Language Log

30 Comments

1. Matt said,

   February 6, 2014 @ 8:03 pm

   (Edible) greens w/ new buds/sprouts, or an affectionate term for culled greens (season: autumn) ← really? And why the "affection" here? I admit I'm slightly baffled — I assume it's closer to "pity" or at least "sympathy"

   No, the intended meaning of "親しんで" (shitashinde) is indeed "affectionate" or maybe more neutrally "casual" or "hypocoristic", like Australian "sanger" (non-rhotic!) for "sandwich". And, yeah, as a seasonal word in haiku and so in it is associated with autumn, because that's when you pick and eat the 小菜!

2. John Ch said,

   February 6, 2014 @ 10:39 pm

   So is this ambiguity materially different than the similar one that we get in English (or German) when we string three nouns together? It's the basis of the ongoing humor of headlines that can easily be interpreted in a wildly different way than was intended. In written English, we use intonation and/or a subtle pause to disambiguate such phrases, though that doesn't work as well with four or more nouns. Written English has the advantage of using spaces to make it clear, but again this only works well for three nouns. Anyway, it might be interesting to look for ways that English and Mandarin (and German and Cantonese) differ in the way they deal with this problem.

3. Stephan Stiller said,

   February 7, 2014 @ 2:42 am

   @ John Ch

   Intonation is indeed the right word, or I'd call it "prosodic grouping". (The word "stress" might not be "wrong" but I find it confusing/misleading unless you qualify it with something like "compound-level"/"phrase-level"/… because Chinese doesn't seem to have lexical stress. Note that my view doesn't contradict the possibility that grouping within compound words like that is stored in the lexicon, and that aspect would then certainly be "lexical".) Intonation/prosody in Mandarin and Cantonese normally means an increase in the pitch range (at least that's what everyone says), though prosody can in principle override lexical tone entirely, like in any language. (Naturally, the shorter one's utterance the smaller the risk of not being understood if one completely overrides tone.)

   I don't see a fundamental difference between English/German and Mandarin/Cantonese, except for the fact that prosody is more restricted in M/C for obvious reasons. In fact, the larger number of tones in Cantonese means that a good portion of prosody is relegated to the choice of and contours over (often very prolonged) sentence-final particles.

   Orthographically, M/C have more ambiguities because of the lack of word segmentation. (We note that a lot of lexicalized M/C "compounds" are single polysyllabic words that likely aren't processed as compounds.) But if you know the orthographic extent of the compound word, the languages are all very similar: In German, everything is run together; in English you have spaces everywhere between compound constituents (not syllables, which is why "small restaurant" isn't a problem in English). German might use hyphenation, but then English might too. De facto, you don't have much orthographic flexibility in either language: the use of hyphens and spaces (or no spaces) follows certain patterns in English with just a little bit of wiggle room, as most LL readers will know. In German you generally hyphenate only long compounds or ones with ambiguities or sequences of identical letters at the boundaries (I'd need to check the latest rules, but that's roughly it), and when you do hyphenate, it might look unusual despite being orthographically allowed. So, you don't have that much flexibility. In M/C you don't hyphenate or use spaces at all, meaning you have more ambiguity, relatively speaking. Morphology in M/C largely operates on the level of entire syllables, so we should assume that this increases the proportion of ambiguities found in the written language. I'd say that both this and the lack of orthographic word boundaries are the main reasons for why written M/C are more ambiguous. Finally, there's the homophone problem for words in M/C, which has its roots in the writing system and in Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese); this factor increases ambiguity in the spoken domain (if fancy words are used) but not the written domain.

   And I'm sure there are details that I missed.

   But you asked how the languages "deal with this problem". Despite all of the above factors, Chinese tends towards noun compounding (where for example you'd use "of" in English). This is strange, but someone will have explained this somewhere.

   Note though that much of the above post is about regional variation (in which words exist and what they mean). This is more of an issue for "Chinese" because the orthographic domain of written Mandarin covers the geographic area of several languages and cultures. Thus, more language variation permeates into written Mandarin.

