Zhou Ji (Zhōu Jì / 周济 / 周濟) is out, in a move that caught many by surprise.
Sinolingua‘s terrific series of abridged editions of classic Chinese books includes one of my favorites, which may well be the finest novel written in Mandarin during the twentieth century: Qian Zhongshu’s Wéichéng (圍城/围城), best known in English as Fortress Besieged but published by Sinolingua with the English title of The Besieged City.
I’m very pleased to announce that Pinyin.info now offers the first chapter of Sinolingua’s edition this book, along with an audio file of it being read aloud. This edition is in Mandarin, in word-parsed Hanyu Pinyin (with Chinese characters underneath) and has a few notes in English as well as mp3 files of the text being read aloud.
Here’s the download page: Wéichéng (圍城/围城/).
I’ve often told people who plan to go to China and want me to recommend a book that will help them “understand” the country (as if!) they’re about to visit: “By all means, read the Analects of Confucius, the Dàodéjīng, and the Zhuāngzǐ; but know in advance that they’ll be about as relevent to your trip as reading the Gospels would be to someone from China who’s about to travel to the West for the first time. And don’t waste your time with crap like The Tao of the Chinese Boardroom’s Inner Art of Feng-shui or whatever. Read Fortress Besieged. It’s as good a start as just about anything — and a lot more fun to read.”
The novel is also available in a fine English translation.
Related reading:
Michael Churchman provided me with this shot from somewhere in China:
And Mark Caltonhill sent me this instant classic several years ago from the streets of Taipei. But I may not have displayed it yet on this blog:
The division of railway makes it even better.
I didn’t have any luck finding anything in Sin Wenz (Lādīnghuà Xīn Wénzì / 拉丁化新文字), despite trips to several large used book stores. (Fortunately, the Internet is now providing some leads. Thanks, Brendan and Joel!) But I did find some other books to bring home.
I acquired lots of books by Zhou Youguang, not all of which focus primarily on linguistics:
Other than the Zhou Youguang books, here are my favorite finds of the trip, as they are for the most part in correctly word-parsed Hanyu Pinyin (with Hanzi underneath), along with a few notes in English:
I’ll soon be posting more about the above books with Pinyin, so watch this site for updates. Really, this is gonna be good.
Although this collection of Y.R. Chao says it’s volume 15, it’s actually two books:
Some more titles:
The following I bought because Yin Binyong, the scholar primarily responsible for Hanyu Pinyin’s orthography, is the author of these titles from Sinolingua’s series of Bógǔtōngjīn xué Hànyǔ cóngshū (“Gems of the Chinese Language through the Ages” (their translation)), all of which are in Mandarin (Hanzi) and English, with Pinyin only for the sayings being illustrated:
Other:
And finally:
Of course I already have that one — more than one copy, in fact. But it’s always good to have more than one spare when it comes to one of the two most important books on Pinyin orthography. I really need to follow up on my requests to use excerpts from this book, as it is the only major title missing from my list of romanization-related books (though it’s in Mandarin only).
![sign in a Beijing bookstore reading 'Education Theury' [sic]](https://pinyin.info/news/news_photos/2009/07/beijing_bookstore.jpg "beijing_bookstore")
To my relief, I saw very little in the way of the orthography-killing cancer that is InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion while I was in Beijing.
The worst offender I spotted was the cover to Qǐyè yǔ xíngzhèng jīguān chángjiàn yìngyòngwén xiězuò dàquán (企业与行政机关常见应用文写作大全 / 企業與行政機關常見應用文寫作大全), which to me just screams out “UGly NightMare”. But at least the word parsing is right, which is more than can be said for many uses of Pinyin in China.
Note that the image is flipped:
More troubling, because it is on official signage, is the use of intercaps on some station guides above the doors of subway cars.
The capitalization of “Of” demonstrates that the bro-ken and InTerCaPiTaLized “Bei Jing” is probably due more to standard sloppiness than design. At least I certainly hope no one did that on purpose.
