Language Log

Jason Cox, who sent the following photograph to me, says that his "uncle-in-law has this all over the place":

Self-explanatory screen shot:

The two notes below, as described in this article (in Chinese) were written around the same time and under similar circumstances.

Pro-Cantonese sign in Hong Kong:

A man holds a sign professing his love for Cantonese as he attends a Hong Kong rally in 2010 against mainland China’s bid to champion Mandarin over Cantonese. Picture: AFP

Claro's tweet:

Volunteered to be a penpal for Japanese Junior Highschool students, and the letters they sent are priceless. pic.twitter.com/JHPRREPy7Y

— Claro (@MellowZenith) October 2, 2017

Lisa Chang took this photo of two paintings at an antique store in 2015 (the store was either in Maryland or Pennsylvania):

I. J. Khanewala writes:

While visiting the tomb of the first emperor, I saw a sign in Mandarin which read minzu jiliang and translated as "National backbone". It left me quite mystified.  Here's a photo of the sign:

Source ("Utterly lost in translation").  Any idea what it could mean?

Name on a ship that docked in Yancheng (in Jiangsu province) harbor last Thursday:

The reason there are armed public security forces patrolling near the ship is because it was full of smuggled cargo.  The story is reported here:

"Smugglers caught because they got their Chinese characters the wrong way round:  Language blunder gives sugar carriers a bitter lesson after it attracts coastguards’ suspicions" (SCMP, 9/5/17)

This is what happened in a middle school in Anhui's capital city of Hefei on the first day of the new school year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peoQ_-F2F_Y

Mark Landler recently published an article in the New York Times under the headline "Where Predecessors Set Moral Standard, Trump Steps Back." Unlike his predecessors, he notes, the current president has rejected the very concept of moral leadership:

On Saturday, in his first response to Charlottesville, Mr. Trump condemned the violence "on many sides." Then he lapsed into the passive voice, expressing, as he has before, a sense of futility that the divisions between Americans would ever be healed.

"It's been going on for a long time in our country," he said. "Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time."

This incompetent, floundering president, who has never previously had to run an organization and is revealing that he is no good at it, is guilty of so many things that could have been mentioned. But passive voice?

Asking whether "the divisions between Americans would ever be healed" is passive voice, but that's not Trump, that's Landler, who's the accuser here. "It's been going on for a long time in our country" is not in the passive voice. Mark Landler is one more case (I have literally lost count) of someone who writes for a major print source and pontificates about other people's grammar but doesn't know the difference between active and passive.

Following on yesterday's post ("The naturalness of emerging digraphia" [7/28/17]), Alex Wang tells me, "parents and supplementary educators often post photos like these on their WeChat moments".  Here's an example of one that he sent along:

From David Moser:

8-year-old in Beijing pens heart-warming letter to dad's boss asking for time off in summer. Have you got a good work/life balance? #China pic.twitter.com/5OYJchuUuh

— The Chairman's Bao (@TheChairmansBao) July 28, 2017

The four main aspects of learning a language are "tīng shuō dú xiě 听说读写 (simplified) / 聽說讀寫 (traditional) ("listening, speaking, reading, and writing").  A few days ago in Singapore, an event was held to promote Mandarin in accordance with this fourfold approach.  Unfortunately, at the launch of the campaign on July 10, 2017, on the front of the large podium behind which stood the four guests of honor, this slogan was miswritten in simplified characters as tīng shuō dú xiě 听说渎写, where the third character has a water radical / semantophore instead of the speech radical / semantophore.  The pronunciation of the two characters is identical, but there's a world of difference in their meaning.