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”).
Dan of Jidanni.org has come up with a list of Taizhong’s busstops in the mixed style of Hanyu Pinyin and English that has become standard in Taiwan and is becoming so in China.
I hear that this list may actually be implemented! If so, that would be much to Taizhong’s credit, as local governments elsewhere in Taiwan are often not so responsive.
Here are the lists:
Good work, Dan!
Just out of curiousity, I removed the English and numerals from the list and then compared how it would be written in Hanyu Pinyin (the international standard) vs. Tongyong Pinyin (Taiwan’s international embarassment). This revealed that 337 of 633 entries would be written differently in Hanyu Pinyin and Tongyong Pinyin, giving a difference rate of 53.2 percent.
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.)
Matt of No-sword has two recent posts (<gue> to fabulas and I just can’t stop talking about old Portugo-Japanese texts online) on translations into Japanese of several books related to Aesop. These books are from the late sixteenth century and are the work of Portuguese Jesuits. And they’re in R?maji.
Here’s a link to the fable of the horse and the ass. For more links, see Matt’s posts.
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.
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
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.
Matt at No-sword talks about the uses of the letter W in Japan:
Many English initialisms are used in Japan, like CM for “commercial [movie]”, but W is a special letter: it can represent meaning all by itself. This is because it is generally pronounced “double” instead of “double-u”, so it’s handy for referring to things that are doubled.
Read the whole piece: Let the pretending to be injured begin.