Category Archives: Chinese characters

Obama, Bush, vitamin drinks, and puns

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Here’s something from an ad I saw on the Taipei subway (MRT). It features cartoons of George W. Bush and Barack Obama shilling for some vitamin drink.

Cartoon figures of Bush and Obama, with Bush disdainfully tossing aside drink cartons labeled 'C' and Obama holding up a bottle of juice labeled 'C'. The text is as described below.

Bush (though he looks a bit more to me like the love child of W and maybe Prince Charles) is saying:

不C 不C
喝果汁不能只有維他命C

Bù C, bù C.
Hē guǒzhī bùnéng zhǐyǒu wéitāmìng C.

A rough English translation, filling in a few gaps:

Not just vitamin C, not just vitamin C.
When you drink fruit juice, you should not settle for just vitamin C.

Note: The C is italicized in the Pinyin version to emphasize that this is pronounced like a foreign (i.e., English) letter C rather than how C is pronounced in the Pinyin alphabet. The reason for this is that “bù C” is a pun on “Bush”, whose name in Taiwan is generally pronounced in Mandarin as Bùxī, unlike in China, where it is usually pronounced Bùshí.

Obama’s lines are more interesting:

歐八馬歐八馬 (台語)
買果汁不要黑白買

Read in Mandarin this is:

Ōubāmǎ [Obama], Ōubāmǎ (Táiyǔ).
Mǎi guǒzhī bù yào hēibái mǎi.

And roughly in English this is

Obama, Obama (Taiwanese)
When you buy fruit juice, don’t buy just whatever

But the text tells people to read 歐八馬 (Ōubāmǎ/Obama) as Taiwanese (Táiyǔ), which means that it’s pronounced Au3-peh4-be2, which is a pun with what is written, in red for emphasis, 黑白買.

黑白買 in Mandarin is hēibái mǎi, which means to buy things indiscriminantly. In Hoklo (Taiwanese), however, this expression is O.1-peh4-boe2, thus a pun on Au3-peh4-be2 (Obama).

Also, hēibái by itself is simply “black [and] white” (as in Obama and Bush).

And Obama’s name, like Bush’s, has different Mandarin forms in Taiwan and China. But that doesn’t have much to do with the ad.

As always, I welcome those who (unlike me) know Taiwanese romanization well to correct anything that needs fixing.

simplified vs. traditional characters

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Most of the recent remarks on the Web about China’s recent discussion on the use of traditional Chinese characters have been, predictably, waaaay off-target. I’ve been trying to ignore them for the most part and not jump up and down while shouting irate things about this. But, still, the topic deserves some remarks.

Fortunately, Zhang Liqing, one of the associate editors of the much-beloved ABC Chinese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, has generously contributed an essay that addresses some of the basics of the matter: “Jiǎntǐ” duì “Fántǐ” — “Yǔ” hé “Wén” Bù Yíyàng. It’s now available here on Pinyin.info in both Mandarin (both Pinyin and Hanzi) and English versions.

Here’s the opening paragraph in Mandarin:

Jiǎntǐzì hé fántǐzì shì shǔyú wénzì fànchóu de wèntí. Dànshi xiànzài wǎng shàng guānyú zhè gè wèntí de yǒuxiē shuōfa chángcháng bǎ yǔyán hé wénzì hùn zài yīqǐ, yě yǒu rén bǎ wénhuà, chuántǒng děngděng dà màozi kòu zài zhè gè wèntí shàng, jiéguǒ líkāi tímù hěn yuǎn, yě déchū yīxiē bù zhèngquè de jiélùn.

And the same paragraph in English:

The question of simplified and complicated characters belongs to the scope of script. However, some recent discussions on the Internet often confuse script with language, and there are also people who cover up the question with heavy topics such as culture and tradition. The result is that the discussion becomes far removed from the question itself, and, at the same time, arrives at erroneous conclusions.

The complete essay is available in four versions:

de de de — d di de

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cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyWhat’s the most commonly used morpheme in Mandarin? It isn’t the word for is (shì/是). And it’s not the one for not (bù/不). And the number one (yī/一) is only number two — in frequency, that is. (Even some of that is that Hanzi frequency counts include 一 used as a dash.) Nope, it’s that little grammatical particle de (的).

Today’s selection from Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography is all about de (800 KB PDF).

So, whaddaya do with de in Pinyin? Simple: It’s almost always written separately from the words around it.

  • māma de ài (mother’s love)
  • zhàopiàn de bèimiàn (back of a photograph)
  • lìshǐ de jīngyàn (the experience of history)
  • dàmén wài de shíshīzi (the stone lions outside the gate)
  • nǐ de yǔsǎn (your umbrella)
  • zhèyàng de rén (people of that sort)
  • tā zìjǐ de cuòwu (his own mistake)
  • jìlái de xìn (the letter that was sent)
  • chī chóngzi de zhíwù (insectivorous plants)
  • Chī de, chuān de, yòng de, yàngyàng dōu yǒu. (They have all kinds of food, clothing, and other items of use.)
  • hǎo de bànfǎ (a good solution)
  • wǒ xǐhuān de xiézi (the shoes I like)

So, yeah, that means if you want to write down a common Mandarin obscenity, it’s tāmā de (他媽的), not tāmāde — though I wouldn’t be surprised if that becomes treated as one word over time.

There are just a few exceptions. This particular de is written together with the component it follows only in the following cases:

  • yǒude 有的 (some): Yǒude rén tànxi, yǒude rén liúlèi. (Some people were sighing, while others wept.)
  • shìde 是的 (yes, certainly): Shìde, wǒ jiù qù. (Certainly, I’ll go right away.)
  • shìde 似的 (like, as): Xiàng hóuzi shìde, tiàolái tiàoqù. (Jumping around, just like a monkey.)

But 的 isn’t Mandarin’s only common de. Let’s not forget de (地, the 20th most commonly used Hanzi) and de (得, 35th).

These three homophonous particles are represented by three different characters in writing; would it perhaps be useful to create three different Hanyu Pinyin forms to differentiate them in Hanyu Pinyin writing? The basic principle of Hanyu Pinyin orthography is to take the language’s sound system as the basis for spelling, and, by this standard the three particles 的, 地, and 得 should all be written identically as “de.” But it may be desirable in certain situations (such as Chinese-language word processing and other computer applications, and in machine translation) to differentiate the three. In this case, they may be assigned different written forms: 的, the most commonly used, as “d”; 地 as “di” (an alternate pronunciation of this character); and the third, 得, as “de.”

That’s:

  • 的 = d (pronounced de)
  • 地 = di (pronounced de)
  • 得 = de (pronounced de)*

(* Yes, I know those all have other readings. But we’re not talking here about Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations.)

But you don’t have to use those orthographic variants if you don’t want to. For an example of a text that does use d and de, see this lovely story: Dàshuǐ Guòhòu (After the Flood).

OK, let’s get back to those other de‘s.

de 地

The principal function of this particle is to link an adverbial modifier to “the verb or adjective it modifies. de 地 is always written separately from the elements preceding and following it.

Thus:

  • suíbiàn de kàn (look over casually)
  • mànmàn de zǒu (walk slowly)
  • yī kǒu yī kǒu de chī (eat bite by bite)

de 得

The principal function of this particle is to link a verb or adjective with its complement. The complement expresses possibility, degree, or result, and may be composed of a single word or a phrase. The verb or adjective preceding de 得 may only be a single word, never a phrase. de 得 is in principle written separately from the elements preceding and following it. The bù 不 that negates a de 得 expressing possibility is also written separately from the elements around it.

Thus,

  • hǎo de hěn (very good)
  • duō de duō (much more)
  • lěng de yàomìng (freezing cold)
  • hēi de kànbujiàn rén (so dark one can’t see the people around one)
  • gāoxìng de jǐnjǐn wòzhu ta de shǒu shuō: “Xièxie! Xièxie!” (so happy I could only grasp his hand and say, “Thank you! Thank you!)

There are two main situations in which de 得 should be written as one unit with the component that precedes or follows it. Let us take a look at these:
(1) de 得 sometimes joins together with the verb that precedes it to form a single word. Sometimes a bù 不 is interposed between the verb and de 得 to indicate negation. In either case, all elements are written as one unit.

  • dǒngde (to understand)
  • jìde (to remember)
  • jiànde (to seem)
  • juéde (to feel)
  • láide (to be competent (to do something)
  • láibude (impermissable)
  • liǎode (terrible)
  • liǎobude (teriffic)

(2) In certain trisyllabic verb-complement constructions in which de 得 (or the negative marker bù 不) forms the middle syllable, the meaning of the complement has altered and the whole has come to express a single concept. In this case all three syllables should be written as one unit.

  • láidejí (there’s still time; to be in time)
  • láibují (there’s no time; to be too late)
  • chīdekāi (to be popular)
  • chībukāi (be unpopular)
  • duìdeqǐ (not let somebody down)
  • duìbuqǐ (let somebody down; also, “excuse me”)
  • chīdexiāo (be able to bear)
  • chībuxiāo (be unable to bear)

Wulai — or something like that

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All of the romanization systems commonly seen in Taiwan — bastardized Wade-Giles, MPS2, Tongyong Pinyin, and Hanyu Pinyin — use the same spelling (tones aside) for the unnecessarily ugly but scenically situated Taipei County town of Wulai (Mandarin: Wūlái / 烏來). And the formerly official but little-seen Gwoyeu Romatzyh isn’t so different: Ulai. So getting this one spelled correctly shouldn’t be a big deal.

But on a recent trip there I saw the spelling of “Ulay” on relatively recent official signage.

two brown (culture) signs with 'Ulay Old Street' and 'Ulay Atayal Museum', along with their respective Chinese characters

three brown (culture) signs with 'Ulay Waterfall', 'Lover's Trail', and 'Ulay Hot Spring', along with their respective Chinese characters

Actually, none of those particular signs really needed any spelling of Wulai. For example, if you’re in Wulai and a sign points toward “Old Street”, you don’t really need to wonder if perhaps it’s pointing toward the Old Street in Sanxia or some other town instead. But officialdom here relies on its lists of official names and seldom exercises anything in the way of imagination or even just common sense. (That reminds me: I really must finish that half-completed post on wordy signage.)

So, about the “Ulay” spelling: Could it be the correct spelling in the system used to write the language of the Atayal people indigenous to the area? A search of some Taiwan government Web sites leads to me to believe that, yes, it could be. But I asked several people in Wulai who said they were literate in Atayal script, and they said that “Wulai” was the correct spelling for the town’s name in the Atayal language.

Still, these were not linguists or teachers, and this is Taiwan, where chabuduo-ism and outright ignorance of romanization are strong. So when I returned home I went to Wulai’s official website, which only made matters worse. There I found all of the following forms: Wulai, WuLai, Wulia, Wulay, and Ulay.

wulai_wulay_wulia
Ulay

  • Wulia — in big letters, no less. Remarkably, the township uses the URL of www.wulia.gov.tw for its site, though, fortunately, www.wulai.gov.tw also works. I doubt this is anything other than a typo that has somehow not been corrected but has instead gained force.
  • Wulai — This spelling is the one used for at least most of the text.
  • Wulay
  • WuLai — Die, intercaps, die!
  • Ulay — found in the Mandarin portion of the site.

Elsewhere I also found the form Ulai; but in these cases that spelling almost certainly has nothing to do with Gwoyeu Romatzyh.

Here are the numbers for some Google searches:

spelling .gov.tw domains all .tw domains any domains, but pages must include “Taipei County” or
“台北縣”
Wulai 2,760 10,900 5,540
Wulia 381 838 307
Ulay 50 649 592
Ulai 33 237 249
Wulay 9 25 16

So, whatever the correct spelling is, that is the government should be using, not this mishmash. And it should let people know how to pronounce it correctly in the original language, not just Mandarin. Perhaps it’s too late for this name, though, as “Wulai” is so well known.

Regardless of the spelling, though, the name is another example of Chinese characters being used to represent a name that did not originate with a Sinitic language. Thus, the name doesn’t really have anything to do with crows (烏) coming (來). Instead, it refers to the hot springs in the area.

kanji scandal

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The Kyoto-based Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation — the group behind the Kanji of the Year announcement and which runs Japan’s well-attended kanji aptitude tests — is registered as a public-interest corporation, which means that it is not supposed to generate profits greater than it needs to operate (much like a non-profit organization in the United States). On March 10, however, Japan’s Ministry of Education stepped in, saying that the foundation was making too much money and needed to overhaul its operations.

How much money are we talking about?

