Language Log

From Rostislav Berezkin, who teaches at Fudan University:

The place where I stay is called Qibao town, now Minhang district of Shanghai. The name means "Seven Treasures". It comes from the name of the Buddhist temple called Qibaosi. Legend says that the temple was built by the Lu family to commemorate Lu Ji* and Lu Yun, brothers of the 3rd cent. AD who were very famous poets and politicians.  Their tombs were located there. It became known as Lubaosi (Precious Temple of Lu). But 500 years later the king of Wuyue (907-978) during the Ten Kingdoms (907-979) period visited the place. When he asked the name of the temple, he misheard it as "Six Treasures Temple"; "six" is pronounced somewhat like "lok" in modern Shanghainese (it's "luc" in modern Vietnamese, also an equivalent of the "entering" tone). Apparently this is very close to the medieval pronunciation of the Lu surname ("[main]land"). The king was perplexed because there are seven treasures in Buddhism, not six. Therefore, he decided to donate the precious manuscript of the Lotus Sutra in gold letters he had made before, so that it would constitute the seventh treasure. Then the monastery became known as the Qibaosi.

Responding to "Transcriptional Chinese animal imagery for English daily greetings" (3/13/23), Mary Erbaugh, using Yale Cantonese romanization, writes:

————

I've never seen it done with animal names, though probably easier to remember, amusing.

I'm used to the English word pronunciations in old fashioned HK (& Taiwan) almanacs, like the Bou Lòh Maahn Yauh (Cant.) / Bāo luò wàn yǒu (Mand.) 包纙萬有 ("all-inclusive"), available in any Chinatown; English title The Book of Myriad Things, an All-Inclusive Reference.  In the exposition below, I use the 1993 Hong Kong edition published by Jeuih Bóu Làuh Yanchaatchóng 聚寳樓印刷廠 [VHM:  聚[jeui6]寳[bou2]樓[lau4/lau2]印[yan3]刷[chaat3]廠[chong2] — Cantonese conversion by this tool; (Modern Standard Mandarin) MSM transcription in pinyin: Jùbǎo lóu yìnshuā chǎng].  It gets re-published every year, in near-identical form, except for the calendars.

Let us begin this post with a brief introduction to the 16th-century Hokkien (Minnan) drama, Tale of the Lychee Mirror:

(source)

From karts deffle:

That's a literal translation of “sùliào pǔtōnghuà 塑料普通话” ("Plastic Mandarin") or “sùpǔ 塑普” for short.  "Plastic" here means "artificial, inauthentic, fake"; in Changsha Xiang topolect (also known as Hunanese), the first syllable is a homophone for "bad", so the short form also means "bad Mandarin".

Chenzi Xu, a doctoral candidate at Oxford University, is from Xiangtan (population nearly 3 million), a prefecture-level city in east-central Hunan province, south-central China. an hour's drive from Changsha  She went to a middle school in Changsha (population over 8 million), capital of Hunan province, so she knows the local language well.

The hometowns of several founding leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, including Chairman Mao Zedong, President Liu Shaoqi, and Marshal Peng Dehuai, are in Xiangtan's administration, as well as the hometowns of Qing dynasty and republic era painter Qi Baishi, scholar-general Zeng Guofan, and tennis player Peng Shuai.

(source)

Other notables who hail from Xiangtan include the Taiwan politicians Ma Ying-jeou and James Soong, so this is a place whose language habits bear considerable weight nationwide.

At least three hundred.

I like the title, not the one on the first panel, but the one at the top of each frame, which I have also given as the title of this post.

You probably don't have time to watch the whole video (13:54), but it's pretty good:

Here is an Instagram link to a young Cantonese teacher, Zita Wong, talking about a restaurant in Guangzhou that banned Cantonese and describing the backlash that ensued.  She also goes into the efforts to downplay all topolects.

The situation with this particular establishment is especially ticklish because it is a Japanese restaurant operating in China, but the same holds true for many other restaurants, not only in Guangzhou, but in other cities as well.

