Today’s Pinyin-friendly fonts are Fortunata, which doesn’t quite close the counters of some letters (e.g., a, o, e, p, d), and the somewhat more recent Fortunatus, which does.
Balint Erdosi (I’m sorry to omit the diacritics for now) of Hungary created both of these, which are available as donationware.
A couple of days ago the New York Times ran a small piece, “How Emojis Find Their Way to Phones.” It contains the sort of nonsense about Chinese characters and language that often sets me off.
Fortunately, Victor Mair quickly posted something on this. J. Marshall Unger (Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning, The Fifth Generation Fallacy, and Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan) and S. Robert Ramsey (The Languages of China) quickly followed. But since those are in the comments to a Language Log post and thus may not be seen as much as they should be, I thought I’d link to them here.
The Language Log post itself is on Emoji Dick, which is billed as a translation of Moby Dick into emoji. As long as I’m writing, I might as well offer up a sample for you. See if you can determine the original English.
Did you try “Call me Ishmael”? Sorry. That’s not it. But if you guessed that I would choose the passage from Moby Dick that mentions Taiwan, give yourself bonus points.
Here’s what the above emoji supposedly translate:
Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China waters into the Pacific.
Ah, of course. It’s all so clear now.
The next time you hear someone use “pictorial language,” “ideographs,” or the like in all seriousness, perhaps ask them for their own English translation of the above string of images.
Actually, Emoji Dick screwed this up some, as part belongs to the main text and part to a footnote.
Today’s Pinyin-friendly font is another display face: Arca Dashed, by Ricardo Marcin and Erica Jung. It has a papercut style.
The other members of the Arca family, which users may find a bit more serviceable, are commercial.
The results of the Advanced Placement exams from the College Board can give us an idea of what’s going on with the teaching of Mandarin Chinese in U.S. high schools.
As the charts below demonstrate, there’s something very different about the scores for the AP exam in Chinese Language and Culture compared with the scores for just about everything else.
The tests are graded on a five-point scale, with a 5 being the top score. Generally, a 3 is considered a pass, though some universities choose to give or deny credit based on different scores.
The first chart shows the percentage of of test takers who received a score of just 1 (lowest) on their respective AP exams. The median of the figures below for the percentage of test takers who received the lowest score is 18.2. The figure for Chinese (in green, at 3.2) is just 0.18 times that. Studio Art Drawing and Studio Art 2-D Design are at about the same level here as Chinese Language and Culture. But everything else is at least twice that — in most cases many times that.
AP Exams Taken by the Class of 2013 During High School: Percent of Exams with the Lowest Score
(click any chart to enlarge it)
So, relatively speaking, almost no one received the lowest score on the AP Chinese Language and Culture exam.
What about the highest score? The median of the figures below for the percentage of test takers who received the highest score (of 5) on their respective AP exams is 13.9. The figure for Chinese is 5.0 times that.
AP Exams Taken by the Class of 2013 During High School: Percent of Exams with the Highest Score
Finally, below is a chart putting the differences into greater perspective. It shows the ratio of highest scores to lowest scores on various AP exams.
The median of the figures below for the ratio of highest scores to lowest scores on the AP exams is 0.8. The figure for Chinese is 27.1 times that.
As is obvious from the image below, nothing else is even close.
AP Exams Taken by the Class of 2013 During High School: Ratio of Highest Scores to Lowest Scores
The reason for this massive difference is that the Advanced Placement exam for Chinese Language and Culture is taken mainly by native speakers and others who generally have not had to learn most of their Mandarin in their high school AP classes. This doesn’t bode well for newcomers to the language who want to learn. But as lopsided as the situation is, things are improving. More on that in later posts.
source: The 10th Annual AP Report to the Nation, February 11, 2014
See also Results of US AP exams: first year for Mandarin, Japanese, Pinyin News, February 14, 2008.
I shouldn’t go too long without mentioning Google’s ambitious Noto project, which offers both serif and sans-serif versions: Noto Serif and Noto Sans.
When text is rendered by a computer, sometimes there will be characters in the text that can not be displayed, because no font that supports them is available to the computer. When this occurs, small boxes are shown to represent the characters. We call those small boxes “tofu,” and we want to remove tofu from the Web. This is how the Noto font families got their name.
Noto helps to make the web more beautiful across platforms for all languages. Currently, Noto covers over 30 scripts, and will cover all of Unicode in the future. This is the Sans Latin, Greek and Cyrillic family. It has Regular, Bold, Italic and Bold Italic styles and is hinted. It is derived from Droid, and like Droid it has a serif sister family, Noto Serif.
Noto fonts for many other languages are available as web fonts from the Google Web Fonts Early Access page.
Noto fonts are intended to be visually harmonious across multiple languages, with compatible heights and stroke thicknesses.
(Emphasis added.)
And it’s free, of course.
In 2013, a total of 706 U.S. students majoring in Chinese graduated, a gain of just 6 students over the previous year. In addition, Japanese as a major continues to attract significantly more students than Mandarin.
By way of contrast, in 2013 a total of 12,703 U.S. students graduated with degrees in Spanish.
Despite the strong growth of interest in Mandarin over the past two decades or so, only 2.34% of all students in U.S. universities majoring in a foreign language are majoring in Chinese, so the percentage of Mandarin majors among students overall is tiny indeed.
The numbers are for graduating seniors in those years.
Source: Data on Second Majors in Language and Literature, 2001–13, MLA Office of Research, Web publication, February 2015
A doubled vowel is a sure sign of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system — except when it’s a sign of someone wrongly omitting an apostrophe in Hanyu Pinyin or simply making a typo. But today’s example is certainly Gwoyeu Romatzyh, as, oddly enough, the side of a coach bus is one of the most likely places in Taiwan to spot an example of that romanization system. I’m seeing it less and less as the years go by, though, which saddens me.
Here, however, is a nice example that looks fairly new. I took the photo along Taidong’s lovely coastline a couple of weeks ago.
Diing Dong Bus (Pinyin: Ding3 Dong1; lit. ancient three-legged round cauldron, east)
Note, too, the mixing of Mandarin and English (rather than the loanword form of bashi), and those hideously misplaced g’s.
Rapid growth in U.S. students going to China to study has not been seen since around 2008. In fact, in the most recent school year for which we have data (2012–2013), the total fell to 14,413, down slightly from the 14,887 U.S. students studying in China during the 2011–2012 school year.
Meanwhile, the number of students from China studying in the United States is back on the rise.
Note, the chart below is not of the absolute number of Chinese students in the United States but of the ratio of Chinese students in the United States to U.S. students in China — just because I thought it might be more interesting. If you’d like to the see the numbers for the former, then check the source document.
China is the leading place of origin for students coming to the United States, with Chinese students comprising 31% of international students in the United States. They’re about evenly divided between undergrad and grad students.
Source: Open Doors Fact Sheet: China.