Category Archives: Chinese characters

Courage… Cabnap… Grunplitk: zhuyin and the movie Fearless

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Many Westerners are so attracted by Chinese characters, which tend to be absurdly exoticized as symbols [sic] or ideograms [sic] of deep meaning, that they place them here and there as if they were some sort of pixie dust that bestows coolness upon any object (or body). Often when they do so, they write these characters incorrectly or are mistaken about their meaning, as Tian of Hanzi Smatter continues to note. But you’d think that at least those who make trailers for Chinese movies would be a little better informed.

Fearless (Mandarin title: Huò Yuánji? / ???), which is billed as Jet Li’s final martial-arts movie, has been out in Asia since January but won’t reach the States until later this year. (I have no plans to see this movie, which appears from the trailer to be a string of the usual clichés. And, anyway, I have yet to forgive Jet Li for appearing in Hero, which is probably the biggest cinematic valentine to totalitarianism since Triumph of the Will.) One of the trailers for Fearless features a number of Chinese characters. They’re even written correctly. But, oddly enough, interspersed with the Chinese characters are zhuyin fuhao, also known as bopo mofo, a semi-syllabic script used in Taiwan mainly to help teach children to read. Odder still, the zhuyin make absolutely no sense.

Here’s how Taiwanonymous, on whose site I found this story, puts it:

Intercut with scenes from the movie was a burnt-yellow background, suggesting aged parchment, with Chinese characters flying past. Along with the Chinese characters were some Mandarin phonetic symbols (zhuyin fuhao ????). It’s bad enough that they included phonetic symbols (which are mainly used in Children’s books) in the flying sea of what wanted to be an ancient Chinese text, but the symbols flew past in strings of gibberish! Imagine the following text dramatically moving across the screen, “Integrity… Peace… Courage… Cabnap… Grunplitk… Uwsugls.” Gives you chills just thinking about it.

Here’s a screenshot from the trailer:
gibberish zhuyin in the background

Just below COMING SOON is a giant ?. For something written in English this would be the equivalent of putting a large letter G on the screen.

Along the right side of the screen is the following, in zhuyin fuhao: ?????. This, in Hanyu Pinyin, would be “maixrici,” which is complete gibberish. The other vertical lines of text are also nonsense in zhuyin fuhao.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with how these are written. It’s just that they’re no more meaningful than a random string of letters.

Here’s one more shot:
gibberish zhuyin in the background
The zhuyin fuhao on the left read, from top to bottom, ?????, which would be “chjktp” in Hanyu Pinyin. As I think should be obvious even to those who don’t know Mandarin or any other Sinitic language, this is simply nonsense.

sources:

oracle bones site makes World Heritage list

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The PRC has been trying for several years to get Yin Xu (the Ruins of Yin) in Xiaotun, site of important finds of oracle bones, included on the United Nation’s list of World Heritage Sites. Oracle bones are pieces of turtle shell or animal bone on which were inscribed early forms of what eventually came to be Chinese characters.

This year Yin Xu was finally voted in.

This year’s new additions also include giant-panda sanctuaries and the Tequila-producing area of Mexico.

sources:

prospects for Chinese writing reform: important new work

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John DeFrancis — whose name should be familiar to most readers of this site, especially for his essential work The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, which contains his refutation of the ideographic myth — has just published a new article: “The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform.”

This article is the first in the new, electronic-format releases of Sino-Platonic Papers. Moreover, these new issues will be available free of charge.

I strongly recommend reading this.

‘furiganified’

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No-sword’s post on this is already brief, so I won’t shorten it here other than to note that sentences like “The furigana undermine the kanji at the most fundamental level, but the overall meaning of the poster remains unchanged” are the sort of thing that really make my day.

Just go read the whole post, which discusses something at the intriguingly titled Moji no ura-d?ri (which Matt translates freely as “The Back Streets of Orthography”).

Curse of the chaos crisis?

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Professor Victor H. Mair, whose piece on the character-related myth that crisis = danger + opportunity is one of the most popular readings here on Pinyin Info, sent in the following on a variation he has encountered:

Amazing!!! The Chinese are made to have a saying for **every** silly idea that anybody ever dreamed up. As if the “crisis = danger + opportunity” one were not bad enough, people are now compounding the problem by tacking on “chaos”!

The second item is even more unreal. From bad to worse, compounding of compounding.

California congressman Jim Costa speaking:

“So, the fact is, is that. . . . I mean, in crisis — what are the two Chinese symbols for the word “crisis”? One symbolizes in the Chinese alphabet[!!] “chaos,” and the other one reflects . . . . or defines “opportunity.” And so, through crisis and chaos . . . . or through chaos and opportunity you have a crisis. [VHM: THIS IS ***UNREAL***.] I mean, it’s unfortunate during this budget time. During the last three budget recessionary cycles that we lived with, I tried to — of course, I was one of the leaders at the time, in ’91 and ’92 — to get the folks to use this as an opportunity to look at taking a step back and to see how California, how much of our budget was now on autopilot….” (source)

UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!!!!!! And now they even invent an improbable, trisyllabic gloss/pseudoword: w?izh?ngj? (“incipient moment in the midst of danger,” which the exegetically-minded coiner obviously wanted to interpret as “*opportunity in the midst of danger”).

Oh, woe is me! Perhaps the person who concocted this oddity had gotten wind of my deconstruction of the bisyllabic term and rushed to its defense with an explicit “center, midst” to stick in the middle! Sorry, buster, that’s not enough. The main thing you have to fix is the last syllable.

And this is another one that keeps coming up.

(With thanks to Michael Carr and Ivan Aymat for references.)

Taishan dictionary

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A recently published dictionary of Taishan — Táishān fāngyīn zìdiǎn (台山方音字典), edited by Dèng Jūn (邓钧) and Lín Róngyào (林荣耀) — has been selling relatively well, according to news reports. But I haven’t been able to find out much more, such as if the book is available for purchase online.

quote of the day

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Wǒ de mùbēi shàng
qǐng wèiwǒ kèxià Luómǎ pīnyīn de chuántǒng míngzi
zài yòng Hànzì jiāzhù yìyīn
wǒ yào wǒ de zǐsūn xúnzhe jiāzú de chuántǒng mìngmíng fāngshì
ràng zhèxiē zǔxiān de míngzi liúchuán xiàqù

我的墓碑上
請為我刻下羅馬拼音的傳統名字
再用漢字加註譯音
我要我的子孫循著家族的傳統命名方式
讓這些祖先的名字流傳下去

Rough translation:

On my tombstone
please carve my traditional name using romanization
then use a Chinese character phonetic transcription
I want my descendants to follow the family’s traditional name system
Let these ancestors’ name pass down through the generations

from Mùbēi shàng de míngzi (墓碑上的名字), by Kaing Lipay, a member of one of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples.

see also Q?ng zài w? de mùb?i kèshang chuánt?ng míngzi (??????????????????), CNA, June 10, 2006

Kaohsiung’s signage in English and romanization

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Chih-Hao Tsai has a good post (in Mandarin) on the English and romanization in Kaohsiung’s signage: Gāoxióng Shì de Yīngwén lùbiāo — kǎoyàn nǐ de yǎnlì. He notes especially how the text in Latin letters is too small. The post also links to some of his other many writings on the topic.

I’ve had related conversations with officials in the Banqiao City Government and Taipei County Government. Upon hearing my complaints that new signs’ English and romanization are ridiculously small, the officials invariably answer me with something like, “It can’t be too small because we’re following the rules.”

Meanwhile, cities around Taiwan continue to waste taxpayer money putting up signs that don’t help.