Fortunately, that usage isn’t found throughout the subway system, as this photo from a map of another line shows.
Reports of what style is to be found on other Beijing subway lines — especially the newest ones — would be welcome.
And Randy spotted this one:
But that appears to be a one-off, since the Beijing Vikings don’t use that style on their Web site or elsewhere that I noticed.
Typing the letter v to produce ü is pretty standard in most Pinyin-related software — the letter v not being used in Pinyin except for loan words, and the letter ü not being found on traditional qwerty keyboards.
Here’s an official sign not far from Tian’anmen Square in Beijing that provides an example of an unconverted v.
Of course there’s the usual word-parsing trouble as well, which can indeed be tricky in some cases (but not so much that everythingneedstobewrittensolidlikethis).
This should be “Zhīnǚ Qiáo dōng héyán” (织女桥东河沿 / 織女橋東河沿 / Weaver Girl’s Bridge, east bank) or perhaps “Zhinü Qiao Dong Heyan” or “ZHINÜ QIAO DONG HEYAN”.
Some people might not think this is worth categorizing as a problem. My position, however, is that government has an obligation to write things properly on its official signage. (If this were on some ad hoc sign put up privately it would still be interesting but less problematic.) So, if anyone’s OK with the V, would you also be OK with, say, “之釹喬冬和言”?
OTOH, as mistakes go, at least v remains distinct, unlike when ü gets incorrectly written as u, which is so common in Taiwan that I don’t recall ever having seen a ü on official signage. (Pinyin has the following distinct pairs: nü and nu, lü and lu; nüe (rare) and lüe are also used but not nue or lue since the latter two sounds are not used in modern standard Mandarin.
I’ve been reading War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945, by Chang-tai Hung, which is one of the University of California Press books available for free online. It contains a reproduction of a woodcut with with the following text in romanization:
XIANG WU MANIOU KAN KI
(齊看有满吴向)
To my disappointment, the book does not discuss the romanization movement at all, though the presence of Sin Wenz (Xīn Wénzì / 新文字) in the woodcut is an indication of its relevence.
Anyway, back to the romanization in the illustration. In Hanyu Pinyin, which would not exist until some 15 years later, XIANG WU MANIOU KAN KI would read “xiàng Wú Mǎnyǒu kànqí” (“emulate Wu Manyou”). This Wu Manyou was a “model peasant” who got his very own official emulate-this-guy campaign in the early 1940s.
Notice that the use of the letter x predates Hanyu Pinyin. (Actually, x in romanization for Sinitic languages long predates Hanyu Pinyin, appearing even in Trigault’s seventeenth-century work.) But even though the xiang of Sin Wenz and the xiang of Hanyu Pinyin are written the same, the two systems handle the letter differently in most cases. In Sin Wenz texts, most of the time the letter x represents what would be written h in Hanyu Pinyin. For example, the full name of Sin Wenz is Latinxua Sin Wenz, not Latinhua Xinwenz. Note, too, the use of the original “Latin” rather than “Ladin”, just as Gwoyeu Romatzyh uses Romatzyh rather than Luomaatzyh, indicating the link between romanization and the alphabet of Rome (Roma).
Also interesting is the form of the character that is second from the right. (These Chinese characters are read from right to left. Put left to right, they would appear as 向吴满有看齊.) Note how it is not in the traditional form:
吳
Nor is it the standard “simplified” form (which would not have been officially adopted for more than decade after this woodblock was made):
吴
Of variant characters there is no end.
In less than seven hours I’ll be leaving on my first trip to Beijing in fifteen years … and of course I’m not finished packing yet.
While I’m there I’ll of course be doing my usual thing of finding sloppy Pinyin and signage to complain about here. But I’m also hopeful that I’ll be able to pick up some more old tracts in Sin Wenz. Recommendations on where to look would be greatly appreciated.