a shameless proposal

A Taipei city councilor with the KMT on Tuesday launched an attack on President Chen Shui-bian disguised as a signage proposal. His idea: Change the name of Ketagalan Boulevard (凱達格蘭大道 Kǎidágélán Dàdào), the street leading to the Presidential Office.

The city councilor, Yang Shi-qiu (楊實秋, Yang Shih-chiu), called for a change to Lǐ-yì-lián Dàdào, which is literally Propriety, Righteousness, [and] Honesty Boulevard. While that might sound nice, it’s actually a disguised insult.

John DeFrancis was all over this word play a long time ago in “The Singlish Affair,” the biting satire that leads off his essential book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. DeFrancis explains assigning the name Li Yilian to a person in his story:

The most complex is the name Lǐ Yìlián. Those who know Chinese may get the point if it is written in characters: 禮義廉 or, in simplified characters, 礼义廉. The three characters mean respectively “propriety, morality, modesty” and form part of a four-character phrase listing a number of Confucian virtues of which the fourth is 恥 (chǐ “a sense of shame”). The omission of the fourth character is part of a Chinese word game in which the reader is supposed to guess the last item when it is omitted — much as if we had to tell what is lacking in the list of the three Christian virtues of “Faith, Hope, and ______.” The omission of the fourth character is expressed as 無恥 or 无耻 (wúchǐ “lacking a sense of shame”). In short, calling someone Mr. Lǐ Yìlián seems to praise him as Mr. Propriety, Morality, and Modesty but actually insults him as Mr. Shameless.

By renaming the street “people will know that the person who works at the Presidential Office at the end of the boulevard has no sense of chi [恥, shame],” Yang said.

Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, who also serves as chairman of the KMT, didn’t care for the idea of his city having a Lǐ-yì-lián Dàdào or Wúchǐ Dàdào (both of which could be translated as “Shameless Boulevard” — the first figuratively, the second literally) but said that the name Lǐ-yì-lián-chǐ Dàdào (“Propriety, Righteousness, Honesty, and a Sense of Shame Boulevard”) could be discussed.

The name of Ketagalan Boulevard is especially interesting from a number of standpoints.

  • Since the street is named after a tribe that lived long ago in what is now Taipei, Ketagalan Boulevard is one of the only road names in all of the capital of Taiwan that has much of anything to do specifically with Taiwan, as opposed to China. (Jilong/Keelung Road is the only other one that springs to mind at the moment.)
  • It is one of the only Taipei street names that isn’t bisyllabic.
  • The street itself is not really independent as much as an extention of Ren’ai Road. (Don’t forget that apostrophe.)
  • The name has been changed before. As Mark Caltonhill notes in What’s in changing a name?, “the vast majority of the island’s streets and even many towns were simply renamed by the KMT regime”. But in this case I’m referring to a relatively recent renaming. In 1996, Chen Shui-bian, who was then mayor of Taipei, oversaw the renaming of the street from Jieshou Road (介壽, Jièshòu Lù, i.e., “Long Live Chiang Kai-shek Road”).
  • Chinese characters aren’t a good fit for “Ketagalan,” which comes out 凱達格蘭 (Kǎidágélán).

Here’s a Mandarin-language story on this:

Miànduì dào Chén Shuǐ-biǎn huódòng bùduàn, Táiběi Shìyìyuán Yáng Shí-qiū jīntiān biǎoshì, tā yǐ zhǎnkāi lián shǔ, tí’àn bǎ Ketagalan Dàdào gēngmíng wéi Lǐ-yì-lián Dàdào; Táiběi shìzhǎng Mǎ Yīngjiǔ suī rènwéi yǒu chuàngyì, dànshì yǒu màrén “wúchǐ” zhī xián, tā bù zànchéng.

