The University of Hawai’i Press is having a sale, with deep discounts on many titles, including three great books from Pinyin.info’s list of recommended readings.
[Thanks to Victor H. Mair]
Santa’s in his bus and all’s right with the world.
Although coach buses in Taiwan often use the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system, this bus uses “SAN TA” for “三大”, which is Wade-Giles.
Earlier this week I wrote about San Francisco politicians and what constitutes a Chinese name.
There has been some pushback against the new policy in San Francisco of not letting candidates for office use their own choice of Chinese name unless they can prove they’ve had the name since birth or that the name has been used publicly for at least two years. Those who advocated for the new rule may not have fully anticipated its impact.
“The regulation may unintentionally hurt American-born Chinese candidates who are making their first bids for office,” the San Francisco Standard reported. “Unlike more established politicos who are legacied in, they may not have used their Chinese names publicly, and if they were born in the United States, they also might not have any Chinese-language documents.”
Candidates are quoted as calling the policy “an incredible waste of time” and “absurd.” At least one press conference to protest against the new rule is planned.
Unless the policy is reversed, candidates must provide documentation in support of their self-submitted names before next Thursday.
source: Chinese American Candidates in San Francisco Outraged at Ballot Rule on Chinese Names, San Francisco Standard, December 15, 2023
San Francisco will begin its own enforcement of a 2019 bill that places restrictions on the use of self-submitted Chinese names (i.e., names as written in Chinese characters), requiring that candidates prove they’ve had the names since birth or that the name has been used publicly for at least two years.
All other candidates on the ballot will be assigned transliterated names (i.e., names that use Chinese characters according to rough their having at least rough equivalents in sound in Mandarin, Cantonese, or another Sinitic language).
Since 1999, San Francisco — whose [ethnic] Chinese population is about 21.4 percent of its population as a whole — has required ballots to include the candidates’ English names and their translated or transliterated names in Chinese characters….
[C]andidate for mayor Daniel Lurie, “will likely be assigned a name, 丹尼爾·露里,” which “doesn’t have any meaning. It’s just an approximate pronunciation of his name in English: ‘DAN-knee-er LOO-lee.’”
Lurie had already given himself the name 羅瑞德, which means “auspicious” (瑞) and “virtue” (德), according to the [San Francisco] Standard. The Standard said this name is “widely publicized in the Chinese-speaking world,” but since he is a first-time candidate, if he can’t prove he has used the name for at least two years, it likely will not appear on the ballot in 2024.
Many established local public figures will be grandfathered in, since many will meet the two-year threshold already.
But then there’s this: San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan, who led the push for the change, said, “Cultural appropriation does not make someone Asian…. There is no alternative definition to whether someone is Asian or not. It should be based solely on a person’s ethnicity and heritage. That’s what this law is about.”
That’s very different than a birth-name or two-year stipulation.
As real as cultural appropriation may be in some situations, wanting to base this “solely on a person’s ethnicity and heritage” seems to me problematic. I doubt Chan would argue that immigrants like herself who gain U.S. citizenship are not real Americans entitled to use Western names like “Connie.”
Then there’s the case of plenty of people whose ethnicity and heritage are not Chinese who live in Asia and have Chinese names, in many cases because they were required by government regulations. I’m one of those people. Although I’m unlikely to ever run for office in San Francisco and I’ve had my “Chinese name” a lot longer than two years, Chan doesn’t seem interested in granting any ground on this issue — at least not from what’s given in the brief quote.
source:
San Francisco targets non-Chinese candidates using Chinese names on ballots, The Hill, December 7, 2023
further reading:
SF politicians and Chinese names, Pinyin News, May 12, 2023
Terry Gou, the billionaire head of Foxconn, has been running an independent campaign for president of Taiwan. He doesn’t seem to be running this very well — but that’s not a romanization-related matter.
Anyway, I’ve been looking for an excuse to write about his name, and a photo in today’s news offers just that.
First, let’s get the biggest oddity out of the way: Why does Terry Gou misspell his own name?
His English name is “Terry Gou” (spelled as such). His Mandarin name, however, is Guō Tái-míng/ Guo Tai-ming / 郭台銘. Why is he a G-O-U and not a G-U-O (or, for that matter, not a K-U-O, the spelling most people in Taiwan with that surname use)?
Sorry, I have no answer to this. I’m just noting that it’s weird.
Both of his parents are mainlanders from Shanxi, in the north of China, so this wouldn’t be related to a Taiwanese pronunciation. No major romanization system in Taiwan for Mandarin uses G-O-U for this surname. And G-O-U doesn’t make sense as an ad-hoc spelling for G-U-O/K-U-O.
Maybe:
Has anyone heard any stories about this?
“Good timing” and “GT,” on the other hand, are more transparent. Gou/Guo’s given name is “Tai-ming,” which is indeed pronounced much like the English word “timing.” Note too the typographic touch of using a lowercase i in “TiMING” to help indicate this is both English and not English. Nicely done. Now if only the campaign had worked a bit harder to get anyone to show up at his empty campaign building to sign the petition to put him on the ballot….
