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).
The International Taiwan-Denial Association United Nations has declared September 8 International Literacy Day.
Talking Taiwanese is a great new blog featuring long, detailed posts that often compare and contrast Taiwan’s linguistic situation with that of other places (e.g., Catalonia, Friesland, Galicia). Taiwan’s failure to institute meaningful language programs in Taiwanese is another frequent topic.
Talking Taiwanese started so strong, with a torrent of posts, that I more than half expected the author, Johan, to burn out. But although the rate of new posts there has slowed a little, Talking Taiwanese is still going strong. Check it out.
My only excuse for not mentioning this earlier is that I’m behind on everything lately. I first heard about this blog from David of David on Formosa, who often puts up great links.
China has attempted to block personal and now place names with unusual Chinese characters and even prevent names using a perfectly usual Roman letter and numbers, but authorities in Venezuela are trying to limit personal names themselves to just 100(!), with exemptions for Indians and foreigners, according to an article in the New York Times.
Goodbye, Tutankamen del Sol.
So long, Hengelberth, Maolenin, Kerbert Krishnamerk, Githanjaly, Yornaichel, Nixon and Yurbiladyberth. The prolifically inventive world of Venezuelan baby names may be coming to an end.
If electoral officials here get their way, a bill introduced last week would prohibit Venezuelan parents from bestowing those names — and many, many others — on their children.
The measure would not be retroactive. But it would limit parents of newborns to a list of 100 names established by the government, with exemptions for Indians and foreigners, and it is already facing skepticism in the halls of the National Assembly….
The bill’s ambition, according to a draft submitted to municipal offices here for review, is to “preserve the equilibrium and integral development of the child” by preventing parents from giving newborns names that expose them to ridicule or are “extravagant or hard to pronounce in the official language,” Spanish.
The bill also aims to prevent names that “generate doubts” about the bearer’s gender….
Not everyone denounces the bill. Temutchin del Espíritu Santo Rojas Fernández, 25, a computer programmer, explained that his first name was inspired by the birth name of Genghis Khan, often spelled Temujin in English. He said he frequently had to correct the spelling of his name on official documents.
And in Venezuela, where the tax authorities require name and national identity number for every purchase needing a receipt, pronouncing and spelling out Temutchin del Espíritu Santo can get tiring, Mr. Rojas Fernández said. “With a name this complicated, you lose time,” he said.
“It also creates social problems,” he continued. “When interacting with others, not everyone can pronounce your name. I have to pronounce my name five times and spell it twice.”
source: A Culture of Naming That Even a Law May Not Tame, New York Times, September 4, 2007
Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased for free issue no. 30 from October 1991: Chinese Philology and the Scripts of Central Asia (742 KB PDF), by M.V. Sofronov of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies, Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
It begins:
The period of the tenth to fourteenth centuries was a time when the peoples who conquered Northern China established their own states and proceeded to create their own written culture. They rightly saw the basis of a new state culture in their own script. The Kidan state of Liao was established in 916 in the northeastern part of China. It was conquered by the Jucen state Jin in 1126. The Tangut state of Hsi Hsia was established on the northwestern frontiers of China in 1032. All of these states created their cultures in accordance with historical circumstances and taking into consideration the achievements of older cultural centers of East and South Asia.
The oldest and most powerful philological tradition which exerted an influence on the scripts of Central Asia was that of the Chinese. This tradition developed under the specific conditions of the Chinese character script. Primarily, it elaborated the problem of the explanation of the meanings of the characters and the establishment of their correct readings.
One of the important achievements of the traditional Chinese philology was the method of fanqie (“cut and splice”) according to which the unknown reading of a character is described by means of two other characters with known readings. Originally fanqie was designed, presumably under the tutelage of Indian phoneticians, to indicate the readings of characters in the philological works. With the development of Tantric Buddhism in China it was extended to the transcription of Sanskrit dharanis and related texts. In these transcriptions, Sanskrit syllables with phonemic components distributively incompatible in Chinese were constructed. In these cases the Sanskrit syllable was rendered by two Chinese ones. This pair of Chinese syllables formed the fanqie binom provided with appropriate diacritics. For rendering initial consonant clusters, two or three Chinese syllables were used respectively for clusters of two or three Sanskrit consonants. These binoms or trinoms were provided with diacritics, respectively erhe (“two together”) or sanhe (“three together”). This method of transcription constituted the counterpart to the orthographic techniques of the rendering of consonant clusters in Sanskrit and Tibetan syllabic scripts….
What’s being touted as the first Broadway-style Hakka musical will open in October at Taipei’s National Theater. The play, “Fú chūn jiànǚ” (to give the Mandarin title) (「福春嫁女」, My Daughter’s Wedding), is based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
sources and further reading:
Sino-Platonic Papers has rereleased its August 1991 issue: Linguistic Nationalism: The Case of Southern Min.
An excerpt from the introduction:
In this paper, I will explore aspects of the social value of Southern Min. I draw on data collected in three Southern Min-speaking communities in which I have done participant-observation fieldwork: Penang, Malaysia; Tainan, Taiwan, and Xiamen (Amoy), the People’s Republic of China, focusing in particular on the political importance of Southern Min in Tainan. I take as one goal that of drawing attention to the importance of regional identities and differences in Chinese society, differences all too often disregarded by those who seek to reify ‘Chinese culture’ as a monolithic entity.
Also, the color scheme of the online catalog for Sino-Platonic Papers has been adjusted a little in order to make clearer which issues are presently available for free download.
Donald Ritchie’s recent review of Japanese Love Hotels: A Cultural History, by Sarah Chaplin, has the following interesting section:
The contemporary love hotel is now much more kawaii (cute) than kinky.
Among the the reasons offered for this is that there has been something of a power shift in love-hotel choice. It used to be the male half that decided. Back then the places had hopeful macho monikers — Empire, Rex, King. Then the female half began to choose. Love hotels started calling themselves “fashion hotels” or “boutique hotels,” and began to have lavish lobbies with theme-shops, colors like beige and lavender, and decor like Laura Ashley.
This change can be documented in the Meguro Emperor (still in Meguro), which began in 1973 as a he-man fort before it slowly metamorphosed into a romantic Disneyland castle. The interior has been several times revised to segue from male- to female-friendly. Even the name has changed. It is now Gallery Hotel.
In most love hotels “macho” kanji has been replaced by “feminine” hiragana, trendy katakana or, more often, romaji, that romanized script that carries no male/female associations at all.
source: It’s ladies first now in Japanese love hotels, Japan Times, August 26, 2007