Táiběi Shìyìhuì xiàwǔ jǔxíng shìzhèng zǒng zhìxún shí, Yáng Shí-qiū zhìxún biǎoshì, Chén Shuǐ-biǎn zǒngtǒng zài Táiběi shìzhǎng rènnèi zài wèijīng mínyì zhēngxún xià, jiù bǎ jièshòu lù gǎimíng wéi Ketagalan Dàdào, rìqián yòu làngfèi Xīn Táibì shàng yì yuán, bǎ Zhōngzhèng Guójì Jīchǎng gēngmíng wéi Táiwān Táoyuán Jīchǎng. Yáng Shí-qiū yě lián shǔ tí’àn, yāoqiú shì-fǔ jiāng Ketagalan Dàdào gēngmíng wéi “Lǐ-yì-lián Dàdào”.

Mǎ Yīngjiǔ huídá shuō, dàolù yǐ zhèngmiàn mìngmíng wèi yuánzé, ér bù shì fùmiàn mìngmíng, yìyuán de yòngyì yǒu chuàngyì, dànshì kèyì shěnglüè jiùshì màrén “wúchǐ” zhī xián. Yáng Shí-qiū huíyìng shuō, ruò shì-fǔ yǒu yílǜ, Ketagalan Dàdào kě gǎiwéi “Lǐ-yì-lián-chǐ Dàdào”.

Mǎ Yīngjiǔ huíyìng shuō, tā bù zànchéng Ketagalan Dàdào gǎiwéi “Lǐ-yì-lián Dàdào”, zhèyàng huì biànchéng “Wúchǐ Dàdào”, dànshì ruòshì “Lǐ-yì-lián-chǐ Dàdào”, zhè kěyǐ tǎolùn.

Yìyuán Jiǎng Nǎi-xīn suíhòu qiángdiào, Yáng Shí-qiū de tí’àn jiùshì tíxǐng wéizhèng zhě bùkě wúchǐ, ruò Mǎ Yīngjiǔ dānxīn bèi rén zhǐwéi yǒu màrén wúchǐ de yìsi, tā jiànyì gǎiwéi “Bùkě Wúchǐ Dàdào”. Mǎ Yīngjiǔ xiào shuō, zhèige jiànyì gèng yǒu chuàngyì, dànshì xū jīngguò shì-fǔ nèibù tǎolùn.

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    Festschrift for John DeFrancis now available for free

    Most readers of Pinyin News will already know of John DeFrancis, editor of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary and author of The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy and many other important works. (If you haven’t read The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy yet, order it now.)

    In recognition of the 95th(!) birthday today of Professor DeFrancis, Sino-Platonic Papers is rereleasing Schriftfestschrift: Essays in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday. Previously, this important compilation, which runs more than 250 pages, was available only in a printed edition priced at US$35. The fifteenth-anniversary edition, however, is being released for free as a PDF (15 MB — so have a fast Internet connection, or a lot of patience).

    I’d like to draw special attention to an article written in Pinyin: “Hanzi Bu Tebie Biaoyi,” by Zhang Liqing. (Zhang’s work also appears here on Pinyin Info, in her translations of The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts and of the amazing Comparing Chinese Characters and a Chinese Spelling Script — an evening conversation on the reform of Chinese characters.)

    Feel free to print out a copy of the Schriftfestschrift for your own use or for inclusion in a library. Just don’t sell it.

    The original publication contained several color photos. I’ll add those later. Also, the English tex is searchable to some degree, as I used OCR after scanning these pages; but the results weren’t perfect.

    Here are the contents:

    • Tabula Gratulatoria
    • Introduction, by Victor H. Mair
    • Publications of John DeFrancis
    • Hanzi Bu Tebie Biaoyi, by Zhang Liqing
    • Typology of Writing Systems, by Zhou Youguang
    • Dui Hanzi de Jizhong Wujie, by Yin Binyong
    • The Information Society and Terminology, by Liu Yongquan
    • A Bilingual Mosaic, by Einar Haugen
    • The Polysemy of the Term Kokugo, by S. Robert Ramsey
    • Memorizing Kanji: Lessons from a Pro, by J. Marshall Unger
    • Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, by David Moser
    • Ethnolinguistic Notes on the Dungan, by Lisa E. Husmann and William S-Y. Wang
    • Korean Views on Writing Reform, by Wm. C. Hannas
    • Language Policies and Linguistic Divergence in the Two Koreas, by Ho-min Sohn
    • Okinawan Writing Systems, Past, Present, and Future, by Leon A. Serafim
    • Proposal of a Comparative Study of Language Policies and Their Implementation in Singapore, Taiwan, and China (PRC), by Robert L. Cheng
    • The Topical Function of Preverbal Locatives and Temporals in Chinese, by Feng-fu Tsao
    • Yes-No Questions in Taipei and Peking Mandarin, by Robert M. Sanders
    • Patronizing Uses of the Particle ma: Bureaucratic Chinese Bids for Dominance in Personal Interactions, by Beverly Hong Fincher
    • Gender and Sexism in Chinese Language and Literature, by Angela Jung-Palandri
    • A zhezi Anagram Poem of the Song Dynasty, by John Marney
    • Some Remarks on Differing Correspondences in Old Chinese Assumed to Represent Different Chinese Dialects, by Nicholas C. Bodman
    • Can Taiwanese Recognize Simplified Characters?, by John S. Rohsenow
    • Simplified Characters and Their (Un)relatedness, by Chauncey C. Chu
    • The Teaching of Culture and the Culture of Teaching: Problems, Challenges, and Opportunities in Language Instruction, by Eugene Eoyang
    • The Culture Component of Language Teaching, by Kyoko Hijirida
    • Thinking About Prof. John DeFrancis, by Apollo Wu
    • Wo suo Renshi de De Xiansheng, by Chih-yu Ho
    • Two Poems for Professor John DeFrancis, by Richard F. S. Yang
    • Announcement, by Stephen Fleming

    Happy birthday, John! And many happy returns!

    What Chinese characters can’t do-be-do-be-do

    It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that “shuing”!

    David Moser uses the question of how would someone scat sing in Mandarin Chinese to start off an exploration of what Chinese characters can’t do well (and what Pinyin can).

    Here’s an excerpt:

    English has numerous conventions for representing casual oral speech: “Are you kiddin’ me?” “Whaddya wanna do tonight, Marty?” “I’m gettin’ outta here!” “Gimme that.” And so on. Such spelling conventions have been employed in the literature of most alphabetic traditions for hundreds of years, and are often an invaluable link to the vernaculars of the past. English-language writers from Mark Twain to James Joyce have used the flexibility of the alphabet to vividly re-created various speech worlds in their works. It is, in fact, hard to imagine how much of the literature of the West could have been produced without recourse to such devices.

    Chinese characters, by contrast, cannot reproduce the equivalent elisions and blends of colloquial Chinese, except in rare cases, and only at the level of the syllable…. The result is that China effectively has no tradition of realistically notating vernacular speech. Wenyanwen ???, classical Chinese, exerted a virtual stranglehold on written literature up until the early twentieth century, and even then, most writers did not attempt to accurately represent common speech, despite the appearance of an occasional Lao She or Ba Jin. But even if such writers had so desired, working within the Chinese system of writing, they could never have notated the sounds of the language around them with the same kind of vivid verisimilitude of the following examples in English….

    Read the whole article, here on Pinyin Info: Some Things Chinese Characters Can’t Do-Be-Do-Be-Do.

    And if you haven’t seen it already, be sure to check out another work by Moser: Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, which is one of Pinyin Info’s most popular readings.

    some recent posts elsewhere

    Although many notable stories have been in the news lately, I haven’t had time yet to comment on any of them. So for now I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to two recent posts elsewhere:

    May Fourth remembered

    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.

    many Taipei sixth graders can’t use traditional dictionaries

    The Taipei City Government has released the results of a Mandarin proficiency exam administered to 31,145 sixth-grade students.