Also notable about this photo is the use of “Cing” on the streetsign at right for what would be written “Qing” in Hanyu Pinyin (as part of the name of Qīngnián Lù / Qingnian Road /青年路). The “C” indicates the presence of Tongyong Pinyin, which is standard in Kaohsiung.
Source: Guō Táimíng “Gāoxióng lián shǔ zǒngzhàn” qiāoqiāo kāizhāng gōngzuò rényuán bǐ lián shǔ mín zhòngduō (郭台銘「高雄連署總站」悄悄開張 工作人員比連署民眾多), Liberty Times, September 24, 2023
Recently, on my way to Wulai (just south of Taipei), I spotted an interesting sign. Normally, the combination of “interesting sign” and “Wulai” means something in a language of one of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples. But for today I have something different: Japanese, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. Plus another bonus sign in Japanese (I think) — but more on that later.
I wasn’t able to get a good photo of my own, so here’s one from Google Street View.
The “OEC” on the sign on the left is meant to represent Japanese “oishī” (美味しい / おいしい), which means “delicious.” Knowledge of some Japanese words is very common in Taiwan, much as knowing a few words in Spanish is common in parts of the USA.
The whole top line is “OEC 手工麵線” (OEC shǒugōng miànxiàn) = “delicious handmade noodles.” The letters on the sign work like the hyphenated combinations in William Steig’s charming C D B.
The line below the sign’s headline is also linguistically interesting.
大腸, 蚵仔, 肉羹
(intestines, oysters, meat soup)
The second word, 蚵仔, would be pronounced kezi in Mandarin. But in Taiwan it’s standard for that to be read in Taiwanese as “ô-á.” Also notable is the use of handwriting — rather rare these days — instead of a computerized font.
The brunch shop next door also has what I strongly suspect is an interesting sign: 一豆, which in Mandarin is yi dou (lit. “one bean”). Someone who knows Japanese help me out with this one.
As I often note, apostrophes are used in only about 2 percent of words as written in Hanyu Pinyin. But when they’re needed, they’re needed. Don’t skip them.
A few years back, someone wrote to me to ask about multiple apostrophes in Pinyin. I dug through a 2019 edition of the CC-CEDICT (2019-11-12 04:41:56 GMT) for an answer. But I don’t think I ever posted my findings online. It’s time to rectify that.
CC-CEDICT is not an ideal source in terms of words, because some entries are phrases rather than single words, though they are not marked separately than words, which means that some entries might be better off with spaces rather than apostrophes, which would reduce the apostrophe count and percentage.
So, with that in mind, of the file’s 117,579 entries, 3,006 needed apostrophes, or 2.56 percent.
No entry needed three or more apostrophes.
Only 52 entries needed two apostrophes, or 0.04% of the total (1 per 2,261 entries).
Most of those were just Mandarinized foreign proper nouns. For example:
Examples of more regular Mandarin entries with two apostrophes include:
A few of those present interesting questions in orthography. For example, Xīn’ào’ěrliáng or Xīn Ào’ěrliáng?
But, basically, those entries are outliers. Relatively few words in Pinyin need an apostrophe; only a minute subset of those need two apostrophes; and, to my knowledge, none need three or more apostrophes.
Can you think of any triple-apostrophe words? Sorry, written examples of stuttering don’t count.
What were the most common names for newborn babies in China in 2020?
Please note that some names appear more than once (Yichen three times in the top 10 for boys, and Yinuo and Yutong twice in the top 10 for girls). The only differences are in some of the characters used.
| Rank | Chinese characters |
Pinyin (with tone marks) |
Pinyin (without tone marks) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 奕辰 | Yìchén | Yichen |
| 2 | 宇轩 | Yǔxuān | Yuxuan |
| 3 | 浩宇 | Hàoyǔ | Haoyu |
| 4 | 亦辰 | Yìchén | Yichen |
| 5 | 宇辰 | Yǔchén | Yuchen |
| 6 | 子墨 | Zǐmò | Zimo |
| 7 | 宇航 | Yǔháng | Yuhang |
| 8 | 浩然 | Hàorán | Haoran |
| 9 | 梓豪 | Zǐháo | Zihao |
| 10 | 亦宸 | Yìchén | Yichen |
| Rank | Chinese characters |
Pinyin (with tone marks) |
Pinyin (without tone marks) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 一诺 | Yīnuò | Yinuo |
| 2 | 依诺 | Yīnuò | Yinuo |
| 3 | 欣怡 | Xīnyí | Xinyi |
| 4 | 梓涵 | Zǐhán | Zihan |
| 5 | 语桐 | Yǔtóng | Yutong |
| 6 | 欣妍 | Xīnyán | Xinyan |
| 7 | 可欣 | Kěxīn | Kexin |
| 8 | 语汐 | Yǔxī | Yuxi |
| 9 | 雨桐 | Yǔtóng | Yutong |
| 10 | 梦瑶 | Mèngyáo | Mengyao |
I tried using ChatGPT again to clean up the HTML in the tables above. But it kept hallucinating and changing characters, and it never gave me the entire tables but cut off at least one row each time. So I cleaned up the code myself in a text editor.
Source: 《2020 nián quánguó xìngmíng bàogào》 fābù (《二〇二〇年全国姓名报告》发布), Gōng’ānbù wǎngzhàn (公安部网站), February 2, 2021