Language Log

Article in South China Morning Post (12/18/21):

My Hong Kong by Luisa Tam

Cantonese is far from dead. It lags Mandarin in the Chinese language league table for numbers, but its cult status will see it live on

    Cantonese is a one-of-a-kind linguistic art form that’s quirkier and more edgy than Mandarin, nimble and ever-changing

    Its long-term fate is in the hands of every Cantonese speaker and Cantonese-language enthusiast who is willing to continue to breathe new life into it

In this, her most recent article on the nature and fate of Cantonese, Luisa Tam, a favorite author of ours here at Language Log, is upbeat about the future of the language.  I love Cantonese as much as she / anyone does, but I am less sanguine about what lies ahead for it than Luisa is.  As I said several days ago during a faculty meeting at Penn, there's no one who is more passionate about about defending and promoting Cantonese than VHM.  Why, then, am I so pessimistic about what is in store for this lively language?

Before I answer that question, let's see why Luisa Tam is so positive about Cantonese in the coming years.  Here are some selections from her article:

Two days ago, I met a person who had a thick white coating on their tongue.  Wondering what it was called and its implications for health, I asked members of the e-Mair list about it.  Here are some of the answers I received:

Denis (Sinologist):

Thick tongue coating, often due to lengthening of the keratinous papillae on the tongue's surface.

Heidi (Yoga teacher and Ayurveda specialist):

We call it "ama" in Ayurveda – accumulated toxins from undigested foods. The person who has it might be ill. I scrape my tongue every day

From Proto-Indo-Aryan *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *HaHmás, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂eh₃mós (“raw, uncooked”), from *h₂eh₃- (“to burn”). Cognate with Ancient Greek ὠμός (ōmós, “raw, crude, uncooked, undressed”), Old Armenian հում (hum, “raw, uncooked”), Old Irish om (“raw, uncooked”) (whence Irish amh), Persian خام‎ (xâm, “crude, raw”).

(source)

VHM:  In some Indic languages it means, among other things, "undigested", as Heidi noted for Ayurveda in general.

Cover page of a cookbook published in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia:

From Mark Swofford:

The back of a restaurant stand going up in front of the Banqiao train station as part of a temporary market for the Christmas season.

(source)

We've alluded to this Sichuanese dish in posts and comments several times before on Language, but this is the first time I have captured it in the wild (at Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House in Philadelphia's Chinatown):

From Zihan Guo:

Yesterday a friend of mine posted this photograph he took in a restaurant called 興記菜館 in Hong Kong. As a Chinese speaker and Japanese learner I find this hilarious.

Café de Coral Advertisement with Hong Kong Cantonese Lexical Items:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cafe de Coral (@cafedecoralhk)

(source: from their Instagram account)

That's the name of a delectable Chinese nosh made famous by this pastry shop.  The name of the snack in Chinese is "ròusōng xiǎobèi 肉鬆小貝" ("pork floss little cowry / cowrie"), after its shape and the main ingredient of the covering in which it is encased.

If you look up the English name in this encyclopedia entry, it gives "Pork floss Beckham".  What?  How did that happen?

Francois Lang sent in this menu from YU Noodles Cafe in Rockville, MD:

[This is a guest post by S. Robert Ramsey]

"Korean kimchi originally came from China."

–Or so China’s online encyclopedia Baidu Baike declared in its article on kimchi.

Koreans were outraged. What gall for Chinese to lay claim to their national dish! Adding to the furor, China’s English-language newspaper Global Times reported last year that the International Organization for Standardization (the ISO) had recognized an “international standard for the kimchi industry led by China.”

Indignant Koreans flooded the Internet: “It’s total nonsense, what a thief stealing our culture!” a South Korean netizen said. Another wrote: “I read a media story that China now says kimchi is theirs, and that they are making international standard for it. It’s absurd.”

The name of my favorite pastry shop in Philadelphia's Chinatown is Bǎobǐng diàn 飽餅店 (English name "Mayflower Bakery & Cafe").  They serve all sorts of Chinese pastries, cakes, buns, turnovers, etc. Their egg tarts (dàntà 蛋撻) are divine, and you can get everything at scandalously reduced prices late in the afternoon.

Nearly all of the Chinese friends who go to Bǎobǐng diàn 飽餅店 with me think the name is strange and believe that, if anything, it should be Bāobǐng diàn 包餅店, but even that seems rather odd to them.

Diàn 店 means "shop", so we won't worry about that.  Bāobǐng 包餅 would mean "bun and (flat)cake / pie / cookie / pastry", which my friends can make sense of, but they are not familiar with that wording.  On the other hand, bǎobǐng 飽餅 would mean "full (flat)cake / pie / cookie / pastry", which they have a hard time making sense of, though most of them just say, "Well, they must mean they are a shop whose (flat)cakes / pies / cookies / and pastries will / can make you full".

Oy, the joys of naming in Chinese!

Sign at a fruit stand: