{"id":34373,"date":"2017-09-08T23:42:45","date_gmt":"2017-09-09T04:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=34373"},"modified":"2018-01-26T08:02:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-26T13:02:17","slug":"impromptu-biscriptalism-on-a-starbucks-cup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=34373","title":{"rendered":"Impromptu biscriptalism on a Starbucks cup"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Photograph taken by a Russian friend of Nikita Kuzmin at a Starbucks in Shenyang, northeast China:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/wais.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/wais.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" \/><\/a><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The handwriting on the side says simply:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">w\u00e0i's \u5916's (\"foreigner's\"), where the w\u00e0i \u5916 is short for:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">w\u00e0igu\u00f3r\u00e9n \u5916\u56fd\u4eba (\"foreigner\")<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">l\u01ceow\u00e0i \u8001\u5916 (\"[old] furriner\"), which we studied extensively in this post:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\">\"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=11626\">Laowai: the old furriner<\/a>\" (4\/9\/14)<\/p>\n<p>One might well ask why the barista didn't write \"de \u7684\", the Mandarin possessive particle equivalent to English \"'s\".\u00a0 I submit that they felt the two strokes of \"'s\" were easier and simpler than the eight strokes of \"de \u7684\".\u00a0 Not only that, using \"'s\" after the designation for a person at a Starbucks in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Shenyang\">Shenyang<\/a>\u00a0(Manchu name Mukden) shows that the English morpheme is thoroughly assimilated in Chinese and that it felt natural for the barista to do so.\u00a0 We observed this already years ago in this post on the adoption of the English agentive suffix -er in Mandarin:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\"<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=3111\">A New Morpheme in Mandarin<\/a>\" (4\/26\/11)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For digraphia, biscriptalism, and multiscriptalism, see &#8212; among others &#8212; the many posts listed\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?cat=176\">here<\/a>, and especially this intriguing early post:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\"<a href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/005318.html\">A new way of \u5bebing Mandarin<\/a>\" (1\/13\/08)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A final observation is that I've never seen a Starbucks barista write \"[so-and-so]'s\" on a cup in any English-speaking country where I've been (they just write the name of the person without \"'s\"), so the barista in Shenyang was not emulating an English usage when they added \"'s\" to w\u00e0i \u5916 (\"outside[er]; foreigner\").\u00a0 Their \"w\u00e0i's \u5916's\" (\"foreigner's\") is a thoroughly indigenous creation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photograph taken by a Russian friend of Nikita Kuzmin at a Starbucks in Shenyang, northeast China:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,176,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-borrowing","category-diglossia-and-digraphia","category-morphology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34373"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36379,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34373\/revisions\/36379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}