Category Archives: linguistics

How to write adverbs in Hanyu Pinyin

Posted on by
Reply

cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyI thought how to write adverbs in Hanyu Pinyin (1.1 MB PDF) would be the logical follow-up to last week’s posting of the rules for verbs.

Most of these are pretty straightforward, so I won’t discuss much here.

One note: Although reduplicated verbs lose the tone on their second syllable, reduplicated adverbs do not:

  • gānggāng 剛剛 (just now)
  • jǐnjǐn 僅僅 (only; merely)
  • chángcháng 常常 (often)
  • shāoshāo 稍稍 (a bit; slightly)

Here are some of the adverbs for which examples are given:

  • dōu 都 (all)
  • zhǐ 只 (only)
  • zuì 最 (most, -est)
  • gèng 更 (even more), bǐjiào 比較/比较 (relatively)
  • hěn 很 (very), tài 太 (extremely; too)
  • gāng 剛/刚 (just now), yǐjing 已經/已经 (already), céngjing 曾經/曾经 (in the past)
  • jiù 就 (then), jiāng 將/将 (in the near future)
  • cái 才 (finally)
  • hái 還/还
  • yòu 又 (again; too)
  • zài 再 (again)
  • yě 也 (also, too)

As always, I recommend this to not just those interested in Pinyin orthography but also to those learning Mandarin (esp. those who are at least at the intermediate level).

‘dialects’ wasting ‘important neurons’ needed for Mandarin, English: Lee Kuan Yew

Posted on by
19

In 1979 Singapore launched its campaign for people there to “Strike Hard Against Hoklo, Cantonese, and Other Languages that Your Government Says Are Puny and Insignificant Because They Have Only Tens of Millions of Speakers Apiece,” er, “Speak Mandarin” (Jiǎng Huáyǔ Yùndòng / 讲华语运动). The city-state has been marking the the 30th anniversary of this with some speeches, such as one a couple of weeks ago by former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (Lǐ Guāngyào), now “minister mentor.”

Lee described the situation:

Thirty years ago I launched the Speak Mandarin campaign. [Singaporean] Chinese students learned Mandarin at school. Unfortunately, they used to speak dialects amongst themselves, at home, and with their friends — a variety of dialects.

Here, “dialects” is of course the standard misnomer for Sinitic languages other than Mandarin.

Lee said that he himself was setting a bad example during the 1960s and 1970s by doing such highly irresponsible things as giving speeches in the native language of the majority of Singapore’s citizens. So he stopped all that. And he had the government shut down almost all broadcasts in Hokkien (Hoklo) and other such languages.

Lee said that although he understands “the strong emotional ties to one’s mother tongue … the trend is clear. In two generations, Mandarin will become our mother tongue.”

Actually, no, that’s not clear at all. Rather, a very different trend is apparent. During his speech Lee displayed the graph below, with data taken from surveys conducted by Singapore’s Ministry of Education.

Dominant Home Language of Singaporean Chinese Primary-1 Students (1980 to 2009)
graph showing English in a steady climb from 10% -- all numbers are approximate -- (1980) to 60% (2009); 'Chinese dialects' in steep decline from 1980 (62%) to 1988 (9%) and continuing to decline to only 1% or 2% in 2009; and Mandarin, which begins in 1980 at 28% and quickly tops 60% in 1985, with slower growth until 1988 (69%), after which it enters a steady decline to 39% (2009)

As the primary language of the home for young students, Mandarin has dropped steadily since the late 1980s, while English has risen steadily since 1980, with English surpassing Mandarin in 2004. (Language data for the whole population is more complicated. See, for example, the 2005 General Household Survey.)

Of course the government and Lee recognize this. But they don’t want to fight against English, which is crucial to Singapore’s success. So what Lee is proposing is that parents — both parents — speak Mandarin, not English, to their children.

(I see from my stats that this site gets lots of visitors from Singapore. Can any of you comment on how well you think the public will respond to Lee’s proposal.)

Lee explained in his speech that people have only so many “gigabytes” in their brains to devote to languages.