Today I went to a shop in a nearby mall.  I heard two people who worked there speaking a language that sounded a bit like Arabic, but was softer and different enough that I could tell it wasn't really Arabic — al-ʻArabīyah al-Fuṣḥā (العربية الفصحى) ("eloquent Arabic").

They were a young woman in her early 20s and a man who was probably in his late 20s or early 30s.  The woman was Moroccan and the man Algerian.

I asked them what language they were speaking and the man said he was speaking Arabic.  The woman declared, "I would never say that I speak Arabic.  I don't understand people who speak Arabic and they don't understand me.  I am half Berber and I speak a Berber tribal language."  The man, who had honey blond hair and blue eyes, chided her and said, "You do speak Arabic."  She replied, "Never!"

My sister Heidi's friend Janet Bush told me that her husband Brett is from Canton OH and her favorite of his colloquialisms is "red up", as in "I will red up the kitchen."  To clean, to make ready.

He also used to call hamburgers "hamburgs".

I remember both of these expressions from my Canton youth.

Marjorie Corsi reminded me that we said "pop" (meaning a beverage containing CO2) instead of "soda".  Margaret Kaser agrees that we called Coke and Pepsi "pop", whereas in other areas they are called "soda".  She also noted that we drove on a parkway and parked on a driveway.

Back in the day when I lived in East Canton (before 1961), I think that most people said "warsh", as in "warsh the clothing" or "warsh the dishes".  I don't know what they say now.

From a native Northeasterner:

Many people think that Dōngběi huà 东北话 (Northeastern Topolect) = Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (Modern Standard Mandarin). Nononono! Although phonologically Dōngběi huà 东北话 (Northeastern Topolect) sounds like Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (Modern Standard Mandarin), it is not Mandarin at all because of its distinctive lexical inventory. Yesterday we talked about hermaphrodites, or intersex persons, which are called “èryǐzi” (sounds like 二椅子 (lit., "two chairs"), though I don’t know which are the Chinese characters at all); and also breasts as zhāzhā — e.g., a small kid would say to his/her mom “Wǒ yào chī / mō 我要吃/摸 zhāzhā” ("I want to nibble / touch zhāzhā") when he/she looks for the mama’s breasts; and also xuán了 for “a lot” — e.g. "Lǎoshī liú de zuòyè xuánle 老师留的作业xuán了" ("the teacher gave a lot of homework")，"Dàjiē shàng yǒu xuánle rénle 大街上有xuán了人了" ("the street is crowded with so many people")，or "Tā de wánjù xuánle 他的玩具xuán了" ("he has a lot of toys"). Note that we don’t say "Tā yǒu xuánle wánjù 他有xuán了玩具"，but rather "Tā de wánjù xuánle 他的玩具xuán了"。Funny grammar :) Again, I don't know how to write these words in characters.

A current catch phrase in China is kēngdiē 坑爹, which literally means "trap your father", but in actuality is a slang neologism used to signify "dishonest; fraudulent; deceptive; be contrary to what one expected", etc. 

"‘Really annoying’ — phrase of the week"

A decade-long online prank involving fake historical accounts of Russian history was unearthed on Chinese social media. For many internet users, the hoax got under their skin.

Andrew Methven  SupChina    Published July 8, 2022

From Mark Swofford, a cup of bubble tea with Taiwanese on it (romanized, Hanzified, and translated).

Continuing my run through the Midwest, among many others, I have passed through the following towns and counties:  Lima, Cairo, Gomer, Delphos, Van Wert, Warsaw, Kosciusko, Hamlet, Wanatah, and Valparaiso.  These names reflect the variety of ethnicities and origins of the inhabitants.  Several of them are locally pronounced in ways that I had not expected:

Lima is Laima, not Leema (one of my students flew to the capital of Peru that same day I went to its reputed namesake in Ohio).

Cairo OH is Kayro, not Kairo; I don't know for sure how the same name of the southernmost city in Illinois is pronounced locally.

Kosciusko is Kaziasko, not Koskiusko.

Valparaiso is colloquially known as Valpo.