New story in Pinyin: ‘Dashui Guohuo’ (’After the Flood’)
Posted by site admin on 29 Sep 2007 at 10:00 am | Tagged as: China, Chinese, English, Hanyu, Mandarin, pinyin, tone marks
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.
what’s with all the d’s? Is d now an abbreviation of de or is the editing not yet done?
Some writers distinguish between the use of de as an adjective, adjectival phrase, possessive, etc., using “d” for these, and de as an adverb, adverbial phrase, complement, etc., using “de” for these. The author put a note about this usage at the end of the story. Should I move it to the top?
Could this be done with the different le’s too? l for one and le for another (or others).
I can’t say I find d and l to my taste, but this kind of abbreviation is very common in alphabetic scripts of course (see Tagalog ng and mga) and could help pinyin be perceived as a writing system on its own (rather than a mere transcription)
Very nice. A sweet sad story. And a sweet story behind the text.
Haha: “before [until?] she has enough time to fully master the characters, Hanyu Pinyin can temporarily serve as a tool to help her to read Chinese”
Here’s to the “temporary” helpfulness of Pinyin!
The “d” looks weird to me too. If it’s pronounced the same, why bother to make that particular grammatical distinction explicit in the spelling?