Review: "Poems Without an ‘I’", by Madeleine ThienNYRB October 8, 2020 Issue The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)by Ha JinPantheon, 301 pp. The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translatedby David HintonNew Directions, 267 pp. Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetryby David HintonShambhala, 138 pp. I have […]
Throughout history, female literacy in China was extremely low. It was only in the 20th century that sizable numbers of women were able to read. An exception to this general rule was Candida Xu (in Chinese called Xǔ Xú Gāndìdà, 许徐甘第大, Xǔ Xú shì 许徐氏，Xǔ Gāndìdà 许甘第大，Xú Gāndìdà 徐甘第大, and Gāndìdà 甘第大 [source]). The double […]
From Shī jīng 詩經 (Poetry Classic), circa 6th c. BC: (Her) hands are like catkins; skin is like congealed lard; neck is like larva of longicorn; teeth are like calabash seeds; forehead (like that of) cicada, eyebrows (like antennae of) moth, (her) enchanting smile is winsome; (her) beautiful eyes are clear-set. — Ode 57, […]
A fuller and more specific version of the title of this post would be "Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of An Shigao (Chinese: 安世高; pinyin: Ān Shìgāo; Wade–Giles: An Shih-kao, Korean: An Sego, Japanese: An Seikō, Vietnamese: An Thế Cao) (fl. 148-180 CE) and Lokakṣema (लोकक्षेम, Chinese: 支婁迦讖; pinyin: Zhī Lóujiāchèn) (fl. […]
Jialing Xie surveys the field in "Top 10 Buzzwords in Chinese Online Media: An overview of China’s media top buzzwords over the past year", What's on Weibo (1/5/20). As in the previous year, the expressions were chosen by the chief editor of the magazine Yǎowén Jiáozì 咬文嚼字, which Xie says "literally means 'to pay excessive […]
From the moment I began learning Mandarin more than half a century ago, I had a strong, visceral opposition to learning the characters. I wanted to learn the language — its phonology, grammar, lexicon, morphology, syntax, idioms. My teachers forced me to learn some characters, but I figured out various ways to devote much more […]
The word for "write" in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is xiě. The traditional form of the Sinograph used to write this word is 寫, var. 冩 (can you see the difference?). In Japanese that would be pronounced "sha" or "utsusu", but it is considered an uncommon character (hyōgaiji), and means not "write", but "transcribe; duplicate; […]
These are jokes circulating on the Chinese internet. Not all of them have to do with Chinese languages per se in the narrowest sense. Mandarin Guānhuà 官話 (lit., "officials' talk", "Mandarin")
Two days ago, in "Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19), we listed scores of languages from easiest to hardest to learn. Spanish came out overall as the easiest widely spoken language for many people to learn, while Arabic and Turkish struck many people as quite difficult to master.
Mandy Chan saw this sign on Weibo (a major Chinese microblogging website) and challenged me to translate it:
This article (in Chinese) describes how China's netizens (wǎngyǒu 网友) are ridiculing President Xi for inappropriately quoting a poem by Kong Rong 孔融 (153-208), a 20th generation descendant of Confucius, in his New Year's address to the nation. The first lines of the poem are: suìyuè bù jū shíjié rú liú 歲月不居 時節如流 The years […]
In the comments to "The ethnopolitics of National Language in China" (7/2/18), "Uyghur basketball player" (6/24/18), and other posts, there has been a vigorous debate on the relationship between national language on the one hand and local and "minority" / ethnic languages on the other hand. In the course of the debate, many interesting political, […]
I'm reading Paul Midler's What's Wrong with China (Hoboken, NJ: 2018). Midler has spent two decades as a business consultant in East Asia and speaks Mandarin. His book is replete with penetrating observations about many aspects of society and culture and is solidly based on extensive first-hand experience and deep learning in Chinese history. Its […]