Lots and lots of puns out there for the year of the rabbit (tùzi/兔子). Most of them, like this, are based on English “to” vs. Mandarin’s “tu.” Here’s a biscriptal one before the holidays end.
HAPPY 兔GETHER
Best wishes, and stay warm, everyone!
North Korea is a scary, scary, scary place. Fortunately, at least for those of us not living in that People’s Paradise, every so often the country also provides important linguistic tips, which I am duty-bound to pass along to you.
For example, did you know that names without final consonants are “anti-socialist”? The wise authorities in North Korea have reportedly come to that conclusion and are presently dedicated to the task of cleansing that evil. Since October, “notices have been constantly issued at the neighborhood-watch unit’s residents’ meeting to correct all names without final consonants. People with names that don’t have a final consonant have until the end of the year to add political meanings to their name to meet revolutionary standards,” a resident of North Korea’s North Hamgyong told Radio Free Asia.
In meetings and public notices, officials have gone so far as to instruct adults and children to change their names if they are deemed too soft or simple …, another source said….
The government has threatened to fine anyone who does not use names with political meanings, a resident in the northern province of Ryanggang told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.
Naturally, it would be unwise to adopt any sort of name that reminds the government authorities of names in South Korea or elsewhere.
In the past, North Koreans were encouraged to give their children patriotic names that held some ideological or even militaristic meaning, such as Chung Sim (loyalty), Chong Il (gun), Pok Il (bomb) or Ui Song (satellite).
In recent years, though, as the county has become more open to the outside world, North Koreans have been naming their children gentler, more uplifting names that are easier to say, such as A Ri (loved one), So Ra (conch shell) and Su Mi (super beauty), sources inside the country say.
Instead of names that end on harder sounding consonants, children are being given names that end in softer vowels, which is more like names given to children in South Korea.
But recently, North Korean authorities are clamping down on this trend, requiring citizens with the softer names to change to more ideological ones, and even their children’s names, if they aren’t “revolutionary” enough, the sources say.
source: North Korea forcing citizens to change their names to sound more ideological, Radio Free Asia, November 30, 2022
related article in Korean: “남한식 이름 불가” 북, 혁명적 개명 강요 (“South Korean names are not allowed.” North Forces Revolutionary Name Changes), Radio Free Asia, November 28, 2022
Further reading: “북 채택 예고한 ‘평양문화어보호법’, 사상·정신적 이완 방지 조치” (North Korea to adopt Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act to prevent ideological and mental relaxation), Radio Free Asia, December 7, 2022.
The following is a guest post by Victor H. Mair.
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How do we learn languages, after all? By following rules, whether hard-wired or learned? Or by acquiring and absorbing principles and patterns through massive amounts of repetitions?
“AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning — and raising questions about innate grammar,” a stimulating new article by Morten Christiansen and Pablo Contreras Kallens that first appeared in The Conversation (10/19/2022) and later in Ars Technica and elsewhere, begins thus:
Unlike the carefully scripted dialogue found in most books and movies, the language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, full of false starts, interruptions and people talking over each other. From casual conversations between friends, to bickering between siblings, to formal discussions in a boardroom, authentic conversation is chaotic. It seems miraculous that anyone can learn language at all given the haphazard nature of the linguistic experience.
I must say that I am in profound agreement with this scenario. In many university and college departments, which consist entirely of learned professors, you’d think that discussions and deliberations would be governed by regulations and rationality. Such, however, is not the case. Instead, people constantly talk over and past each other, barely listening to what their colleagues are saying. They interrupt one another and engage in aggressive behavior, or erupt in mindless laughter over who knows what. I’m not saying that all the members of these departments are like this nor that all departments are like this, but far too many do converse in this fashion. The individuals who are more sedate and civilized tend to remain silent for hours on end because, as the saying goes, they can’t get a word in edgewise. It’s a wonder that departments can accomplish anything.
For this reason, many language scientists – including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics – believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.
Everybody knows these things — or knew them decades ago — but now they are indubitably passé.
Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience – or so the thinking goes.
This template, for example, might contain a “super-rule” that dictates how new pieces are added to existing phrases. Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).
But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.
Now, however, the authors make an astonishing claim. They assert that AI language models produce language that is grammatically correct, but they do so without a grammar!
Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be.
GPT-3, arguably the most well-known of these models, is a gigantic deep-learning neural network with 175 billion parameters. It was trained to predict the next word in a sentence given what came before across hundreds of billions of words from the internet, books and Wikipedia. When it made a wrong prediction, its parameters were adjusted using an automatic learning algorithm.
Remarkably, GPT-3 can generate believable text reacting to prompts such as “A summary of the last ‘Fast and Furious’ movie is…” or “Write a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson.” Moreover, GPT-3 can respond to SAT level analogies, reading comprehension questions and even solve simple arithmetic problems – all from learning how to predict the next word.
The authors delve more deeply into comparisons of AI models and human brains, not without raising some significant problems:
A possible concern is that these new AI language models are fed a lot of input: GPT-3 was trained on linguistic experience equivalent to 20,000 human years. But a preliminary study that has not yet been peer-reviewed found that GPT-2 [a “little brother” of GPT-3] can still model human next-word predictions and brain activations even when trained on just 100 million words. That’s well within the amount of linguistic input that an average child might hear during the first 10 years of life.