4. Stephan Stiller said,

   February 7, 2014 @ 3:03 am

   One explanation for the high level of ambiguity in Mandarin is that people write or speak in a terse style "because they can". Why can they and why haven't things balanced themselves out? It's partly because of the lack of morphology that operates within the syllable or that crosses the syllable boundary. Compact sentences are more ambiguous; disambiguation requires that one use more words. One can produce clear and unambiguous Mandarin; people just don't do it as much as they could. The problem of a lack of written word segmentation would remain. That problem has an easy solution too (just use spaces), except nobody does that.

5. Morgan J said,

   February 7, 2014 @ 3:49 am

   Though the thread has moved on, it may be worth pointing out that the online menu of the restaurant in the original post makes it look like a very ordinary North American Chinese restaurant–no suggestion of a speciality in 'side dishes'.

   Anyone in BC want to go see what topolect the owners of the restaurant speak? (and if you do, order me a little something, this thread has made me peckish).

6. JQ said,

   February 7, 2014 @ 4:00 am

   There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of Cantonese from the non-natives.

   I would just like to add that in HK / HK restaurants overseas, you can say or are asked 小菜 at dinnertime, to indicate that you want to eat rice with dishes, as opposed to hotpot 打邊爐 (a term which is gradually being replaced by the (MSM?) 火鍋 due to influx of mainland residents, but which nobody knows how to say in Mandarin anyway)

   In the past I have been to restaurants that offer 小菜 at lunch time as well as dim sum, and you'd have a choice between those two. I have not found any restaurants doing this in the past 10 years.

   I've never heard the term 撚手小菜 spoken aloud in HK. 撚 is slang for penis/fuck. Due to lazy pronunciation, uneducated people might interpret it as something pornographic.

7. Simon P said,

   February 7, 2014 @ 10:41 am

   @JQ said "Due to lazy pronunciation, uneducated people might interpret it as something pornographic."

   I'd love to see a LanguageLog article on the sound changes in Cantonese. The 'n/l' merger (as well as initial 'ng' dropping and the 'gwo/go' merger) is called "lazy sounds" (laan6 jam1) in Cantonese, but of course it's been the standard way to speak for quite some time. The only people I hear differentiating initial 'n' and 'l' are people with specific training, mostly newsreaders and actors. Despite this, most everyone are convinced that they don't use these "lazy sounds". It's fascinating.

   One way we can see evidence for this is place names in HK. Look at Lamma Island, 南丫島. 南 is "naam4" in Cantonese, yet already when this was first transcribed into English (presumably well over a century ago), it was pronounced with an 'l' initial.

8. julie lee said,

   February 7, 2014 @ 11:20 am

   My late husband, who was Chinese and grew up in China, would sometimes call the dishes I cooked everyday as xiaocai "小菜“ （little dishes). I felt it was an affectionate term for everyday, home dishes to go with rice at a meal. "Little" here would also mean "not a major production", not a big roast, or a big stew, for example, but rather dainty dishes of meat/poultry/fish-with-veggies sliced, diced, shredded, or minced, which so often accompanies rice. I see "little" also as meaning "accompaniment" to rice, like an accompanist.
   A propos of this: Once lunching with my daughter and father-in-law (who could only speak his provincial topolect, no English) at his apartment in Taipei, we each had a bowl of rice and helped ourselves to the only dish he provided, some sauteed chicken-(in small pieces)with-veggies. He came of a rural gentry family. He said in China rice was the main food at a meal, and people would share a single dish at the center of the table, just dabbing lightly at it with their chopsticks. Each time, their chopsticks would pick up a tiny bit of the dish and then they'd sweep a lot of rice into their mouths with their chopsticks (this was allowed by etiquette, though sweeping noodles into your mouth was a no-no), so one small dish went a long way with eight or ten people at the table (who often each had two to four bowls of rice), whereas nowadays, people often eat a lot of the dishes and only a little, or even no, rice. My own family was urban, and in the old days we usually had four or more dishes to go with the rice.

9. Victor Mair said,

   February 7, 2014 @ 1:45 pm

   @John Ch

   You've raised a number of important issues. Let me address some of them.

   There's a big difference between the sort of fixed collocation like xiǎo cài guǎn 小菜館 (lit., "small vegetable / dish shop") that we're discussing here and the ad hoc, impromptu stringing together of independent nouns in English and German to which you refer. Here we're dealing with three morphosyllables (they're not really separate words like the nouns you were talking about in English and German) that customarily cohere as a commonly repeated expression. The problem is that it means various things according to the environment and locale in which it is used. From the more than two dozen opinions listed above and in the previous post, we have seen that there are many diverse opinions about the meaning of xiǎo cài guǎn 小菜館 (lit., "small vegetable / dish shop").

   You were right to point out that spacing in English and German help to disambiguate groups of words and that Chinese written with characters lacks this advantage. What needs to be pointed out is that Mandarin written in Hanyu Pinyin does have word spacing, and that — as I've shown both in this post and in the previous one — this spacing goes a long way toward helping to disambiguate groups of syllables, just as pauses do in speech.

10. Chau Wu said,

    February 7, 2014 @ 2:10 pm

    @ Simon P. "Look at Lamma Island, 南丫島. 南 is "naam4" in Cantonese, yet already when this was first transcribed into English (presumably well over a century ago), it was pronounced with an "l" initial."

    English notoriously loves to denasalize words. German fünf (5) is English five, Gans goose, uns us, etc. When the English started to take control of South and Southeast Asia, they gave denasalized versions of place names such as Mumbai > Bombay, and Myanmar > Burma (note the typical English non-rhotic style for the latter).

    @ Victor Mair. This is just a footnote. Respondent #2 (A specialist in Hanyu Pinyin) to your survey says, "Another possibility would be "Xiao Cai [de] guan" (a restaurant belonging to someone with the family name of Cai who has the nickname of Xiao Cai)." The family name must be written with the character 蔡 (Cài), not 菜 (Cài). Nevertheless, Xiao Cai Guan 小菜館 based on the play of sound for the nickname, Xiao Cai 小蔡 is logical. But the jest of the sound-play is known only to the owner's circle of close friends, it would be lost to other customers.

11. julie lee said,

    February 7, 2014 @ 2:29 pm

    As to segmentation, I agree with Prof. Mair that xiao cai guan 小菜館 can be understood as
    xiaocai guan (little-dishes restaurant) and/or xiao caiguan (little vegetable/dish-restaurant, i.e., little restaurant). Yes, Pinyin allows you to join syllables into words, thus reducing ambiguity. The character script doesn't allow you to join syllables (characters) by closing the spacing between characters.

12. Stephan Stiller said,

    February 7, 2014 @ 3:12 pm

    @ John Ch

    First of all, I agree with what Prof. Mair writes. I should clarify that much of my comments was about what sort of ambiguity remains if one knows about the word boundaries (but not about the constituent grouping). So his comment is more relevant for 小菜館, while what I write is (more) about general compounding.

    A German example that is similar to our Mandarin example is the word "Druckerzeugnis". It is ambiguous between "Druck-Erzeugnis" (printed matter) and "Drucker-Zeugnis" (evaluation/report for someone who is a printer by profession). We have (at least) three morphemes druck·er·zeugnis whose constituent grouping is just as ambiguous as that of 小菜館 unless we hyphenate. But German doesn't exhibit regional variation for this.

13. Stephan Stiller said,

    February 7, 2014 @ 3:28 pm

    @ John Ch

    An ambiguity in German where all 3 constituents are full nouns*: "Holztürschlüssel". "Holz-Türschlüssel" means "door key made out of wood"; "Holztür-Schlüssel" means "key for a wooden door".

    (* While both "Holztür" and "Türschlüssel" exist already as wonderfully compositional nouns, the example would still work if they weren't.)

14. Dave Cragin said,

    February 7, 2014 @ 11:48 pm

    To add to Stephan’s comment on ambiguity: Zou’s article from 7 years ago suggested that additional ambiguity was creeping into Chinese due to the influence of English and the use of long sentences. Here's what he said:

    “The most problematic adoption, however, is the use of long sentences, which make much writing almost unreadable. Since the Chinese language has less stringent grammatical rules, sentences must be short and compact to avoid ambiguity. The difference between English and Chinese can be seen in the necessity, according to textbooks, for a translator to break down sentences into shorter ones when translating the former into the latter.” See: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2007-08/31/content_6071848.htm

    It would be interesting to hear if other Chinese feel that the author’s observations have continued to today, i.e., is there more “English-like” sentence construction in Chinese?