Though stating that speaking “dialects” in some situations can provide “extra warmth,” he warns that by using such languages: “You are losing important neurons with data which should not be there. And like the computer, when you delete it, it doesn’t really go away. It’s there at the back, and you’ve got to go to the rubbish channel and say ‘destroy.’ And it’s still disturbing your hard disk.”

Thus, those rubbish languages must be destroyed “dialects” must be let go, he said.

On March 8 a linguist at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore was quoted in the newspaper as saying, “Although Singaporeans are still multilingual, 40 years ago, we were even more multilingual. Young children are not speaking some of these languages at all any more…. All it takes is one generation for a language to die.” But even after all these years, with Sinitic languages other than Mandarin fading fast there, this is apparently still no time to be slacking off, as Lee’s principal private secretary, Chee Hong Tat, promptly responded, “It would be stupid for any Singapore agency or NTU to advocate the learning of dialects, which must be at the expense of English and Mandarin.”

Part of the reason behind Lee’s call, however, is a basic misunderstanding. Setting aside the matters of educating children in a language not native to them and how many languages most people are capable of speaking effectively, the main difficulty with learning Mandarin is not the language itself (especially for those who speak other Sinitic languages) but Chinese characters as its near-exclusive script.

If Singapore is smart about promoting Mandarin, sooner rather than later it will develop a two-track system, with most students studying how to read and write Mandarin exclusively in Hanyu Pinyin, while those who wish become more specialized can go on to study Chinese characters as well. For this to work, Singapore will need to produce plenty of material to read in Pinyin. (A newspaper, for example, would be a must — and one with real news, not just cute stories for kids.) The city-state certainly has the means and motive for this. But does it have the imagination? If it does, most students could save their precious neurons and gigabytes for other things — perhaps even their families’ traditional native languages.

SOURCES:
Lee Kuan Yew speech:

Some Singapore blog posts:

newspaper stories:

letter to the editor:

additional:

How to write verbs in Hanyu Pinyin

Posted on by
6

cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyToday’s release from Yin Binyong’s Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography is a long, important section that covers verbs in Hanyu Pinyin (2 MB PDF).

In this post I’ll go over the rules for what to do with Mandarin’s three tense-marking particles — zhe (著/着), guo ( 過/过), and le (了) — since these participles are extremely common and people are often unaware of how they should be written in Pinyin. Fortunately, this is pretty easy: -zhe and -guo are always written solid (with no interposing space or hyphen) with the verb they follow. The case of le is more complicated (but not too much trouble).

-zhe 著/着

-zhe is added onto a verb to indicate the ongoing nature of an action or state, whether in the past, present, or future. It thus bears a certain similarity to the English verb suffix -ing. A sentence in which -zhe is used tends to emphasize the description of the action or state indicated by the verb. Since no other sentence component may be interposed between a verb and -zhe, a general rule may be stated: -zhe is always written as one unit with the verb it follows.

Some examples:

Tā wēixiàozhe duì wǒ shuō: “Nǐ lái ba!”
她微笑著對我說: “你來吧!”
(Smiling, she said to me, “Come on!”)

Nǐ xiān děngzhe, ràng wǒ jìnqu kànkan.
你先等著,讓我進去看看.
(You wait out here while I go in and look.)

Note that “kànkan” in the sentence above shows something else about verbs in Hanyu Pinyin: the second part of a reduplicated verb is in the neutral tone.

-guo 過/过

-guo is added after a verb to indicate that a given person or object has experienced the action expressed by the verb. -guo may only be used in the past tense. Since no other sentence component may be interposed between a verb and -guo, a general rule may be formulated: -guo is always written as one unit with the verb it follows.

Some examples:

Wǒ xuéguo liǎng nián Yīngyǔ, dànshì méi xuéguo Rìyǔ.
我學過兩年英語,但是沒學過日語.
(I’ve studied two years of English, but I haven’t studied Japanese.)

