‘language with no boundaries’

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I read today that scientists in Japan have demonstrated that paddy birds are able to distinguish between English and Mandarin — well, at least if they’re given an incentive to do so. The researchers didn’t use Japanese because the birds were already used to hearing that language.

This might have implications beyond just the category of “hmm, researchers have been spending a lot of time playing recordings of English and Mandarin Chinese translations of Genji Monogatari (The Tale of Genji) and Wagahai wa Neko de Aru (I Am a Cat)(?!) to birds.”

“Humans are able to distinguish between languages, even ones they don’t know, from the intonation and pronunciation, and it seems that paddy birds have the same ability,” [Keio University professor Shigeru] Watanabe said. “If we study common traits, such as brain structure, this may shed light on the mechanisms of speech recognition.”

According to the article, monkeys, mice, and other mammals have already been shown to have the ability to distinguish between a variety of languages, but this is “the first time that birds have been scientifically found to possess the same ability.”

Mammals distinguishing between languages brings to mind the much-reported efforts of the PRC to push some pandas on Taiwan, which took a turn toward the silly last month when China announced the pandas were being “taught” Taiwanese/Hoklo/Hokkien (or the Minnan dialect [sic], as China likes to refer to it).

“We began our language training with songs because music is a language with no boundaries,” said Li, the 25-year-old keeper who has taken care of No.19 since he was born.

“Girls are more gifted than boys in learning languages,” said Xu, No.16’s keeper, adding that the female cub began to react when they translated her nickname Huangmao Yatou (meaning a chit of girl in Chinese) into Minnan dialect.

“No. 19, however, is too naughty to study,” said Li….

“We immediately started our training program because the two cubs not only need to adapt themselves to the climate and geographical environment of the tropical island, but also to understand the language of their new keepers and visitors,” said Li Desheng, director assistant of the center.

“It’s not an easy task for the pandas as they are already familiar with the Sichuan dialect of their current keepers. They need more time to improve,” said Li Desheng.

China’s strained claims that this isn’t all one big propaganda ploy hit an especially rocky patch about a week ago when the results of a nationwide vote for the pandas’ names were announced. The winning names are Tuántuán and Yuányuán, more examples of reduplication in naming.

The source of these names is the Mandarin word tuányuán (?? / ??), which means “reunify.”

Fat chance Taiwan will accept them now.

Supposedly 100 million people voted in the name-selection process. Maybe it’s true. There are probably at least that many people there who would love a chance to vote for something.

sources:

Just a cartoon. Not to be taken seriously.
It's a cartoon. Not to be taken seriously.

Taiwan’s Aborigines urged to officially adopt original names

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Taiwan’s Cabinet-level Council of Indigenous Peoples is encouraging the members of the island’s twelve tribes to officially adopt their original, non-Sinified names. (Good for the Council of Indigenous Peoples. It’s about time.)

These names will be recorded using the Roman alphabet.

Earlier this evening, however, I heard a television report that many local officials were unaware that this name change was legal, much less encouraged. This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I’ve run into more than my share of officials who, because they misunderstand the laws it’s their job to deal with, make life difficult for those who want to get things done. (I”m hoping that renewing my residency will go more smoothly next month than it has in the past.)

Here’s a look at parts of Taiwan’s Full Name Registration Law:

Chapter 1 Local Legislation Authority

Section 1 Republic of China (ROC) nationals may have only one name, and said full name should be the official name stated in the census records.

So why must Aborigines who file to officially use their original, non-Sinified names have not only their names in romanization but also in Chinese characters (and thus are likely Sinified and therefore different than their original name)?

Taiwan indigenous peoples should be registered under their customary full names. Indigenous peoples registered under a Han’s full name should apply for restitution of traditional full name; those who have restituted their traditional full name should apply for the restitution of their Chinese full name; however an individual is entitled to a single restitution application.

Huh? (It’s late, so I’m not going to bother checking the Mandarin-language original to see if that’s any clearer.)

Section 2 The full name registered in the census record should be written in words found in the Ministry of Education Mandarin dictionary or Tzu-Yuan (origin of Chinese phrase or expression), Tzu-Hai (Chinese words collection), Kanghsi and other general dictionary; however, an exemption to paragraph 1 is the registered traditional full name of indigenous peoples which should be written using the Romanization system.
Full names that are not written with words found in any of the aforementioned general dictionaries shall not be registered.

That’s normal.

The Ministry of the Interior is renewing national ID cards from January 1 to December 31, 2006. This hadn’t been done in years.

Lin Chiang-yi, a council official and an Amis tribe member, said his council was asking the Ministry of the Interior to set up a “one-stop window” in counties with large aboriginal populations where people could officially change their Chinese name back to their aboriginal name.

Although a 1995 act allowed aboriginals to substitute their Chinese name with an aboriginal one, only 1,000 aboriginals have adopted their own name so far, Lin continued.

The official said his council was working to persuade several aboriginal communities to make the change en masse, with the purpose of increasing the number of aboriginals who go by their aboriginal name to 10,000.

With a population of 426,000 representing 12 different tribes, aboriginals account for nearly 2 percent of the country’s population.

source: Aboriginals encouraged to adopt indigenous names, CNA, January 31, 2006

URLs, Chinese characters, and the Roman alphabet

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In Will China Build a Separate Internet? John Yunker, citing Naseem Javed’s When Will The Internet Be Divided Among Nations?, states, “Naseem does raise a very important point — for Chinese speakers, the Internet is far from user-friendly. The major obstacle is the URL, which is still limited to ASCII (Latin) characters.”

