Pinyin news

卍

Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased another issue related to the history of writing: Questions on the Origins of Writing Raised by the Silk Road (1.0 MB PDF), by Jao Tsung-i (Ráo Zōngyí, 饒宗頤) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

This work focuses especially on the use of two symbols, shown at right, in China and elsewhere.

This is issue no. 26 of Sino-Platonic Papers. It was first published in September 1991.

additional reading:

• Jao Tsung-i, a Web site in Mandarin
• Jao Tsung-i, Wikipedia

No Comments »

Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased for free Tracks of the Tao, Semantics of Zen (950 KB PDF), by Victor H. Mair.

After a brief introduction, Mair, who has translated more than one classic Taoist text, asks, “How did Tao and Zen enter our vocabulary? And what do these two extraordinarily powerful words really mean?”

He then enters into a “somewhat lengthy excursion into the neglected realm of philology” but keeps to his word to “try to make it as painless and entertaining as possible.”

It’s a fascinating and wide-ranging essay, especially for those interested in historical linguistics.

This is issue no. 17 of Sino-Platonic Papers. It was originally released in April 1990.

No Comments »

Ah, Park Street: Taipei’s lovely tree-lined boulevard next to a wonderful oasis of well-manicured nature.

Nope.

Here, “park” refers to Nangang Software Park (Nángǎng Ruǎntǐ Yuánqū, 南港軟體園區), an area in eastern Taipei of new buildings housing mainly software-development and biomedical companies. The software park itself is a pretty nice place and looks fine; its surrounding area, however, is anything but green and leafy, comprising mainly dreary brick buildings and vacant lots.

But what’s odder than the name itself is that it appears in English rather than in the mix of Hanyu Pinyin (with StuPid, StuPid InTerCapITaLiZaTion) and English (e.g., St., Rd.) that has become standard in Taipei. Also odd is that at one end of the street the signs read “Park St,” but at the other end “YuanQu St.” This is a fairly new street name, as the software park is only a few years old.

The flash on my camera helps reveal that the part of the sign reading “YuanQu St.” is pasted on top of something else — quite possibly “Park St.”

I spent about 15 minutes today getting my phone call to the Taipei City Government transferred from one desk to another before I was able to speak with someone who knew what she was doing. She stated that the Park Street version is in error and would be corrected to Yuanqu Street.

I really wish I’d asked for her extension number, because I’m certain to be making similar calls in the future.

2 Comments »

My friend Michael Cannings has just unveiled his new Web site on the Taiwanese language, Tailingua. Here is how he introduces it:

Taiwanese is a Chinese language spoken by two-thirds of the population of Taiwan. It forms one dialect of the group known as Southern Min, which has a total of around forty-nine million native speakers, making it the twenty-first most widely-spoken language in the world.

However, there is very little information in English available on the internet (or in print, for that matter) about Southern Min in general, and Taiwanese in particular - a lack that Tailingua is designed to remedy, at least in part.

The site provides concise summaries of romanization and other methods for writing Taiwanese. It also offers fonts, input methods, a list of useful books, and more.

A very promising beginning!

1 Comment »

I’m very pleased to announce that Pinyin Info has a new story in Hanyu Pinyin: “Dàshuǐ Guòhòu,” by Zhang Liqing. It’s available here in two versions: Pinyin alone and Pinyin with English translation (as “After the Flood”), so one doesn’t even have to know Mandarin or Pinyin to read this.

The story recalls a girlhood friend in China, not long after the end of the Second World War.

Zhang is an associate editor of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary and has translated a number of important works into English, including Zhou Youguang’s The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts and Lü Shuxiang’s Comparing Chinese Characters and a Chinese Spelling Script — an evening conversation on the reform of Chinese characters.

4 Comments »

Imagine some white guys in a fairly large U.S. city open a restaurant named “Mr. Taiwan Slant-Eyes Asian Cuisine.” And imagine that this restaurant specializes in distinctly Americanized dishes such as egg foo yong, fortune cookies, and California wraps. Now imagine the response. Isn’t this fun?

