Category Archives: English

English tips from the school formerly known as Peking University

Posted on by
2

old logo of Peking UniversityPeking University, China’s most prestigious school, has announced that it is planning a change. First, the school’s logo will be redesigned. The original was made by Lu Xun, who was apparently not just a great writer and an impassioned advocate of romanization and critic of Chinese characters but also an artist.

Significantly, the new logo design will feature a different English name: the University of Beijing. This is especially interesting because “Peking University” had officially remained as such in English despite China’s official adoption of Hanyu Pinyin.

Moreover, “Beijing University,” which would match the Mandarin Chinese name of Beijing Daxue (English and Mandarin have much the same syntax), is not to be used except in informal contexts. Instead, the name is to be the “University of Beijing.” That is, according to the school, because in formal English names the place name has to come after “college” or “university”:

Běijīng Dàxué zài shuōmíng zhōng zhǐchū, gēnjù Yīngyǔ yǔfǎ guīzé, dìmíng zuòwéi xíngróngcí de xuéxiào míngzi wǎngwǎng zhǐshì yòngyú kǒuyǔ de jiǎnchēng, ér zài zhèngshì de shūmiànyǔ zhōng zé yīnggāi jiāng dìmíng zuòwéi míngcí zhìyú “xuéyuàn” huò “dàxué” zhīhòu.
(北京大学在说明中指出，根据英语语法规则，地名作为形容词的校名往往只是用于口语的简称，而在正式的书面语中则应将地名作为名词置于“学院”或“大学”之后。)

Danwei, where I first spotted this story, has helpfully translated one delightfully arch reaction to this English lesson.

Evidently the professors at PKU’s English department will have to give new names to the following British and American universities according to PKU’s English grammar rules:

Princeton University, New York University, Boston University, Syracuse University, Lancaster University, Coventry University, Cranfield University, Bournemouth University, Keele University, Middlesex University, Roehampton University, Athabasca University, Brandon University….

Would the leaders of PKU please inform the leaders of those universities the next time they meet with them? Some, like like Princeton University, New York University and such, are considerably more famous than PKU. Try to have them follow PKU’s English grammar rule first, and then it can become a wordwide rule of English grammar, and PKU can have a world-leading innovation.

Heh.

Before I close, here are a couple more points:

  • Peking is not the Wade-Giles spelling for what in Hanyu Pinyin is Beijing. (The Wade-Giles spelling for Beijing is Pei-ching, which never caught on in English.)
  • The correct way to write 北大 in Pinyin is Bei-Da, not Bei Da or Beida. Short forms of proper nouns take a hyphen, according to the rules for hyphens in Pinyin.

sources:

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

Posted on by
3

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.

Opera’s translation widget

Posted on by
Reply

The latest version of Opera, my favorite Web browser, now has a feature called “widgets.” These are basically the same as Firefox’s extensions. (Many of the features Firefox gets credit for were taken from Opera, so turnabout is fair play.)

Of particular interest to readers of this site is the GTranslation widget, which ties in with Google’s and BabelFish’s translation engines. This will allow you to input text and even Web pages in [Mandarin] Chinese and view them in English. Well, sort-of English. But at least it’s free!

Thus, this widget is Opera’s equivalent of Firefox’s translation extensions.

GTranslation was written by Shoust.

I know that many of my readers are still tied to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I strongly recommend trying Opera or Firefox, which are faster, more secure, and generally better in most every way.

Kaohsiung to revise English signage

Posted on by
Reply

According to a CNA story in the Taipei Times, the Gaoxiong/Kaohsiung City Government has decided to “correct and update all English translations of signage at 132 scenic spots” in preparation for the city’s hosting of the World Games in 2009.

A “group of specialists” from an ESL magazine are the chief advisers to the city government, which I suppose is better than just one randomly selected foreigner. Still, I wonder what these “specialists” know about signage — or romanization, for that matter. And will anyone check to ensure the signs are made correctly?

Here’s what is probably going to happen: Gaoxiong will replace some old signs with poor English and worse romanization with signs in tiny, unreadable English (probably still with mistakes) and sloppy romanization in a system that most foreigners actively dislike.

Deputy Mayor Cheng Wen-lung (鄭文隆), who is convener of a city committee formed to develop Kaohsiung’s English living environment, said yesterday that in addition to the changes, the committee was considering standardizing the English translations of food names in the area as a way to help foreign athletes — as well as the large number of foreign visitors who are expected at the upcoming World Games — recognize Chinese and local cuisines.

The city plans to update English translations on all of the city’s key signage within one month.

source: Kaohsiung looks to improve its English signage for games, CNA, June 28, 2006

Taichung/Taizhong busstop names

Posted on by
Reply

Dan of Jidanni.org has come up with a list of Taizhong’s busstops in the mixed style of Hanyu Pinyin and English that has become standard in Taiwan and is becoming so in China.

I hear that this list may actually be implemented! If so, that would be much to Taizhong’s credit, as local governments elsewhere in Taiwan are often not so responsive.

Here are the lists:

Good work, Dan!

Just out of curiousity, I removed the English and numerals from the list and then compared how it would be written in Hanyu Pinyin (the international standard) vs. Tongyong Pinyin (Taiwan’s international embarassment). This revealed that 337 of 633 entries would be written differently in Hanyu Pinyin and Tongyong Pinyin, giving a difference rate of 53.2 percent.

Curse of the chaos crisis?

Posted on by
1

Professor Victor H. Mair, whose piece on the character-related myth that crisis = danger + opportunity is one of the most popular readings here on Pinyin Info, sent in the following on a variation he has encountered:

Amazing!!! The Chinese are made to have a saying for **every** silly idea that anybody ever dreamed up. As if the “crisis = danger + opportunity” one were not bad enough, people are now compounding the problem by tacking on “chaos”!

The second item is even more unreal. From bad to worse, compounding of compounding.

California congressman Jim Costa speaking:

“So, the fact is, is that. . . . I mean, in crisis — what are the two Chinese symbols for the word “crisis”? One symbolizes in the Chinese alphabet[!!] “chaos,” and the other one reflects . . . . or defines “opportunity.” And so, through crisis and chaos . . . . or through chaos and opportunity you have a crisis. [VHM: THIS IS ***UNREAL***.] I mean, it’s unfortunate during this budget time. During the last three budget recessionary cycles that we lived with, I tried to — of course, I was one of the leaders at the time, in ’91 and ’92 — to get the folks to use this as an opportunity to look at taking a step back and to see how California, how much of our budget was now on autopilot….” (source)

UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!!!!!! And now they even invent an improbable, trisyllabic gloss/pseudoword: w?izh?ngj? (“incipient moment in the midst of danger,” which the exegetically-minded coiner obviously wanted to interpret as “*opportunity in the midst of danger”).

Oh, woe is me! Perhaps the person who concocted this oddity had gotten wind of my deconstruction of the bisyllabic term and rushed to its defense with an explicit “center, midst” to stick in the middle! Sorry, buster, that’s not enough. The main thing you have to fix is the last syllable.

And this is another one that keeps coming up.

(With thanks to Michael Carr and Ivan Aymat for references.)