    According to the results, more than 40 percent of those tested are unable to use so-called radicals (bùshǒu, 部首) to find Chinese characters in dictionaries. This, of course, comes as no great surprise to me. Ah, for the wisdom of the alphabetical arrangement of the ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary!

    Furthermore, the Taipei Times reports that the person in charge of the testing, Datong Elementary School Principal Chen Qin-yin, said that although most students received good grades, the essay test revealed weaknesses in writing ability, including a limited use of adjectives.

    Reading that sort of thing sets off all sorts of alarms in my head. First, adjectives are the junk food of writing. Even worse, though, I suspect that Chen is talking not about any ol’ adjectives but rather stock phrases either in or reminiscent of Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese). Larding a text with clichés is the sort of thing that passes for good writing here. And if, for example, students don’t throw in a zhi in the place of a de often enough their grades will suffer.

    The language reforms springing from the May 4 movement have been tremendously important. But more than eighty years later the job still isn’t finished!

    sources:

    Sino-Platonic Papers releases new issues

    The wide-ranging and provocative Sino-Platonic Papers has just come out with 25 new titles (nos. 146-170).

    Here are some of the new releases:

    • Conversion Tables for the Three-Volume Edition of the Hanyu Da Cidian
    • Learning English, Losing Face, and Taking Over: The Method (or Madness) of Li Yang and His Crazy English
    • The Genealogy of Dictionaries: Producers, Literary Audience, and the Circulation of English Texts in the Treaty Port of Shanghai
    • The Mysterious Origins of the Word “Marihuana”
    • A Sacred Trinity: God, Mountain, and Bird: Cultic Practices of the Bronze Age Chengdu Plain
    • Uyghurs and Uyghur Identity
    • Writings on Warfare Found in Ancient Chinese Tombs
    • Aspects of Assimilation: the Funerary Practices and Furnishings of Central Asians in China
    • The Names of the Yi Jing Trigrams: An Inquiry into Their Linguistic Origins
    • Counting and Knotting: Correspondences between Old Chinese and Indo-European
    • Shang and and Zhou: An Inquiry into the Linguistic Origins of Two Dynastic Names
    • DAO and DE: An Inquiry into the Linguistic Origins of Some Terms in Chinese Philosophy and Morality

    Two of the new releases are in French:

    • Mythologie sino-européenne
    • Le gréco-bouddhisme et l’art du poing en Chine

    Most of the issues released prior to this batch have on-line excerpts. All SPPs will have on-line excerpts eventually — once I have the time, hardware, and software to do the job, that is. (I serve as SPP’s webmaster but have no other direct involvement with the publication.)

    Check out the Web site of the Sino-Platonic Papers, now at a new URL, for details and a complete list of issues.

    This will be the last batch to come out in printed form, so get ’em while you still can.

    Some say ‘no 3Q’ to Net slang in Chinese test

    Internet slang and emoticons were included in the Chinese-language section of this year’s college-entrance exam for Taiwan, to the dismay and confusion of many.

    Examples of this in the exam include

    • ::>_< ::
    • 3Q
    • Orz

    ::>_< :: is supposed to represent crying. (The colons are tears, the underscore is the mouth, and the others are the eyes.)

    For "3Q," the three is pronounced san and the Q is pronounced as in English, yielding "san Q," which is meant to represent the English phrase "thank you."

    "Orz" is intended to be a pictograph of a person bowing down on the floor, with the O as the head, the vertical line of the r as the arms, and the z as the legs.

    This test is crucial to the lives of those seeking to enter post-secondary education. Many students spend years studying for this exam. The nation's parents, stressed-out from worry about how their children will do on this test, will probably go ballistic over this. I'll be surprised if those questions end up being counted toward the final score.

    On the other hand, I can't help but think that given how much Classical Chinese is certain to be on the test, a few questions about modern Internet slang might not be inappropriate. After all, the latter is likely to have more relevance to the majority of today's college students and even possibly more a part of modern Mandarin than some parts of literary Sinitic.

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