Monthly Archives: May 2006

May Fourth remembered

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Today is the 87th anniversary of the demonstrations in Beijing that marked the beginning of what is now called the May Fourth Movement. What concerns me here is not the surge in Chinese nationalism (something the present-day PRC — and some would say Taiwan, too — could use rather less of) but the literary revolution that largely overthrew the use of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese).

This revolution, though, swift and remarkable as it was, unfortunately remains incomplete today. As Yin Binyong put it:

Ever since the beginnings of the May Fourth movement, many scholars — especially those who support the use of alphabetized writing for Chinese — have all advocated as the main goal of the modern Chinese language standardization movement that spoken and written Chinese should be the same. Unfortunately, this goal has remained primarily a subjective aspiration; as long as Chinese characters continue to be the sole writing system in China, this goal can never be realized. Despite the fact that literary Chinese is no longer used, nevertheless it has been replaced by a half-literary, half-vernacular style of writing, rather than a style based solely on the spoken language.

Even so, the literary movement should not be underestimated. The changes brought — for well or ill — by the introduction several decades later of “simplified” Chinese characters are practically nothing compared with the impact of the overall change from Literary Sinitic to vernacular Mandarin.

A good source of information on the literary aspect of the May Fourth Movement is The Chinese Renaissance, by Hu Shih (Hú Shì, 胡適), one of the main figures in this movement.

Finally, I’d like to direct people to Languagehat’s post yesterday on the somewhat analagous situation with classical Arabic and Arabic vernaculars, a subject I’d love to learn more about.

new MRT signage

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David has posted on the inconsistent use of Tongyong Pinyin in the Taipei-area MRT system. I’ve already put a comment there, so I’ll not duplicate everything here.

I spend a lot of time complaining about signage, and my experiences in trying to get some errors in the MRT system corrected have, predictably, been frustrasting. But there is something I do really like: the font for the MRT signage. (See the photos with David’s post.) Does anyone recognize it?

For those of you not in Taiwan, the MRT is the Metropolitan Rapid Transit system for the Taipei area. Most of the system takes the form of a subway. One line, however, is elevated, as is a section of a different line (which also runs on ground level for several miles).

Wenlin: ‘software for learning Chinese’

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I get a lot of questions about how to do some sort of conversion involving Chinese characters. Most of the time, my answer is something like, “Get Wenlin. Even the free, non-expiring demo version (4 MB) will do what you need — and a lot more.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Wenlin, Random Stuff That Matters has posted a five-minute movie (with sound) of Wenlin in action (14.5 MB).

The range of what Wenlin can do extends far beyond what the movie shows. A lot of people might not notice that even in the demo a wide range of options are available under

  • Edit → Make Transformed Copy

My favorite, which is available only with the full version, is

  • Edit → Make Transformed Copy → Pinyin Transcription

Oh, it is a thing of beauty. (That function, though, works only in the full version, not the demo.)

For those of you who have the full version, I thought I’d share a little-known feature of Wenlin: its ability to search for regular expressions.

Let’s say you are trying to remember a chengyu (set phrase) about studying, but all you can recall is that it contains the sound “rubu.” You’re not sure of the characters. You’re not even sure of the tones. First you look up entries beginning with “rubu” in Wenlin’s electronic edition of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary:

  • List → Words by Pinyin
  • Then enter rubu and hit OK.

This will take you to rùbùfūchū and rúbùshèngyī. But neither of those is what you’re looking for. Now what? Here’s where regular expressions come in handy.

Hit Ctrl+F to search for something within the current page.

In the Find box, enter

  • re=r(u|ū|ú|ǔ|ù)b(u|ū|ú|ǔ|ù)

This will yield:

  • chǒngrǔbùjīng 寵辱不驚[宠–惊] f.e. unmoved by honors/disgrace
  • lèirúbùgān 淚濡不乾[泪–干] f.e. be drowned in tears
  • nièrúbùyán 囁嚅不言[嗫—] f.e. 〈wr.〉 move the mouth without speaking
  • xuérúbùjí 學如不及[学—] f.e. study as if one could never learn enough

Bingo!

The reason for using OR pipes to separate the possibilities instead of putting them together — i.e., the reason for writing (u|ū|ú|ǔ|ù) instead of [uūúǔù] — is that the regex library sees non-ASCII characters as strings of bytes (UTF-8); thus, without the pipes you could end up with extra garbage or not find what you intend to at all. This might be fixed in the next version.

surname-spelling scrap

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Danwei has picked up on a story of someone in China with the surname of Xiè being issued an air ticket under the name Jiě. The reason behind the mixup is that the character used for this woman’s name, 解, is most often pronounced “jie,” as in jiěfàng (liberate; emancipate), jiějué (solve; resolve; settle), liǎojiě (understand; comprehend; find out; acquaint oneself with), and jiěshì (expound; interpret; analyze). Thus, it is but one of the many Chinese characters that has more than one pronunciation.

When she and some of her relatives went to the travel agency to get the matter cleared up, however, an argument broke out. Before long, people from the travel agency were using poles to beat the family.

(Maybe not my strongest entry, but there was no way I was going to pass up a chance to post on a story titled “Is personal safety another argument for Chinese romanization?”)

sources:

language acquistion through immersion — 17th-century proposals for Latin

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Sorry for my lack of posts recently. My Internet connection at home has been out for more than a week. I’m writing this from work during my lunch break.

While reading Latin or the Empire of a Sign (title in the original French: Le Latin ou l’empire d’un signe XVIe-XXe Siècle), by Françoise Waquet, I came across mention of several proposals from the seventeenth century and later for the creation of “Latin towns.”
cover of book on Latin

The originators of these projects started from a double observation: on the one hand the weakness of Latin after a long and difficult learning process; on the other, the speed with which a child suddenly immersed in a foreign environment learns to speak its language. In 1621 Antoine de Laval suggested that the King of France “create a Latin colony for Monseigneur the Dauphin his son and for all the princes, great lords, nobles and other children of good houses”: the exclusive use of Latin and the “pleasant” methods of instruction that would be adopted would guarantee rapid and perfect mastery of spoken Latin. Along similar lines, but more modest, was Jean Cécile Frey’s proposal for a Latin college which children would enter at the age of two; there, along with their masters and servants, they would use nothing but the Latin language in conversation and play. Thus at the age of five they would speak “more Latin, and in a more Attic fashion” than children who had spent ten painful years at school. Daniel Georg Morhof believed that it would take about twenty years to establish a Latin town where even the artisans would speak Latin; to get started all that would be needed were six or seven good Latinists, who would teach Latin to poor children of both sexes; these would then learn a profession; they in their turn would then teach Latin to their apprentices, and in this way a Latin society would take shape

Of course, nothing came of these proposals for Latin — or any of the others to follow for that language. The concept of language villages for English, though — that’s another story.

Another anecdote:

Gasparo Gozzi noted that at Padua, in the unanimous judgement of the professors, hardly a tenth of the students — perhaps thirty out of 300 — “had a middling understanding of the Latin language”. How could they follow lectures in an unintelligible language? “It is true,” Gozzi added, “that after such lectures, the students go to hear the explanation at a private school.”

I stumbled across this book while browsing in a bookstore and been having a lot of fun reading it, and not just because of the parallels between the situation with Latin and those of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese) and Chinese characters. Highly recommended.