15. Bob said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 1:19 am

    @Dave Cragin: Yes, the long sentences problem in Chinese writing is still there; particularly in scientific (including social science) writings. Sometimes, one feels, one need to know English –structure of sentences– to understand what the author wants to say.

16. Victor Mair said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 8:10 am

    From a colleague:

    I've just talked to a friend of mine in Shanghai, who is a university professor, about the exact meaning and usage of xiaocai guan. According to him, this is one of the many new-emerging terms in Shanghai dialect, which may have derived from some of the neighboring towns around Shanghai, and which sound folksy and voguish. He predicts that some of these terms may eventually fade into oblivion, as did many other terms in the past which were once faddish but soon became obsolete. This phenomenon is typical of many Chinese dialects. Manners change; modes evolve. This is why and how a language becomes self-sustainable and self-rejuvenating.

17. languagehat said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 9:07 am

    English notoriously loves to denasalize words. German fünf (5) is English five, Gans goose, uns us, etc. When the English started to take control of South and Southeast Asia, they gave denasalized versions of place names such as Mumbai > Bombay, and Myanmar > Burma (note the typical English non-rhotic style for the latter).

    This is all nonsense. The part about five, goose, etc. represents a development common to English and Frisian and thus has to do with a period before even Old English; it is completely irrelevant to anything that happened in the last millennium and a half. Bombay is borrowed from Portuguese, which changed the initial sound on the basis (presumably) of the resemblance to their phrase for 'good bay.' Burma is not from Myanmar but from the colloquial form Bama (and exhibits that annoyingly pointless and confusing use of r by non-rhotic speakers, as in "Sade, pronounced Shar-day"). If English-speakers transcribed the name as Lamma, it is because they heard an l there.

18. Victor Mair said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 10:25 am

    From the same colleague who made the 2nd comment above:

    Just got this from Shanghai: xiaocaiguan is a term used by those peasants from villages or towns near Shanghai. As more and more peasants moved to Shanghai as residents or workers, they have brought with them their own language, from which some terms have been conveniently picked up by "old" Shanghai citizens who think those expressions are exotic and cute. So it should be xiaocaiguan, instead of xiaocai guan or xiao caiguan.

19. Bob said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 11:11 am

    there are some addition information for some of the things mentioned by various persons:
    大菜=aga-aga, 9japanese name), a kind of sea weed, 大菜糕 is the jelly like dessert made from aga-age.
    大菜=西餐, in Hong Kong, we use the term 大餐. But, this western meal has to be a complete dinner/supper, including soap, salad, entrée(s), and dessert…..
    While 菜館 is not used commonly these days, I recall the phrase 酒樓菜館, evidently 菜館 has been used in the past. ,

20. julie lee said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 12:07 pm

    @Bob says: "Sometimes, one feels, one need to know English –structure of sentences– to understand what the author wants to say."
    Yes, exactly. I've mentioned this before: My late mom was Chinese and knew very little English. She was very literate in Chinese. However, in her later years she was finding the Chinese newspaper often hard to understand, not the contents but the language. I knew why because I came from English. News articles in the Chinese paper often seemed to me a direct translation from English, with English sentence structure and vocabulary. When I read the Chinese paper, I had a strange feeling I was reading English, and had just read the same news articles in the English newspaper. So it was easy for me to understand the Chinese newspaper, even though my mom's Chinese was much better than mine. Her native language, Chinese, was becoming a foreign language to her, with strange grammar and strange words, directly, literally, translated from English.
    Neil Dolinger here on LLog asked me to give examples. I recently moved and don't have Chinese newspapers and magazines here. I'll have to get a Chinese newspaper when I drive some distance to the Chinese supermarket in another city.
    Here's one example of a Chinese word directly translated from English:
    Qingxuhua 情緒化 "emotional" (as in, "He was too emotional in his response." )
    An older, more familiar translation would be jidongde 激動的 "emotional".
    Qingxu 情緒 usually means "mood" in Chinese. And the suffix hua化 usually means "-ize(d)", as in prioritize(d), nationalize(d). So the newer qingxuhua 情緒化 "emotional" would literally mean "moodized" . So "his emotional response" would be "his moodized response". This would sound strange to a Chinese of an older generation. In the more familiar jidongde 激動的 "emotional", jidong激動 means "stirred (emotionally), excited, moved (emotionally)" and 的 is a suffix -al (as in emotion-al). The translator may have thought "moodized response" is closer in meaning to English "emotional response" than "stirred response".