The foundation racked up profits of ¥880 million [US$8.8 million] in fiscal 2006 and ¥660 million in fiscal 2007. The value of its assets increased from ¥5 billion at the end of fiscal 2004 to ¥7.35 billion at the end of fiscal 2007. It would not be far-fetched to say that the foundation has created a kanji business. Kanken became a registered trademark. In fiscal 2007 alone, the foundation sold some 1.5 million copies of books. It is also providing kanji-related questions to TV shows.

But there are more problems than just how much of the money the foundation makes. It has been funneling money into companies controlled by the foundation’s director and his son, the deputy director. “In fiscal 2007, commissions to these companies amounted to 2.48 billion yen [US$24.9 million], accounting for about 40 percent of the foundation’s annual expenditures,” the Asahi Shimbun reported.

Moreover, it appears the companies did little work for the large amount of money they received.

The Ministry of Education has warned the foundation before, with not much in the way of results. The foundation is to report back to the ministry by April 15. Given how entrenched the foundation is within Japan, I don’t expect much to change.

sources:

Y.R. Chao’s responses to arguments against romanization

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Y.R. Chao. Also, FWIW, Wikipedia took this image from Pinyin.Info, not the other way around.Pinyin.Info has a new reading: Responses to objections to romanization, written by the brilliant linguist Y.R. Chao in 1916, when he was a young man of 24.

It’s an unfortunate irony that another writing associated with Chao, the famous “stone lions” (a.k.a. shi, shi, shi) piece, is often mistakenly cited as evidence that the author opposed romanization. In fact, Chao favored using romanization for Mandarin, as his essay reveals.

It’s written in the form of 16 “objections,” each followed by Chao’s reply. For example:

Obj. 8 Alphabetized Chinese loses its etymology.

Rep. 8 This argument is like that often urged against simplified English spelling and is to be met similarly. In actual usage, how much attention do we give to etymology in words like 學, 暴, 發, 旋, 之, through, draught, etiquette, row, disaster? Of how many of these very common words do you know the original meaning? It is not to be denied, of course, that it is useful to know the etymology of words by looking them up, and our future dictionaries of alphabetized polysyllabic words should no doubt give their derivations.

The etymology of disaster (which is pretty cool) is certainly easy enough for an educated person to guess, if you stop to think about it. But I must admit I never had.

I have added notes following the text.

Writing Taiwanese: 1999 study

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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.

San Francisco Chinatown signage

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Here are some photos I took a couple of years ago in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

As should be clear from the Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations I’ve provided for the Chinese characters, the Sinitic names for streets in Chinatown certainly don’t come from Mandarin, which isn’t surprising given how the Chinese diaspora was not predominantly Mandarin speaking until recently. My guess would be Taishanese Cantonese.

Beckett: 白話轉街 (Mandarin: Báihuàzhuǎn Jiē; Cantonese: baahk- wa/ jyun/ )

BECKETT 白話轉街

I like this unofficial sign even better.
a one-way sign, beneath which is a hand-lettered sign reading BECKETT ST 白話轉街

Jackson: 昃臣街 (Mandarin: Zèchén Jiē; Cantonese: jak\ sahn\)

The first Chinese character, 昃, is a surprising choice since it is quite rare and would not be known by most people. Some far more common characters that perhaps could have been used instead include 則 (Cantonese: jak\), 責 (Cantonese: jaak-), 澤 (Cantonese: jaahk-), and 擇 (Cantonese: jaahk-) — all of which are pronounced zé in Mandarin.

Jackson 昃臣街

Clay: 企李街 (Mandarin: Qǐlǐ Jiē; Cantonese: keih/ leih/)

streetsign for Clay Street, with 企李街 in Chinese characters

Commercial: 襟美慎街 (Mandarin: Jīnměishèn Jiē; Cantonese: kam\ meih/ sahn-)

I would have expected a semantic translation for this street name. But Kam-meih-sahn appears to be another phonetic approximation.

'Commercial 襟美慎街' -- a bronze placque embedded in brick paving

Grant: 都板街 (Mandarin: Dōubǎn Jiē; Cantonese: dou\ baan/ gaai\)

This is another interesting one. Note that Doubaan and Grant sound nothing like each other. And this isn’t a semantic translation of Grant either. So why is this street labelled 都板街? The answer is that the Sinitic name preserves an old name of the street: Dupont.

street sign reading 'Grant 都板街'

And for lagniappe, here’s a photo taken in the nearby Italian district, where Columbus Street is also identified in Italian as Corso Cristòforo Colombo.

as described above

further reading: