Pinyin news

Those working in the new administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (Mǎ Yīngjiǔ) are people with priorities. For example, they certainly didn’t waste any time removing the Chinese characters for “Taiwan” from the Web site of the presidential office, as this happened on his first day in office. On the other hand, they didn’t bother with other things, like having the current year be 2008 instead of “108.”

From a screen shot taken a couple of nights ago:

From a screen shot taken about two-and-a-half years ago:

(FWIW, I told a meeting of government webmasters three years ago that the date script needed fixing — or, better still, deletion. Are they really under the impression that lots of people visit the presidential office’s Web site or that of any other Taiwan governmental agency to check the date and time?)

Also, given what the head of the ruling party recently said in the glorious motherland China, perhaps they might want to replace “Office of the President” with “Office of Mr. Ma.”

At any rate, how things are named is a concern of the current administration, just as it was for the previous one. I’ve given up trying to follow the twists and turns of the name of Revere the Bloody Dictator Shrine Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. Someone let me know when the dust finally settles.

And then there’s the airport. The last time I was on a highway in Taoyuan I noticed that the signs that previously said “CKS Airport” had the “CKS” covered, so they read simply “Airport”. Maybe the new administration can live with that, regardless of what it does about the signage of the airport itself.

But what is to become of the official names that weren’t changed in Mandarin but only in English? Please note that I’m not talking about romanizations but about real English names. I’m referring to how the English names of several ministries and other government agencies were changed during President Chen Shui-bian’s two terms in office, though the Mandarin names remained the same.

For example:

None of the above revised names have been revoked or changed as of today (June 12, 2008 — or 108-06-12, as the Presidential Office would have it).

What about the addresses of the Web sites of these ministries and agencies?

Thus, so far the new English names have survived.

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During an extremely brief trip a few weeks ago to Gāoxióng, Taiwan’s second-largest city, I was able to grab a few photos of signage there. Most of these were taken from a moving taxi; thus the poor quality and lack of much diversity. But these are the best I could do under the circumstances.

First, a few basic points:

• they’re in Tongyong Pinyin (bleah — but at least they’re consistent)
• they don’t use InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion (This lack is, of course, a good thing. If only Taipei hadn’t screwed this up!)
• in most cases the text in romanization is large enough to read even at a distance (Very good — unlike all too many relatively recent signs elsewhere, such as Taipei County.)

In short, other than the choice of romanization most of these signs aren’t all that bad. They’re certainly much better (and more consistent) than the ones that Taipei County put up in Tongyong Pinyin a few years ago. (Although Taipei County’s current magistrate said more than two years ago that he was in favor of switching to Hanyu Pinyin, as far as I can see he has done absolutely nothing about this. Of course, some might say that he’s done absolutely nothing about anything; but I’ll leave discussion of that to the political blogs.)

Here’s another Gāoxióng sign with romanization that isn’t too small.

I’m not a fan of the practice of force-justifying the Chinese characters and romanization/English to the same width. This style can be seen in many of these signs. Sometimes this results in the romanized/English words being spaced too far apart; more often, though, the Chinese characters are left with lots of space between them — so much space that it would be easy to have spaces indicate word divisions for the texts in Hanzi (something Y.R. Chao recommended nearly a century ago), which might be an interesting thing to try on signs. I wonder if anyone has ever performed any experiments on this.

The full Mandarin name of the school indicated by the blue sign on the left is rather long:

Gāoxióng shìlì Gāoxióng nǚzǐ gāojí zhōngxué
(高雄市立高雄女子高級中學)

Whoever made the sign wisely desided to cut that down to 高雄女中 (Gāoxióng nǚ zhōng). If only someone had realized that it would have been better to use something shorter than the full English name, too. “Kaohsiung Municipal Girls’ Senior High School” is a lot to fit on one small sign. “Kaohsiung Girls’ High School”, “Girls’ Municipal High School”, or something even shorter would have been much better.

Here are some more signs.

And finally an address plate on a building. This style could certainly be better.

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Victor Mair’s latest post at Language Log introduces a new U.S.-based newspaper, the Huayu Xuebao (Mandarin Learning Newspaper, 華語學報), which is similar to Taiwan’s Guoyu Ribao (Mandarin Daily News), the main difference being the former uses Hanyu Pinyin while the latter uses zhuyin fuhao (bopo mofo).

Well, actually the Huayu Xuebao doesn’t use proper Pinyin (see recent remarks). But I’m so happy to see this long-needed paper that I’ll hold my tongue for now.

Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t have its Web site ready yet — not that the long-established Guoyu Ribao is much better at that, at least when it comes to texts as they appear in the newspaper. So, for more information about the Huayu Xuebao, write learningnewspaper [AT] yahoo.com or phone +1-201-288-9188 (New Jersey).

There’s also a sample issue.

source: How to learn to read Chinese, Language Log, May 25, 2008

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The new work I promised on Li Yang and his Crazy English method has finally been published and is available for free on the Web: A Survey of Li Yang Crazy English (2.6 MB PDF), by Amber R. Woodward.

For a little more on this, see Victor Mair’s recent post on Language Log: Crazy English again.

This paper, which is some 70 pages long, includes photos and even videos.

Here’s the table of contents:

• Preface
• Abstract
• Li Yang: The Man
  • Li Yang’s Background
  • The Establishment of Li Yang Crazy English
• Crazy English: The Method
  • Precursors to Crazy English
  • Crazy English Pedagogical Method
  • Crazy English Psychological Method
  • The Potential for Success of the Crazy English Method
• Li Yang Crazy English Politics: The Madness
  • Li Yang’s Personal Ideology
  • Zhang Yuan’s 1999 Documentary, Crazy English
  • Crazy English Publicity
  • Government Response to Li Yang
  • Connection between the Method and the Madness
• Appendix
  • Survey on Li Yang and Crazy English
  • Transcript of Time Asia Interview
  • Transcript of Li’s Responses to Criticism
  • Pictures of Li Yang Crazy English
• Bibliography

This is issue no. 180 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

Further reading:

• Crazy English, Language Log, November 21, 2007
• Shanghai Daily: ‘Crazy English’ guru a bit crazed, Shanghaiist, October 11, 2007
• more Crazy English, Pinyin News
• Crazy English in the New Yorker, Pinyin News, April 23, 2008
• “Crazy English” and Chinese nationalism, Pinyin News, July 2, 2005

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A couple of days ago I promised a “long, critical study of Crazy English” will be released soon. It’s still in preparation. But you can now read a study from a couple of years ago by Amber Woodward, the same author who wrote the forthcoming piece. The 2006 study is Learning English, Losing Face, and Taking Over: The Method (or Madness) of Li Yang and His Crazy English.

The article prominently quotes a comment added to a post here on Pinyin News. So comment away, everyone, cuz you just might end up in an international journal.

This is issue no. 170 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

further reading:

• Crazy English in the New Yorker, Pinyin News, April 23, 2008
• “Crazy English” and Chinese nationalism, Pinyin News, July 2, 2005

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It seems like a good time for something related to Tibet.

The newest rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers comprises 900 sample sentences in romanized Tibetan and English, the Tibetan being specifically Kham Tibetan.

From the introduction:

The reader is undoubtedly aware that written Tibetan radically differs from what is spoken and that there are also many differences in, for example, written Tibetan in Amdo regions and that of Lhasa. The value of this material is that it presents one of the most widely used Tibetan dialects as it is actually spoken.

Renchin-Jashe, a native of Yulshul (Yushu) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province where Kham is spoken, wrote these sentences using a system that he devised. I then edited the sentences…. We have tried throughout to present sentences that reflect Tibetan culture.

This issue is Kham Tibetan Language Materials (2.7 MB PDF), by Renchin-Jashe and Kevin Stuart.

Here are the first 15 of the 900 sentences.

1. Qa e tel.
   Hello.
2. Chou ghale-jiele en?
   Is your life well?
3. Nga Norbu Sangbho yin.
   I’m Norbu Sangbho.
4. Chou Doje e rei?
   Are you Doje?
5. Nga yin.
   Yes, I am.
6. Chou dhemo yin nam?
   How are you?
7. Nga dhemo yin, tujeche.
   Fine, thanks.
8. Droma dhele ghale e ree?
   How is Droma?
9. Mo ni dhele ghale ree tujeche.
   She is very well, thank you.
10. Chou dhehi eyou, Avo Qalsang?
    How are you, Mr. Qalsang?
11. Ghongmo zang, Ashe Yudron.
    Good evening, Ms. Yudron.
12. Ghong mo chou dhemo en?
    How are you this evening?
13. Da do nub dhe mo jie Tshering.
    Good night Tshering.
14. Ghashou, Dondrub.
    Good-bye, Dondrub.
15. Sang nyin tutree zei.
    See you tomorrow.