Nà běn shū wǒ kànjianguo, hǎoxiàng zài shūjià shang.
那本書我看見過,好像在書架上.
(I have seen that book somewhere; I think it’s on the bookshelf.)

le 了

The tense-marking particle le is added after a verb to emphasize that the action expressed has been completed or that the state indicated has been achieved. -le is ordinarily written as one unit with the verb it follows.

For example:

Zuótiān wǎnshang wǒ kànle yī chǎng diànyǐng.
昨天晚上我看了一場電影.
(I saw a movie yesterday evening.)

But here’s where it starts to get a little more complicated.

If a verb complement is interposed between the verb and the tense marker -le in a sentence, there are two possible written forms. If the verb and its complement are written as a unit, then –le is written as a unit with them; if they are written separately, then -le too is written separately.

For example:

Xiǎo Chén qīngqīng de guānshangle fángmén.
小陳輕輕的關上了房門.
(Xiao Chen gently closed the house door.)

But also:

Tā cóng shūbāo lǐ ná chūlai le liǎng běn liánhuánhuà.
他從書包裡拿出來了兩本連環畫.
(He pulled two comic books out of his bookbag.)
(ná 拿 — verb; chūlai 出來 — complement)

I suspect that’s the sort of thing that may well change (for the simpler) once Pinyin makes it out into the world of popular usage as a script in its own right. But for now I’m just givin’ the rules as I find ‘em.

Speaking of which, here’s the final twist on -le.

Apart from its function as a tense-marking particle, -le can also serve as a mood-marking particle. (The former usage is usually denominated le1 and the latter le2 in grammar texts.) In its latter capacity, le always appears at the end of a sentence or clause, just before a comma, period, or other punctuation mark. The two different le’s, le1 and le2, are sometimes quite difficult to distinguish in practice. With this in mind, and with the aim of simplifying HP orthography, the, following simple rule is set out: any le, whether le1 or le2, appearing at the end of a sentence or clause is to be written by itself.

Thus, that’s actually a good thing, since it simplified matters. So, for anyone programming a Pinyin converter, put a space before le if it is immediately followed by punctuation.

Thus, for example:

Wǒmen túshūguǎn yǐjing mǎile sānwàn duō běn shū le.
我們圖書館已經買了三萬多本書了.
(Our library has already purchased over thirty thousand books.)

Hǎo le, hǎo le, dàjiā dōu bié chǎo le.
好了好了, 大家都別吵了.
(All right, all right, everybody quiet down.)

Remember: This post covered only one small aspect of the entire reading. So be sure to download and read the entire PDF, which has many, many more examples.

It’s also a very useful reading for students of Mandarin.

Writing Taiwanese: 1999 study

Posted on by
Reply

This seems as good an announcement as any to end my hiatus from posting. Sino-Platonic Papers has just rereleased a popular issue of likely interest to many readers of Pinyin News: Writing Taiwanese: The Development of Modern Written Taiwanese (2.2 MB PDF), by Alvin Lin.

The table of contents gives a pretty good picture of what’s inside:

Preface
Introduction
The Status Quo: Characters and Taiwanese writing

  1. The Roots of Writing in Taiwanese: Wenyan, baihua and academic Taiwanese
  2. The Missing 15 Percent: Developing a written vernacular
  3. One Attempt at Finding the Missing 15 Percent: Yang Qingchu’s Mandarin-Taiwanese Dictionary

Writing Romanized Taiwanese

  1. The Roots of Romanized Taiwanese: Church Romanization
  2. Church Romanization Today: The Taigu listserver
  3. An Indigenous System: Liim Keahioong and Modern Literal Taiwanese

Linguistic and Social Considerations

  1. Some Linguistic Classifications
  2. Dealing with Homonyms: Morphophonemic spelling
  3. Tones in Taiwanese: Surface vs. Lexical tones
  4. Representing Dialects: Picking a standard written form or representing all dialects
  5. Summary of Linguistic Concerns: Deciding the degree of coding
  6. Writing, Reading, Printing, Computing, Indexing and other Practical Concerns
  7. Social Concerns: Tradition and Political Meaning
  8. Conclusion: Future Orthography Policy on Taiwan

Bibliography
Appendices:

