Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese has an extreme propensity for elision, truncation, and abbreviation, which is one of the factors that make it so hard to read. Yesterday, we looked at the current Chinese proclivity for acronyms and initialisms, made much easier to produce and apply due to the use of digital technology and pinyin […]
We've mentioned "kaomoji " before (see "Readings"), but only gave a few examples. "Kaomoji 顔文字 ("face character / writing") is a Japanese term for more or less elaborate "drawings" composed of kana, characters, punctuation marks, and now letters and other symbols drawn from a wide range of writing systems. They can be quite fanciful, even […]
All in one sign! Here it is: (Source: Pinyin News)
Two delightful Chinglish specimens submitted by Karen Yang:
A cartoonist and her collaborator have been arrested in China for being "spiritually Japanese" (jīng Rì 精日). They have also been accused of "insulting China" (rǔ Huá 辱华). The latter term is transparent, and I've been hearing it a lot for the last couple of decades, whereas the former term is morphologically more difficult to […]
A sign warning against uncivilized behavior in the main bazaar in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region (Bloomberg):
Every time someone (usually a Chinese person) raises the issue of writing Sinographic languages in a phonetic script, people (usually non-Chinese) will jump on him / her and say that it can't be done or that it will destroy the culture. When it is pointed out that it already has been done repeatedly for the […]
[This is a guest post from a frustrated Chinese father in the PRC, written in response to the discussion in the comments that followed this post: "The Sinophone" (2/28/19). He doesn't mince words, but this is how he feels — passionately — about his fatherland.] As usual, the more I learn the more am I […]
There's a new attitude wave in China, and it's called the "Fó xì xiànxiàng 佛系现象", which looks like it means "Buddha system / series / department phenomenon". Unfortunately, that doesn't really make much sense on its own account, and it certainly doesn't fit with the way the expression "Fó xì 佛系" is employed in current […]
We've seen many a polysyllabic Sinograph on Language Log (check the Readings below). The one presented here is perhaps more creative and intriguing than any previously encountered: 「システム」って書こうとするとどうしても「テ」と「ム」が繋がってしまうので新しい漢字を提案したい。 pic.twitter.com/5VDywtulId — おおひなたごう☆レコード大好き小学生カケル (@gooohinata) January 10, 2019
A highly educated Chinese colleague sent me the following note: More Chinese phrases with Latin alphabet, such as C位, diss, etc. have become quite popular. Even one of my friends who is so intoxicated by the beauty of the Chinese classic language used "diss" in her WeChat post. She could have used any of the […]
More than twenty years ago, I wrote a science fiction novel called "China Babel" (still unpublished) in which I described a time in the future when Chinese would merge with English. Judging from current usage, the future of the mid-90s is fast impinging on the present.