The work also contains a guide to pronunciation and sentences for learners at the intermediate level.

It was first published in November 1993 as issue no. 42 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

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Roddy of Chinese Forums, Signese, Dreams of White Tiles, and even more sites, found a new video (4 min. 40 sec.) of Zhou Youguang speaking, in English, to a reporter from the Guardian.

I was kind of surprised to see this featured on the Guardian’s front page under the ‘Father of Pinyin’ title - I’d wager 9/10ths upwards of the Guardian’s readership doesn’t know what pinyin is. Somewhat unforgivably they’ve managed to spell the guy’s name wrong and not bothered to add tones to the pinyin used in the video, and the interview is pretty weak - basically it’s ‘here’s a nice old Chinese guy talking for a few minutes’ but there’s really very little of depth. They’ve also opted to add subtitles to what sounds to me like perfectly comprehensible English.

But enough negativity, if you want to get a look at the guy who rescued you from bopomofo, have a look.

As happy as I am about the video, I’m going to add a bit more negativity. Failure to get the word parsing correct is also a major error: not “pin yin zhi fu” but “Pīnyīn zhī fù.” Actually, even that isn’t so good, because Pinyin is meant for modern baihua, not the style of Literary Sinitic and its many short forms. Thus, “Pīnyīn de fùqin” would be better.

The accompanying article is amazingly sloppy in parts.

Although the article manages to spell Zhou Youguang’s name correctly, it consistently refers to him not by his family name but by his given name, “Youguang.” It’s almost inconceivable that any reporter in China could (repeatedly) make such an elementary mistake; so perhaps this is the fault of an overzealous copy editor.

I’m not going to sort out and list what’s correct and what’s incorrect in the rest of the article, other than mention one point at the end.

Confusingly, Taiwan uses several different romanisation methods — including a variant of pinyin, tongyong pinyin — and zuiyin.

Zuiyin? Of course what is meant is zhuyin (zhùyīn/註音/注音), which is spelled correctly earlier in the article. Zuiyin (zuìyīn/罪因) is a noun meaning “cause of a crime.”

sources:

• Sound principles: On the 50th anniversary of the introduction of his alphabet, Tania Branigan meets 102-year-old Zhou Youguang, the man credited with helping millions of Chinese to read and write, Guardian, February 21, 2008
• Guardian Interview with “The Father of Pinyin”, Chinese Forums

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Putting English words in Mandarin sentences is of course extremely common in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, generally because this is thought to look cool and modern. But last month I was surprised to see Mandarin sentences with just English’s -ing added — and not one but two examples of this.

The image here is from a poster for the DPP’s presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh, that came out in March but which I didn’t see until a few days ago. It reads 台灣維新ing (”Táiwān wéixīn-ing“): “Taiwan is modernizing.” (Click the image to see the whole poster.)

The other example I noticed was in a newspaper headline about the Hong Kong pop diva Faye Wong: 明年拚老三 天后暫不復出 李亞鵬王菲 積極做人ING (Míngnián pīn lǎosān — tiān hòu zàn bù fùchū — Lǐ Yàpéng, Wáng Fěi jījí zuòrén-ing. “Next year work hard to produce third child — superstar temporarily not appearing — Li Yapeng and Faye Wong are energetically working on making a baby.”)

There are several other interesting things about the Faye Wong headline, such as the way in most other contexts zuòrén (lit. “be/make a person”) means something like “be a mensch.” But I don’t want to digress too much lest I never finish this post.

In both of these examples, -ing is used to emphasize the currentness of the actions. But it is of course possible in Mandarin to stress that something is going on now — and to do so without borrowing forms from English. For example, with zài:

• Lǐ Yàpéng, Wáng Fěi jījí zài zuòrén
• Táiwān zài wéixīn

Has anyone seen or heard other examples of this -ing grafting?

sources:

• 明年拚老三 天后暫不復出 李亞鵬王菲 積極做人ING, China Times, November 30, 2007
• “Táiwān wéixīn-ing” — Xiè Chángtíng quánguó xiàoyuán xúnhuí yǎnjiǎng (「台灣維新ing」謝長廷全國校園巡迴演講), Frank Hsieh’s blog, March 27, 2007

For lagniappe: lyrics to the Faye Wong song “Bù liú” in Pinyin, which has lots of examples of Mandarin’s bǎ.

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