strange poem that has gone viral in China:

"Read The Smog-Inspired Poem That China Can't Stop Talking About" (NPR, 1/12/17)

The strangeness of the poem is due to its being written from the perspective of lung cancer and addressed to the patient.  You judge for yourself — here's the complete poem:

In several recent posts, I have pointed out how Chinese and Japanese announcements and greetings for foreigners are often pronounced in a special way that deviates markedly from what Chinese and Japanese would say to each other:

• "Tones and the alphabet" (4/27/16) (last three paragraphs)
• "'Ni hao' for foreigners" (10/11/16)
• "Bus announcements in Okinawa" (12/6/16)

Dave Cragin asks, "How did 平安夜 come to mean Christmas Eve?"

Now that's a good seasonal topic if ever there were one.

There was quite a stir this week surrounding a high profile court case in China over Michael Jordan's suit to control the branding rights to his name.  The controversy is described in this NYT article by Sui-wee Lee:

"Michael Jordan Owns Right to His Name in Chinese Characters, Too, Court Rules" (12/7/16)

After reading the article, Ethan Merritt sent in some pertinent observations and questions:

From the following post, we see that there are three main ways to transcribe Donald Trump's given name in Chinese and two main ways to transcribe his surname:

"Transcription of 'Barack Obama', 'Hillary Clinton', and 'Donald Trump' in the Sinosphere" (10/2/16)

Here are the two prevailing transcriptions of "Trump" in Chinese characters:

Tèlǎngpǔ 特朗普 (mainland China, Macau, Malaysia/Singapore) — 4,970,000 ghits

Chuānpǔ 川普 (Taiwan, Hong Kong, but also on the mainland, especially on the internet) — 1,570,000 ghits

N.B.:  The relative popularity of these two forms is shifting among different groups in all of the designated regions.

Page of a phrasebook published in 1941 (click to embiggen):

Google Street View in Pittsburgh at 5809 Forward Ave. shows a Young's Oriental Grocery.

The corresponding Hangul transliteration of "Young's" gives "Young 'seu 영 '스".

Ryan of Singapore sent me photographs of a section from a Chinese almanac that amounts to a ten-page English phrasebook phonetically annotated in Cantonese. Here are two of the pages (as usual, click to embiggen):

During the last few days, there has been a flurry of excitement over the circulation of photographs and information concerning an old Chinese textbook for learning English.  Here are a couple of pages from the book (click to embiggen):

This morning, an instructor in Jiangsu province, who has been teaching Chinese Culture in college English classes for 12 years and has also been giving lectures on Chinese Culture to international students, wrote to ask about the possibility of becoming a visiting scholar at Penn for half a year.  She introduced herself to me as Lǐ Fǔluòwá 李甫洛娃.  Her name threw me for a loop.

We have already studied an old name for Singapore on the back of an envelope dating to 1901:

• "An old name for Singapore" (9/6/16)

Now, Ruben de Jong, relying on the works of Dutch scholars, has discovered several others.