Category Archives: China

Chinese companies adopting more ‘English’ names: report

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Langchao (浪潮), an IT company in China, has adopted the “English” name of “Inspur” (a marketing-speak portmanteau of “inspire” and “spur”). The switch is apparently part of a trend, with some Chinese marketing departments coming to prefer even invented English to real Mandarin. Such are the demands of the international market, it seems.

Sun Peishu, Inspur’s president and chief executive officer, said when he met foreign customers, he found it was often difficult and inconvenient for them to pronounce the names of his company and brand.

“That is a big handicap for us, if our customers can not even pronounce our name,” said Sun.

So the company decided to scrap the name Langchao, which had been in use for 23 years, since its foundation.

In the past years, more and more Chinese companies are changing their names from Chinese pinyin to English as the first step towards the global expansion.

Compare the earlier logo with the new one.

old logo -- with Chinese characters written with a brush; white on blue logo with 'inspur' and then Chinese characters for 'langchao'; blue on white

original logo

  • Chinese characters written in a calligraphic style
  • no Pinyin
  • I think that’s supposed to be a wave in the triangle. (“Làngcháo” is the Mandarin word for (1) tide; wave (2) tendency (3) major social movement.)

new logo

  • “English” name comes first
  • Chinese characters written in a non-calligraphic style

sources:

Sino-Platonic Papers releases new issues

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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.

more on Beijing’s English and Pinyin signage

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The plan to mix Pinyin and English on signage in Beijing is now official.

Orientations in road names should be in English, such as “MAIJIAPU East Rd.” This is unless it is part of the actual name, like “BEIWEI Rd.” [The “bei” in Beiwei means “north.”] However, road names starting with orientations should have them in initials only, for example, “E. CHANG’AN Ave.”

This regulation is the first part of a campaign to standardize English translations on public signs in Beijing. The campaign will extend to all tourist spots, commercial and cultural facilities, museums, subways, sports centers and hospitals in the city, the report said.

The use of “avenue” will be restricted for the time being to Chang’an Ave., Ping’an Ave, and Liangguang Ave.

A few terms will go untranslated: hutong (alley), li (lane), qu (district), and yuan (garden). Such terms are viewed as embodying Beijing’s culture (tǐxiàn Běijīng chéngshì wénhuà tèsè); the articles didn’t mention, however, that hutong is a loan word from Mongolian.

A few old standards will remain. “Tsinghua University” will remain as such; but road signs will read, for example, Qinghua South Rd.

sources:

Zhou Youguang on 50th anniversary of simplified characters, etc.

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Here’s the text of a speech by Zhou Youguang on the fiftieth anniversaries (but not to the day) of the scheme for “simplifying” Chinese characters and of the national directive on the popularization of Mandarin. I don’t share his enthusiasm for these. But, given his vital and clear-sighted work on Hanyu Pinyin, I’d be happy to publicize his views on just about anything.

And the fact that he’s still giving speeches at the age of 101 is nothing short of phenomenal.

Gèwèi lǐngdǎo, nǚshìmen, xiānshengmen:
Jīntiān wǒmen qìngzhù Guówùyuàn gōngbù 《Hànzì Jiǎnhuà Fāng’àn》 hé 《guānyú tuīguǎng Pǔtōnghuà de zhǐshì》50 zhōunián. 1956 nián Guówùyuàn gōngbù 《Hànzì Jiǎnhuà Fāng’àn》 hé 《guānyú tuīguǎng Pǔtōnghuà de zhǐshì》, dào xiànzài yǐ 50 nián le. Zhè 50 nián, shì wǒguó “yǔwén shēnghuó xiàndàihuà” fāzhǎn zuì kuài de shíqī, Hànzì de guīfànhuà hé Pǔtōnghuà de tuīguǎng qǔdé le qiánsuǒwèiyǒu de jìnzhǎn. 2000 nián gōngbù 《guójiā tōngyòng yǔyán wénzì fǎ》, zǒngjié guòqù, kāizhǎn wèilái, shǐ wǒguó yǔwén shēnghuó màixiàng xìnxī huà shídài.
Guīfàn Hànzì, bāokuò jiǎnhuàzì hé chuánchéng zì, zài wǒguó dàlù yǐjing tōngxíng, xiǎoxué jiàoshī shuō, jiǎnhuàzì hǎo jiāo, xiǎoxuéshēng róngyì rèn, róngyì xiě. Zài diànnǎo píngmù shàng jiǎnhuàzì yuèdú qīngxī, Liánhéguó de Zhōngwén wénjiàn zhǔnbèi yīlǜ yòng dàlù de guīfàn jiǎn Hànzì. Xǔduō zhǒng gǔdài shūji yǐjing fānyì chéng báihuàwén. Gǎi yìn guīfàn Hànzì. Jiǎnhuà bù fáng’ài shūfǎ yìshù, shūshèng Wáng Xīzhī jīngcháng xiě jiǎnhuàzì, shū-huà yìshù fēn shíyòng shūfǎ hé chún guānshǎng shūfǎ, shíyòng shūfǎ lìrú zhāopai yāoqiú dàzhòng néng kàndǒng, yíyú yòng guīfàn Hànzì. Yínháng jìlù de diànnǎohuà, fāshēng xìngmíng shēngpì zì bùbiàn shūrù diànnǎo hé zhuǎnzhàng, jīnhòu xìngmíng yòngzì yīngdāng yǐ tōngyòng Hànzì wéixiàn. Yī ge 13 yì rénkǒu de dàguó, guòqù duōshù rénmín dōu shì wénmáng, jīntiān dàduōshù rénmín zhèngzài jiēshòu jīchǔ jiàoyù, zhè shì wǒguó wénhuà lìshǐ de jùdà biànhuà.
Pǔtōnghuà shì Hàn mínzú de gòngtóngyǔ hé Zhōngguó de guójiā gòngtóngyǔ, tuīguǎng guójiā gòngtóngyǔ shì gōngyèhuà hé xìnxī huà de xūyào, chángqīyǐlái, tuīguǎng gōngzuò chíchí bù qián. Xiànzài, chuánshēng jìshù tūfēiměngjìn, guǎngbō, diànshì, yídòng diànhuà děngdeng, bāngzhù tuī-pǔ gōngzuò kuàisù fāzhǎn. Quánguó xuéxiào yuèláiyuè duō yǐ Pǔtōnghuà wéi xiàoyuán yǔyán. Gōngzhòng huódòng yuèláiyuè duō yǐ Pǔtōnghuà wéi gòngtóng méijiè. Rén-Dà, Zhèng-Xié yǐ Pǔtōnghuà zuòwéi huìyì yǔyán, gěi quánguó shùlì bǎngyàng. Xǔduō dà chéngshì rénkǒu měngzēng, wǔfāngzáchǔ, zhèngzài fāshēng “dàdūhuì huà” de yǎnbiàn, dàdūhuì xūyào yǐ Pǔtōnghuà wéi rìcháng yòngyǔ.
“Yányǔ yì shēng, wénzì yìxíng” de shídài jíjiāng guòqù, “shūtóngwén, yǔ tóngyīn” de shídài chū xiànzài wǒmen de miànqián, zài quánqiúhuà de 21 shìjì, Zhōngguó jiāng yǐ yī ge xiàndài wénmíng de dàguó yìlì yú shìjiè. Xièxie.

The source also has several nice photos of Zhou.

source: 组图：百岁语言文字学家周有光谈汉字, March 22, 2006

Only 5 percent in China have ‘habit of reading books’: report

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Some in China have proclaimed that the country has a “reading crisis” (yuèdú wēijī / 阅读危机).

Only 5 percent of the 1.3 billion Chinese population has a habit of reading books, according to a report released by the China Publishing Research Institute in 2005.

Xi [Shu, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a board chairman of a publishing company based in Beijing,] argued frequent use of the Internet can lead to people’s easy satisfaction with a smattering of knowledge without deep thinking.

I haven’t been able to find the original of the 2005 report, so I don’t know how “habit” is defined, or even “books.” (What percent of those with the “habit,” for example, read primarily comic books?) And are students excluded? Regardless, it doesn’t sound good.

sources:

if people keep using Pinyin input, China will die, says Wubi-input inventor

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Wang Yongmin (Wáng Yǒngmín, 王永民), the developer of the much hyped “Wubi” input method for Chinese characters, seems to get a bit more shrill each time he has a chance to make it into the papers. The Wubi Chinese character input method works by assembling characters based on the shapes of elements within characters.

Here’s something from a recent rant:

近日，五笔字型的发明者——王永民教授在中国科学院研究生院演讲时发表了这样的观点。

王永民认为，汉字的形是“身”，汉字的音是“衣”；“弃形留音”等于“舍身取衣”。拼音输入离开了对汉字造字元素的直接思考和运用，汉字必然将因此而形神俱灭，汉字本身所固有的文化遗传基因，将因此而丧失殆尽。

王永民认为，从文化意义上说，中华民族的伟大复兴也是汉字文化的伟大复兴，没有汉字，就没有中华民族。他指出，汉字和汉语拼音的主辅关系是早有定论的。

source: Wáng Yǒngmín: Pīnyīn shūrù shì Hànzì wénhuà de jué [fen]mù jī[qi] (王永民：拼音输入是汉字文化的掘墓机), Science Web, March 17, 2006

the Santa/Dongxiang

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Several stories have come out in the past couple of weeks on the Santa (or Sarta), reportedly the least literate of China’s 56 official “national minorities.” They’re more often referred to as the “Dongxiang,” a Mandarin name that has been applied to them by the Han.

The stories are interesting in themselves. But I was struck most by an odd detail:

In grammar school, the curriculum is in Chinese and many kids drop out. Government statistics show that the average person in Dongxiang has only 1.1 years of schooling. Because of the cost, many families never even send children to school, particularly daughters….

The challenge of trying to teach Chinese to Dongxiang children has attracted international aid groups to Dongxiang. The British government is funding a large training program for teachers.

Another pilot program, funded by the U.S.-based Ford Foundation, has created a bilingual curriculum using a Dongxiang-Chinese dictionary developed by Chen and other scholars. That program has already produced a jump in test scores but is currently in search of more funding.

British and American groups go to China to help teach Mandarin to people there? That can’t be right, can it?

I looked on the Ford Foundation’s Web site. The foundation’s unit on education, sexuality, and religion (?!) gave a US$30,000 grant in 2004 “for a pilot project using bilingual education in Dongxiang language and standard Chinese to reduce school drop-out rates.” So I think what’s happening is that the Western groups are helping expand education in Santa rather than in Mandarin, at least for a few years, since the latter language is what teachers had been teaching in.

For years, many Chinese scholars assumed the Dongxiang descended from the Mongol soldiers in Genghis Khan’s army who eventually settled in Gansu during the 13th century, when the Mongols ruled China under the Yuan dynasty. But their exact origins were never fully known, an uncertainty that fed an inferiority complex.

“A man once asked me, ‘Where do the Dongxiang come from?'” said Ma Zhiyong, a historian who grew up in the county but moved to the provincial capital, Lanzhou, as a teenager. “I was 18 or 19 and couldn’t answer the question. I was ashamed.”

Ma decided to look for an answer. Over several years, he scoured research libraries in Gansu, talked to other scholars and studied old maps. He found that some Dongxiang villages shared names with places in Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan. He also found shared customs: He said peasants in Uzbekistan and Dongxiang both learn to cut a slaughtered chicken into 13 pieces. And he observed that Dongxiang people described themselves as “sarta” — a term that once referred to Muslim traders in Central Asia.

He concluded that the story about Khan’s army was only half right. Some of the Dongxiang ancestors were Mongol soldiers. But many others were a diverse group of Middle Eastern and Central Asian craftsmen conscripted into the Mongol army during Khan’s famed western campaign. They brought several languages and many brought a strong belief in Islam. Ma concluded that generations of intermarriage, including with local Han Chinese and Tibetans, resulted in a new ethnic group and language.

The language, if a source of pride, is also blamed for Dongxiang’s educational shortcomings. The language is oral, so children never learn to read or write in their native tongue.

Hundreds of millions of people in China never learn to read or write in their native tongue. Instead, the Han Chinese are told they’re speaking merely a “dialect” and so must learn to read and write Mandarin. And everybody else is supposed to learn to read and write Mandarin, too.

Here’s part of the section on Santa from Robert Ramsey’s ever-useful The Languages of China:

The Santa language resembles its relative Dagur in many respects. It has preserved the initial h‘s of Middle Mongolian: hulan ‘red.’ (But long vowels have become short, as the originally long a in the second syllable of this word has done.) And, like Dagur, Santa has progressed noticeably toward an “open syllable” kind of structure — but by a slightly different process. Many consonants that once closed syllables, including r, have been lost in Santa. For example, Middle Mongolian bulag ‘spring’ has become bula; marghasi ‘tomorrow’ has become magashi. The consonants -l and -m have changed to -n. The result of these changes is that n is now the only consonant that closes syllables. In Santa the front vowels ö and ü have changed in pronunciation and are now not distinguished from o and u. Vowel harmony has been lost in the language. In Santa syntax, the genitive and the accusative are marked with the same particle.