  • Email Survey
  • Pronunciation guide to church romanization

List of Tables and Illustrations:

  • Table 1: Suggested Characters for Taiwanese Morphemes from Three Sources
  • Figure 1: Yang Qingchu’s Taiwanese-Mandarin Dictionary
  • Figure 2: Church romanization
  • Figure 3: Modern Literal Taiwanese
  • Figure 4: Sample e-mail from Taigu listserver

This was first published in 1999 as issue number 89 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

writing four-syllable idioms in Pinyin

Posted on by
2

cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyThe latest excerpt from Yin Binyong’s book on Pinyin orthography covers how to write four-syllable idioms in Hanyu Pinyin (929 KB PDF). Here’s a key passage:

almost all four-character idioms can be broken in two halves, called yǔjié 语节 (language segments), on the basis of phonetic structure. The simple expedient of connecting the two yǔjié with a hyphen then provides idioms with their own distinctive written form, and assures ease of writing and reading. It is also a simple rule for students of HP to master.

But not all four-syllable idioms follow this rule, as the reading shows.

This is a worthwhile reading for Mandarin learners, even if you’re not particularly interested in Pinyin. There are many examples of idioms here, all given in Hanzi, Pinyin, and English.

Sino-Tibetan, Indo-European, and the word for ‘wheel’

Posted on by
2

The latest rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers is “Sino-Tibetan *kolo ‘Wheel‘” (800 KB PDF), by Robert S. Bauer. Those of you who like historical linguistics should be sure to read this one.

Abstract:

That the horse-drawn chariot appeared suddenly in China in the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1500-1066 BC) has led some Western scholars to believe that it was not independently invented by the Chinese but was introduced there by Western invaders. This paper is based on the premise that there is a connection between the transmission of the horse-drawn chariot from the West into China and the origin of some words meaning “wheel” and “wheeled-vehicle” in Sino-Tibetan languages. In particular, the paper proposes that words for “wheel” in some northern Chinese dialects and Bodic (Tibetan) languages are ultimately derived from an Indo-European source. On the basis of the comparison of words for “wheel” from various Sinitic and Bodic languages, the author has reconstructed the Proto-Sino-Tibetan root *kolo “wheel” which is itself an Indo-European contact loanword.

This was first published in August 1994 as issue no. 47 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

all 325 ‘words that form the Chinese language’

Posted on by
10

The New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery offers a glimpse inside a book published in the 1770s: The Chinese traveller. Containing a geographical, commercial, and political history of China..

The book provides a chart of 325 syllables identified as being “A LIST of all the WORDS that form the CHINESE LANGUAGE.” I’ll skip the obvious and not address why that’s ridiculous.

The chart is apparently in the first volume of the work. But since the NYPL doesn’t provide many images and Google Books provides only the second volume (scanned from the one in the NYPL collection), I wasn’t able to find any explanatory text about the chart or the authors’ views of Sinitic languages.

Here’s one column:

mouen, moui, moum, mouon, na, nai, nam, nan, nao, nem, ngai, ngan, ngao, ngue, nguen, ngeo, ngo, ni, niam, niau, niao, nie, nien, nieou, nio

Which Sinitic language these are supposed to represent isn’t clear. But, no, it doesn’t appear to be Cantonese, which tends to be the default first guess when it comes to Sinitic languages — at least until recently. My guess is that it’s some form of Mandarin that’s been written in a bastardized way, obscuring differences between what are represented in Pinyin by b and p, d and t, g and k, etc. But then there are those -m finals. What do the rest of y’all think?

sources:

gov’t unveils online Taiwanese dictionary

Posted on by
2

Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has put online its new Taiwanese (Hoklo) dictionary, the Táiwān Mǐnnányǔ chángyòngcí cídiǎn (giving the Mandarin name) (臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典). The preliminary version, which is to be amended in six months, contains 16,000 entries.

I especially welcome the section on Taiwan place-names.

further reading: MOE launches first Hoklo-language online dictionary, Taipei Times, October 20, 2008 [Note: The headline’s use of “first” is almost certainly incorrect.]