In conclusion, Christiansen and Kallens call for a rethinking of language learning:
“Children should be seen, not heard” goes the old saying, but the latest AI language models suggest that nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, children need to be engaged in the back-and-forth of conversation as much as possible to help them develop their language skills. Linguistic experience – not grammar – is key to becoming a competent language user.
By all means, talk at the table, but respectfully, and not too loudly.
Selected readings
[h.t. Michael Carr]
I know what you’re thinking: “Man, look at the weird romanization in that address!” ;-)
Say what you will against the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization system for Mandarin (or “GR” for short) — its quirkiness, its unnecessary complications, its counter-intuitiveness for those who don’t know its rules (much more so than with Hanyu Pinyin). But at least in the few instances where it’s still seen in the wild, it’s usually spelled correctly.
That’s not the case here.
The address for the manufacturer, the Health Chemical Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., is given as
No.12, Yeou-4th Rd., Ta-Chia Yowshy Ind. Dist.
大甲工業區幼四路12號
This is definitely misspelled Gwoyeu Romatzyh rather than a different system (such as MPS2, which is often seen in the boondocks of Taiwan).
And the city name is given as “Taichung,” which is bastardized Wade-Giles (for what would be spelled “Taizhong” in Hanyu Pinyin). But since that is the standard spelling in Taiwan, one can’t blame the company for this.
And at least the company didn’t get “4th” wrong, which is more than can be said for the Taichung City Government, as shown by a sign near the factory. (From Google Street View.)
The source of the other misspellings will likely remain enema-migmatic.
Fan Yiying and Gu Peng have posted a story at Sixth Tone that is both surprising and not surprising at all: State Media Criticizes Chengdu Shop Signs in Romanized Chinese.
The main points I’d like to make about this are:
Here are some screenshots from the video mentioned in the article. Note: This isn’t the loveliest voice ever….
Sorry about the triangles on the photos, which make the shots look like videos. I wasn’t good at capturing screenshots without pausing the video, which made the triangles appear.
Late last year a police officer in Taichung (Taizhong), Taiwan, was checking on a fifty-something-year-old woman when he made the mistake of addressing her as “ama” (Taiwanese for “grandmother,” and generally preferred here to Mandarin forms for elderly women).
Addressing a fifty-something Taiwanese woman even as “ayi” (auntie) would be inadvisable, assuming, of course, she’s not your actual aunt. But “ama”?
I pity the fool.
In response to complaints, the police have come up with guidelines for how to address members of the public, and most terms are now discouraged.
Tǒngyī lǜ dìng 4 zhǒng chēnghu, rúguǒ shì niánqīng rén, kàn shì xuéshēng, bù fēn nánnǚ, tǒngyī chēnghu “tóngxué,” rúguǒ shì niánqīng nǚxìng, tǒngyī chēnghu “xiǎojiě,” zīshēn (niánzhǎng) nǚxìng zé shì tǒngyī chēnghu “nǚshì,” zhìyú nánxìng, chúle niánqīng xuéshēng zhī wài, dōu chēnghu “xiānshēng.”
統一律定4種稱呼，如果是年輕人、看似學生，不分男女，統一稱呼「同學」，如果是年輕女性，統一稱呼「小姐」，資深（年長）女性則是統一稱呼「女士」，至於男性，除了年輕學生之外，都稱呼「先生」。
So there are now four categories:
As I remarked above, “nǚshì” is a bit tricky, but not just in terms of translation. It’s quite formal and something people usually would write rather than say. Consider, for example, how one might begin a letter to a stranger “Dear [name]”; but if you were standing in front of that person you would not begin a conversation with them with the same words.
So, if in doubt, call a Taiwanese woman “xiǎojiě.” But calling a Chinese woman “xiaojie” is not a good idea these days (if not used in combination with a surname), though it was fine when I lived in China back in the early 1990s.
By the way, if you ever need to see if a font face will handle Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks well, “nǚshì” is an excellent test word, as “ǚ” is the combination of letter and tone least likely to be supported.
Further reading:
This is a cute ad for a bakery in Banqiao, Taiwan. The text in Chinese characters reads “虎年送吼禮” (Hǔnián sòng hǒu lǐ).
What’s odd about this is the character 吼, which is the character used to write the Mandarin word “hǒu” (howl, roar). So the text in English reads something like “[In the] Year of the Tiger, give roar gifts.”
This only makes proper sense when one knows that here “hǒu” is standing in for the Taiwanese word for “good” (in Mandarin: hǎo/好).
Wordle is an interesting word game that has gone viral, so you’ve probably already heard of it. I discovered it a few weeks ago through an article in the New York Times.
Now there’s a Cantonese version in romanization: Zidou.
Is there already a Mandarin version in Hanyu Pinyin or any other romanization system? If not, or if the only existing ones are based on syllables and not words, then there certainly should be
Further reading: Wordle: As word puzzle takes over the internet, Hong Kong professor creates Cantonese version. Hong Kong Free Press, January 29, 2022.