OK, now imagine a different situation: In Taiwan’s fifth-largest city some locals open a place specializing in Taiwanized Western food and dub their restaurant “Miss UK Cafe Pointy-Nose Foreign Food.”

As you’ve probably guessed, the second scenario is real. The “Miss UK Cafe ㄚ度仔 異國美食” (Miss UK Cafe a-tok-a yìguó měishí) recently opened not far from my apartment in Banqiao.

A-tok-a (ㄚ度仔) is Taiwanese for “pointy nose” (i.e., Westerner), though perhaps the common translation of “big nose” conveys the spirit a little better. As Tempo Gain explains in the Forumosa thread on this word, “the initial ‘a’ often preceds names, and the final ‘a’ often is attached to nouns like the Mandarin ‘zi’ haizi, chezi, etc.”

Although most foreigners I know in Taiwan find the use of a-tok-a offensive to some degree, reactions are usually tempered by the knowledge that the word is very seldom used intentionally as a pejorative. It’s just the word most Hoklo speakers would use for “Westerner,” and they mean nothing bad by this and perhaps even see it as “cute” in a favorable way. So since I’m certain the restaurateurs didn’t intend any insult in choosing this name, I’m not going to carp about this any more than I already have — which is not to say that I will ever buy anything from that restaurant.

It’s still an interesting name, though. (Actually, this is probably two names: the standard one (ㄚ度仔 異國美食), which is for most people, and the English one (Miss UK Cafe), which is probably there in an attempt to look modern/foreign/cool.)

For those keeping count, that’s three scripts and as many languages on just one sign.

• Miss UK Cafe: English, in the Roman alphabet
• ㄚ度仔: Taiwanese, in a mixed script of zhuyin (ㄚ) and Chinese characters
• 異國美食: Mandarin, in Chinese characters

The mixing of scripts in “ㄚ度仔” is representative of the sad fact that most people in Taiwan are unsure how to write Taiwanese. Here are some of the ways this word gets written, along with the number of Google results and Baidu results for that exact phrase.

• ㄚ度仔 Google 555 / Baidu doesn’t recognize the ㄚ
• 阿凸仔 3,440 / Baidu 1,320
• 阿多仔 6,730/ Baidu 13,400
• 阿卓仔 11,300 / Baidu 2,810
• 阿荳仔 12,500 / Baidu 24,700
• 阿豆仔 12,500 / Baidu 24,700 (Google and Baidu apparently refuse to differentiate 荳 and 豆)

Also interesting is the use of yìguó (異國) instead of the more common wàiguó (外國), for “foreign.”

• “異國” Google 1,510,000 / Baidu 14,700,000
• “外國” Google 6,420,000 / Baidu 46,500,000

Yìguó měishí, however, is more common than wàiguó měishí.

• “外國美食” Google 41,100 / Baidu 26,400
• “異國美食” Google 114,000 / Baidu 152,000

This, I suspect, is because yìguó měishí “sounds fancier” because of how relatively common the word waiguo is.

further reading:

• Big Nose in Taiwanese, Forumosa, thread started December 29, 2004
• Darlie/Darkie toothpaste, Wikipedia
• rice pizza = ‘mizza’, Pinyin News (more script mixing)

4 Comments »

Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased the third volume in its series of book reviews: Reviews III (8.3 MB PDF).

This volume was first published in October 1991.

The main topics of the books in this volume are

• Violence in China
• Scientific Stagnation in Traditional China.
• Oracle Shell and Bone Inscriptions (OSBIs)
• Proto-Language And Culture
• Language and Script
• Reference Tools for Sinitic Languages
• Literature and the Life of Peking
• Religion and Philosophy
• Words
• The New World
• “Barbarian” Business
• South Asia
• Miscellaneous

For those who hesitate to download such a large file without knowing which books were reviewed, you may consult the table of contents (small HTML file).

No Comments »

David Moser wrote his highly popular work Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard (found right here on Pinyin Info) in the early 1990s. Around the same time he contributed another more academic but still highly readable essay to Sino-Platonic Papers, this one on the topic of “Slips of the Tongue and Pen in Chinese.”

This work has just been reissued for free (2.9 MB PDF).

No Comments »