21. Bob said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 12:19 pm

    @JQ all the Chinese restaurants offering dim sum, in southeast Michigan, are still giving customers the choice of dim sum or lunch. Except on Saturdays and Sunday, when most customers come for dim sum. The restaurant workers take it for grant that you come for dim sum too. If you prefer to have lunch, you have to require the menu….

22. Rodger C said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 12:22 pm

    Speaking of pointless rhoticization, I suppose Japanese aga-aga is the origin of English agar-agar.

23. Bob said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 12:37 pm

    菜館 is hardly heard of these days in Cantonese as well as in Mandarin; I remember I heard that term in Taoshanese, used by my Grand mother, Mother, Great Uncle… but, I don't know 菜館 is still in use in Taoshan…

24. Bob said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 12:40 pm

    @ Rodger C: it could be my typo, that aga-aga is really agar-agar..

25. Bob said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 12:51 pm

    –back to the original question, segmentation of 小菜館, 小-菜館 or 小菜-館? But, does it matter? For 小-菜館 usually offers 小菜. 菜館 offers 小菜 usually are not big…..

26. Stephan Stiller said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 1:02 pm

    @ julie lee

    That is a very informative comment. In fact, increased use of the suffix -化 is seen as a foreign influence. It would be interesting to investigate whether this change happened mainly because of English or was a slow and inevitable development having to do with scientific writing.

27. Andrew (not the same one) said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 2:44 pm

    The use of 'r' in representation of foreign words by non-rhotic speakers is not pointless. The function of non-rhotic 'r' is to modify a vowel, so, perfectly reasonably and naturally, we use it in transcribing foreign words to represent the modified vowel. The sounds associated with 'or' and 'ur' in non-rhotic English could not be represented without an 'r'. The sound associated with 'ar' could be, by writing 'ah', but it is not clear why this would be superior; as another commenter pointed out recently, that would get rid of the 'unpronounced r' at the cost of introducing an 'unpronounced h', since the 'h' in that context equally lacks its usual consonantal value.

28. julie lee said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 5:21 pm

    @ Stephen Stiller:
    Yes, you have a point there. I have tended to take it for granted that almost all the newly coined words found in the humanities and social sciences (such as the word qingxuhua情緒化"emotional") are Englishisms because I think most of the foreign journal articles read by social scientists and journalists in Taiwan are in English.
    A young Chinese sociologist from Taiwan told me that the foreign journal literature is translated into Chinese very fast, and the quantity of such literature to read is a never-ending, overwhelming deluge for the Chinese scholar.

29. Victor Mair said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 5:34 pm

    From the Shanghai correspondent again:

    Shanghaiers have a fine tradition of embracing and absorbing fresh linguistic input from outside sources, including English, which explains the use of many loan terms from English, such as sibolin (spring; a term used frequently by Shanghai handymen, commonly called Shanghai tongjiang, lit., Shanghai coppersmith), laske (last car, used as a metaphor in reference to the last opportunity; for instance, the passport I got years ago was valid for five years instead of two or three years, and I was told it was the "last car" I caught, meaning that I was the last person to get it, as any one who got a passport after I did wouldn't be as lucky.), and even "pudding" and "ice cream" (bing qilin, in Chinese — qilin is a transliteration of "cream").

30. julie lee said,

    February 8, 2014 @ 10:13 pm

    Good gracious, I knew buding 布丁 was Mandarin for pudding and shala 沙拉 meant salad, but never dreamed "qilin" in bing qiling 冰淇淋 (icre cream) was the Shanghainese transliteration of "cream".

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