Sorry for the horrible state of the coding in my blog recently. WordPress has not acted well since the last upgrade. So far my attempts to fix the situation have been ineffective and, worse still, have made me even slower than usual to respond to e-mail.
I’m working to resolve this.
Sorry not to have been posting more lately. My wife and I have just returned from a three-week visit to the United States. I’m starting to dig my way through a mountain of e-mail and suggestions for entries and will answer everyone as soon as I can.
I’ve added another new page to my site: How to find syllable boundaries in Hanyu Pinyin.
After you’ve read it and its companion piece on apostrophes in Hanyu Pinyin, be sure to take the Pinyin syllable-break quiz.
Recently added to my list of recommended readings: Characters and Computers, edited by Victor H. Mair and Yongquan Liu. Although this collection was published in 1991 and thus no longer represents the state of the art, the issues raised here remain relevant.
Of particular interest, at least where Pinyin is concerned, is the important essay Pinyin-to-Chinese Character Computer Conversion Systems and the Realization of Digraphia in China, by Yin Binyong, who has also written the books on Pinyin orthography: Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography and the Xinhua Pinxie Cidian. The complete text of this substantial essay (nearly 6,000 words) is available here on Pinyin Info. I strongly encourage everyone to read this.
Here are the subject headings:
I’ve just added Y.R. Chao’s Sayable Chinese series to my list of recommended books. The second book in this series of three comprises Chao’s delightful translation of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. I’ve selected part of the Humpty Dumpty chapter for the sample reading on Pinyin Info. Although the sample has romanization and English, the Sayable Chinese books have romanization and Chinese characters, presented en face. (I’ll add the Chinese characters one of these days, but they’re so much trouble to type! And scanning isn’t much of an improvement.)
These hardback books are a good deal at US$15 each.
The romanization method is Chao’s own Gwoyeu Romatzyh system.
Here’s a sample, with Hanyu Pinyin for comparative purposes:
Gwoyeu RomatzyhKeesh neh jitzeel yueh jaang yueh dah, yueh jaang yueh shianq ren-yanql: Alihsy tzoou-dawle i-leang-janq luh gencheal, jiow kann.chu ta yeou yeanjing byitz tzoei lai le; ta tzay tzoou-jinn ideal jiow chingchingchuuchuu de kann.chulai ta jiowsh HUENDIH DUENDIH been-ren le. Ta duey tzyhjii shuo, “Jeh buhuey sh byeren le! Yonq.bu-jaur geei ta shieele maan-lean de mingtz woo jiow idinq jydaw sh ta le!” |
Hanyu PinyinKěshì nèi jīzǐr yuè zhǎng yuè dà, yuè zhǎng yuè xiàng rényàngr: Ālìsī zǒudào le yī liǎng zhàng lù gēnqián, jiù kànchū tā yǒu yǎnjing bízi zuǐ lái le; tā zài zǒujìn yīdiǎnr jiù qīngqingchǔchǔ de kànchūlai tā jiùshì HŪNDÌ DŪNDÌ běnrén le. Tā duì zìjǐ shuō, “Zhè bù huì shì biéren le! Yòngbuzháo gěi tā xiě le mǎnliǎn de míngzi wǒ jiù yīdìng zhīdao shì tā le!” |
EnglishHowever, the egg only got larger and larger, and more and more human: when she had come within a few yards of it, she saw that it had eyes and a nose and mouth; and when she had come close to it, she saw clearly that it was HUMPTY DUMPTY himself. “It can’t be anybody else!” she said to herself. “I’m as certain of it, as if his name were written all over his face.” |
Chinese characters可是那雞子兒越長越大，越長越象人樣兒：阿麗思走到了一兩丈路跟前，就看出它有眼睛鼻子嘴來了；她再走近一點兒就清清楚楚的看出來它就是昏弟敦弟本人了。她對自己說，“這不會是別人了！用不著給他寫了滿臉的名字我就一定知道是他了！” |
Recordings of all of the books in the Sayable Chinese series are available on cassette. The recordings were made by Chao and his family. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of these — they’re expensive! — so I can’t supply a sound file for the section above. The Folkways recording of Chao’s Mandarin Primer, however, has a 30-second excerpt from from the Tweedledum and Tweedledee section. Here’s the English version of what’s being said:
Tweedledee: You like poetry?
Alice: Ye-es, pretty well — some poetry. Would you tell me which road leads out of the wood?
Tweedledee: What shall I repeat to her? “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is the longest.
The sun was shining—Alice: If it’s very long, would you tell me first which road —
Tweedledee:
The sun was shining—
I think that’s Chao’s daughter, Rulan Chao Pian, as Alice, and Chao as Tweedledee.
Book Three contains Chao’s adaptation of The Mollusc, a 1908 stage comedy by H. H. Davies. (Alas, Project Gutenberg doesn’t have the text of this yet.) Interestingly, this play has an association with another romanization-related figure, Harold E. Palmer, who published The Principles of Romanization in 1930 and who was a leading figure in the field of English teaching. Palmer’s daughter Dorothee published an “annotated phonetic edition” (complete with tone marks) of The Mollusc in 1929. (Palmer had taught her how to read and write in phonetic notation, leaving her to pick up traditional spelling on her own!)
Pinyin Info also has the text of Y.R. Chao’s much-misunderstood stone lions story. Chao was making a point about Classical Chinese, not modern Mandarin. As the architect of a romanization system, Chao understood perfectly well that Mandarin is not doomed to a hell of homophony without Chinese characters.
The year 2006 has already begun here in Taiwan, but we have several more weeks to go before Chinese New Year, which will be on January 29 and which will be the beginning of a year of the dog.
I’ve dusted off and restyled some lists I made several years ago of all the dates of Chinese New Year between the years 1645 and 2644 — one thousand years in total. (See link above.) I think this is a nice resource, though it doesn’t have much to do with the normal concerns of this site.
One possible connection: It might be interesting to hear people’s views on the question of how to translate the names of some of the animals associated with the years in the Chinese calendar: “rat” or “mouse,” “ox” or “cow,” “goat” or “sheep,” and “rooster” or “chicken.” Of course that final example has another possible translation, but I still recall the difficulty of keeping a straight face the time one of my students in China pointed to a map of the country and told me, in all innocence, “China looks like a big cock.”
For lots more information on the Chinese lunisolar calendar, see Helmer Aslaksen’s Mathematics of the Chinese Calendar.
For a long time I’ve had making a “favorites icon” (“favicon,” for short) on the long to-do list for this site. These icons are small images, just 16 pixels by 16 pixels, that can appear in bookmarks for a Web site and in the address bar. In some browsers, such as Opera, they also appear on the browser tabs, which is a nice touch.
Probably the most common look for icons is achieved by incorporating a letter of the alphabet: Yahoo , Google
, Opera
, the New York Times
, Forumosa
.
Some icons use Chinese characters: Wenlin , No-Sword
.
And some are more abstract or pictorial: Notetab text editor , the Panda’s Thumb
, Photo Net
This being the sort of site it is, I’m not going to use a Chinese character — not unless I could fit romanization in as well. And I doubt that can be done within a 16 by 16 square.
Ideally, I’d like to have something in the style of Xu Bing‘s “new English calligraphy.” Here’s roughly the effect I’d be shooting for:
(That’s “P-I-n-Y-I-n”, in case you’re wondering.)
Unfortunately, however, that sort of thing doesn’t work very well when reduced down to icon size. About the best I could come up with is this: 
. But I’m not so sure about that.
I’d like to get input from my readers. Which of the following do you prefer?
— faux Xu BingPlease let me know what you think with a comment here or through e-mail.
If you have an image you’d like to use for your site’s icon but don’t have the software to turn it into icon format, you could try this online favicon generator. It will reduce your image to the correct size and put it in .ico format.
Then place the resulting image, which should be named favicon.ico for maximum browser compatibility, in the root directory of your site. To make Internet Explorer happy, you could also add the following to the head of your HTML:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
In other Pinyin Info image news, I’ve added a script to the Pinyin Info home page that will put up random images and links to readings on this site. I hope it helps let people know that there’s a lot more on this site than might appear at first glance.
Finally, since logos and icons are often associated with “ideographs,” this seems like a good place to recommend John DeFrancis’s reading on the ideographic myth, for anyone who hasn’t read that already.
Pinyin Info made the Reading File of this Sunday’s New York Times, with Victor H. Mair’s essay danger + opportunity ? crisis being quoted:
On pinyin.info, a Web site about the Chinese language, Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, explodes the myth that “crisis,” in Chinese means both “danger” and “opportunity.”
A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate formulation. A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references to this spurious proverb. It appears, … often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for “thinking outside of the box” and practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. …
Like most Mandarin words, that for “crisis” (weiji) consists of two syllables that are written with two separate characters, wei and ji. The ji of weiji, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a weiji is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A weiji indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one’s skin and neck!
source: By Any Other Name, New York Times, December 18, 2005