More than likely, many of the changes that have taken place in Santa can be attributed to the centuries of contact that the speakers of this language have had with northern Chinese groups. The tendency toward an open syllable is typical of the Mandarin dialects, as is the change of final -m to -n. One particularly striking adaption to Chinese is the hybrid construction made in Santa using the Chinese copula shi ‘is.’ This copula is put into the sentence in Chinese syntactic order, between the nouns being equated; but the old Mongolian copula is also kept, appearing in its usual position at the end of the sentence. The result is a strange double-copula construction that is neither Chinese nor quite Mongolian. Here are two examples (the Chinese copula is given in small capitals):

Ene ki̵wan shi kienni we.
this youth is whose is
‘Whose boy is this?’
Bi kieliesen kun shi ene we.
I spoke person is this is
‘The person I was talking about is this one.’

Around 30 percent of the Santa vocabulary is reported to be borrowed from Chinese.

For more examples, see the final link below:

sources:

China to enact rules on characters in personal names: PRC official

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China plans to impose limits on the Chinese characters that may be used in personal names, according to Bao Suixian, deputy director of the Public Security Management Bureau under the PRC Ministry of Public Security. I regard this as a step in the right direction.

[Bao] said the aim is to standardize names of Chinese citizens, and especially “reduce the incidence of rarely-used characters.”

But how big the database will be or when the draft will be completed was not disclosed. (China Daily)

A June 2005 article in a Taiwan magazine reports, “In [the] future, names in mainland China will be restricted to a choice of 12,000 characters.” If that’s at all reliable, I suspect the number would be derived from China’s now-outdated GB 2312-1980 character set (7,445 characters, 6,763 of which are Hanzi) plus the 4,600 “supplemental characters” being added. A project at Peking University compiled the latter list of obscure characters from names throughout the country.

Bào Suìxiàn biǎoshì, jìn 3 niánlái, Běi-Dà fāngzhèng zìkù yǐ cóng quánguó gèdì sōují dào 4,600 ge lěngpì zì, mùqián, quánguó gè zhì zhèng zhōngxīn zhèng ānzhuāng lěngpì zì ruǎnjiàn, ruǎnjiàn kāigōng hòu, yuánlái yīn lěngpì zì méiyǒu lǐngdào shēnfen zhèngjiàn de gōngmín, duǎnqī nèi kěyǐ lǐngdào xīn zhèng. (Beijing News)

But even with 4,600 more characters — a list more than two-thirds the size of the original — the list isn’t big enough. Beijing officials have already run up against 231 characters that still aren’t covered by the new system. There are sure to be even more.

I should probably note that learning 12,000 characters would require someone to have a phenomenal memory — not to mention a lot of spare time and extraordinary dedication. Almost no one in all of China knows that many characters. The percentage of those who know even half that amount would be in the low single digits. Literacy, for the majority of the population, is defined as knowing as few as 1,500 characters; but the figures for those who know even that relatively low number are greatly exaggerated.

Chinese parents usually choose the second and/or third characters for their babies, but “strong,” “smart,” and “wise” for boys; and “pretty,” “quiet,” and “lovely” for girls are popular, so overlapping names are common.

I’ll let those with feminist blogs handle that one.

Figures from nationwide household registration departments show that about 100,000 Chinese share the name “Wang Tao.”

The popularity of assigning single-syllable given names is a real problem.

To avoid such situations, some parents choose names from the gigantic Kang Hsi Dictionary that lists 50,000 characters while the largest standard computer database contains only 27,000.

Such names, which are unrecognizable by computers, have caused inconvenience to about 60 million Chinese in their daily lives, especially when they travel, register in hotels or open bank accounts, the ministry said.

Names with rarely-used characters also hinder a nationwide programme to replace the first-generation identity cards with intelligent, computer-read cards, Bao said.

At least 40,000 Beijing residents whose names cannot be recognized by computers have not got new ID cards since the replacement exercise started in 2004, according to the city’s public security bureau.

The updated ID cards, with advanced anti-forgery and printing features, include an electronic chip to store personal information from computers. “So we cannot handwrite rarely-used characters on the cards like we did before,” Bao said.

(emphasis added)

Below is an anecdote from Taiwan. It refers to a man who changed his name to one having particularly obscure characters. This was to improve his luck and his parents’ health.

Having a name that can’t be entered into a computer because the characters are not in the standard character set has also caused him considerable headaches. His most vivid memory is of getting sick in the middle of the night and going to an emergency ward, where unfortunately the nurse on duty had never seen the two strange characters before and was unable to enter his name into the computer as he rolled on the floor in pain. In the end he had to plead with her to give him an injection for the pain and then discuss the name problem later.

Lucky name. Heh.