Language Log

In several recent posts (and in many earlier posts as well), we have discussed some of the ways in which English has had an impact upon Chinese:

• "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin"
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese"
• "New radicals in an old writing system"

But the Westernization of Chinese reaches far beyond the types of influences and borrowings described in previous Language Log posts.  Testimony of the extent to which this goes comes from a Chinese friend:

My mother, as I've mentioned before, said to me about ten years ago: "I often have difficulty understanding the Chinese in the newspapers," even though Chinese is her mother tongue and her only language, and she is well educated. I find it's because the Chinese newspaper's sentences are now a direct translation from English, with English, not traditional Chinese, grammar and vocabulary. The Chinese language is becoming inexorably westernized.

Gloria Bien (who has been teaching Mandarin for more than forty years [she was my first-year teacher]) heard this sentence at lunch yesterday:  Zhù nǐ yīgè hǎo xīnqíng 祝你一个好心情 ("[I] wish you a good mood").  She remarked:

I was stunned.  How can anyone wish a good mood on me?  But our intern, a native Chinese fresh from Beijing in August, declared that this is actually said, as an equivalent to "Have a nice day."

That's the headline of an article in today's shanghaiist.

What is the greatest Japanese export to China?  Language!

As anti-Japanese protests and riots swirl across China (over some tiny, rocky, contested islands in the middle of the sea between Taiwan and Okinawa), Xu Wenguang, program director of CCTV 1, made this remarkable statement:

Three days ago, I asked the students in one of my classes to tell me all the languages they knew.  One of the female students listed Northeastern Mandarin among her languages.  When I asked her to say a sample sentence in that language, she said something like "Ni de blaji hen haokan" (Your blaji is pretty).  Her sentence surprised me for two reasons.  First, I didn't know the meaning of blaji; second, I was stunned that she used what sounded like a bl- consonant cluster at the beginning of the word with which I was unfamiliar, since Mandarin — at least proper, standard Mandarin — does not have consonant clusters.