{"id":55160,"date":"2022-07-07T08:13:15","date_gmt":"2022-07-07T13:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=55160"},"modified":"2022-07-07T08:13:42","modified_gmt":"2022-07-07T13:13:42","slug":"you-bear-lost-person-writing-taiwanese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=55160","title":{"rendered":"\"You bear lost person\": writing Taiwanese"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Mark Swofford, a cup of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.milkshoptea.com\/en\/about.php?Key=1\">bubble tea<\/a> with Taiwanese on it (romanized, Hanzified, and translated).<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/milksha1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/milksha1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" \/><\/a><!--more--><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/milksha2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/milksha2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/milksha3.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" title=\"Click to embiggen\" src=\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/milksha3.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"350\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The following are the transcriptions, Romanizations, and translations of what is written on the cup.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Li Siong Be Lang<br \/>\n\u4f60\u718a\u8ff7\u4eba lit., you-bear (the animal)-lost \/ charm-person<br \/>\n\"You are most charming\"<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Goa Beh Ka Li Lam Tiau Tiau<br \/>\n\u6211\u8981\u628a\u4f60\u652c\u8fe2\u8fe2 lit., I-want-pretransitive particle-you-embrace-far away<br \/>\n\"I want to hug you tightly\"<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Lai Chit Tho<br \/>\n\u4f86\u4e03\u6dd8 lit., come-seven-dredge \/ strain \/ cleanse (and many other topolectal meanings)<br \/>\n\"Come and play\" (i.e., \"come for a visit and have fun\")<\/p>\n<p>We have often talked about declining fluency rates in Taiwanese, with people becoming increasingly unable to speak, much less write, the language, but they still seem to have sufficient passive ability to understand a considerable amount of Taiwanese, even when written with many characters borrowed solely for their sound.<\/p>\n<p><b>Selected readings<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\"<a title=\"Permanent link to Morphemes without Sinographs\" href=\"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=52699\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"bookmark noopener\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p%3D52699&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1657197724819000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0qhIHHC7gQZWey0i-NARRl\">Morphemes without Sinographs<\/a>\" (11\/18\/21) &#8212; includes a discussion of the Taiwanese expression meaning \"come and play\", with an extensive bibliography documenting the travails entailed by a writing system that cannot directly represent all the morphemes of a given language for which it is used.<\/li>\n<li>\"<a title=\"Permanent link to No character for the most frequent morpheme in Taiwanese\" href=\"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=8922\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"bookmark noopener\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p%3D8922&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1657197724819000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3u8j9eTXDnLY2I6YDzcoDC\">No character for the most frequent morpheme in Taiwanese<\/a>\" (12\/10\/13)<\/li>\n<li>\"Taiwanese Morphemes in Search of Chinese Characters\", by Robert L. Cheng (Zheng Liangwei),\u00a0<em>Journal of Chinese Linguistics<\/em>, 6.2 (June, 1978), 306-314.\u00a0 A classic article that deserves to be enshrined in the Sinological Hall of Fame, morphology-phonology chamber, like the Yale linguist, George A. Kennedy's memorable \"The Butterfly Case\" (in\u00a0<em>Wennti<\/em>, 8 [March, 1955]), which was a followup to his even more famous piece called \"The Monosyllabic Myth\" (in\u00a0<em>Journal of the American Oriental Society<\/em>, 71.3 [1951], 161-166), both of which are reprinted in Tien-yi Li, ed.,\u00a0<em>Selected Works of George A. Kennedy<\/em>\u00a0(New Haven: Far Eastern Publications, 1964), respectively pp. 274-322 and pp. 104-118.\u00a0 In these articles, Kennedy was writing about the fact that some Sinitic morphemes are disyllabic and how h\u00fadi\u00e9 \u8774\u8776 (\"butterfly\") is a prime example.\u00a0 The case is recounted in brief in J. Marshall Unger's\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=fRqKreZFVTYC&amp;pg=PA7&amp;lpg=PA7&amp;dq=george+kennedy+butterfly+myth&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=1-XsoZi7Tg&amp;sig=6DqdvghPsb2f2tdckF6S0Us4kwk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwj6hvXV9cjKAhWKcz4KHfyRBKMQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&amp;q=george%20kennedy%20butterfly%20myth&amp;f=false\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id%3DfRqKreZFVTYC%26pg%3DPA7%26lpg%3DPA7%26dq%3Dgeorge%2Bkennedy%2Bbutterfly%2Bmyth%26source%3Dbl%26ots%3D1-XsoZi7Tg%26sig%3D6DqdvghPsb2f2tdckF6S0Us4kwk%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26ved%3D0ahUKEwj6hvXV9cjKAhWKcz4KHfyRBKMQ6AEIIjAB%23v%3Donepage%26q%3Dgeorge%2520kennedy%2520butterfly%2520myth%26f%3Dfalse&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1657197724819000&amp;usg=AOvVaw2BdIms_XQ0nigjykAUw7RG\"><i>Ideogram:\u00a0 Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning<\/i>\u00a0<\/a>(Honolulu:\u00a0 University of Hawaii Press, 2004), p. 7.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>[Thanks to Grace Wu and Melvin Lee]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Mark Swofford, a cup of bubble tea with Taiwanese on it (romanized, Hanzified, and translated).<\/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":[224,189,205,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-topolects","category-transcription","category-translation","category-writing-systems"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55160","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=55160"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55181,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55160\/revisions\/55181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}