I don’t see where Naseem Javed made that particular point — but no matter. I just want to note that URLs in ASCII do not present an obstacle to Internet users in China. After all, the Roman alphabet (specifically, Pinyin) is what most people use to enter Chinese characters on computers in the first place. And even those in China who don’t use Pinyin to input Chinese characters are perfectly capable of using their, yes, QWERTY keyboards to type the ASCII in URLs, the Roman alphabet having been taught for decades to every schoolchild in China (at least to those now literate enough to use the Internet in the first place).

On the other hand, having to enter Chinese-character URLs would be an obstacle to most of the world’s population.

Those looking to argue that ASCII URLs could be an obstacle would do better to look to Russia, Greece, or Saudi Arabia.

The folks at ICANN and IETF are working to upgrade the DNS to Unicode, but this will take time. There is a workaround in use that allows Web users to input Chinese characters as a URL which is then transformed into ASCII characters behind the scenes (known as “Punycode”) but I’m not sure how widely used this system currently is.

IE7 is supposed to have good support for Punycode. Now if only IE would finally get CSS right….

Here’s an example of Punycode: 拼音 is xn--muuy29i, according to an open-source Punycode converter. Thus, http://拼音.pinyin.info and http://xn--muuy29i.pinyin.info should both lead to the same page. And I would hope that the address bar in the browser would read http://拼音.pinyin.info instead of the xn--muuy29i ASCII version.

If you add a comment on how well the Punycode tests work for you, please mention your computer’s operating system and browser. (I’m using Win2K and Opera 8.51, and both http://拼音.pinyin.info and http://xn--muuy29i.pinyin.info work fine.)

arigatou/obrigado

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No Sword has an interesting post on the etymology of the Japanese arigatou. Matt adds that the notion the word is from the Portuguese word obrigado is “wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Arigatou is the Western Japanese way of saying arigataku, the adverbial form (more or less) of arigatai. The basic rule is replacing ku with u, but in this case that produced au, which becomes ou († a lengthened o) through the magic of sound change. This also happened to omedetou († (o)medetai) and ohayou († (o)hayai). (It is not a coincidence that despite the Tokyo version getting “Standard Japanese” status, the standard politeness terms were imported from the old Imperial capital!)

source: Sorry, Portugal, No Sword, February 3, 2006

MRI study: literate vs. illiterate subjects

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For those who are interested in such things, here’s a new MRI study related to reading Chinese characters: Cognitive processing in Chinese literate and illiterate subjects: An fMRI study (also available in PDF).

Abstract:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) were used to map brain activation during language tasks. While previous studies have compared performance between alphabetic literate and illiterate subjects, there have been no such data in Chinese-speaking individuals. In this study, we used fMRI to examine the effects of education on neural activation associated with silent word recognition and silent picture-naming tasks in 24 healthy right-handed Chinese subjects (12 illiterates and 12 literates). There were 30 single Chinese characters in the silent word recognition task and 30 meaningful road-signs in the silent picture-naming task. When we compared literate and illiterate subjects, we observed education-related differences in activation patterns in the left inferior/middle frontal gyrus and both sides of the superior temporal gyrus for the silent word recognition task and in the bilateral inferior/middle frontal gyrus and left limbic cingulated gyrus for the silent picture-naming task. These results indicate that the patterns of neural activation associated with language tasks are strongly influenced by education. Education appears to have enhanced cognitive processing efficiency in language tasks.

(emphasis added)

I have a lot of objections to some of the language in the article, such as describing the subjects as “pictographic-language speakers.” And I wish the article had indicated whether any of the literate subjects were also literate in a language with an alphabetic script. Be that as it may, some may well find this of interest.

source: Human Brain Mapping, vol. 27, issue 2, pp. 144-152

online course material from MIT

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare makes available selections from the teaching materials for more than one thousand MIT courses. Some of these, such as those in linguistics, may be of particular interest to readers of Pinyin News.

MIT also makes available much of the material from its classes on languages, including those for Mandarin:

and Japanese:

Many of these sections include audio and even video.

source: link spotted in Forumosa’s “learning Chinese” forum.

unfortunate results of appetite for ‘lucky’ moss

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The desire around Chinese New Year to consume fàcài (髮菜 / 发菜), which is an edible, hairlike moss, has led to desertification in Inner Mongolia, according to an article in the South China Morning Post. The problem is rooted in that fàcài sounds like fācái (發財 / 发财), which is the verb “to get rich.”

Note that fàcài and fācái are not true homophones, so there’s no problem distinguishing them in Pinyin — though even without tone marks the difference would be made clear by context, relative frequency of use, and the fact that one is a noun and the other a verb. The name of this moss and “get rich” also sound similar in Cantonese. (In Taiwan, the pronunciation of the fa of fàcài is in third tone.)

The main association with Chinese New Year is the polite phrase gōngxǐ fācái (恭喜發財 / 恭喜发财), which is tossed around a lot this time of year. (In Cantonese, it’s “kunghei fatchoi,” spelled in lots of ways.) It’s a way of wishing that the person makes a lot of money in the coming year. Although it doesn’t mean “happy new year,” in can be used in most of the same circumstances as that phrase.

Guangzhou diners are still consuming the banned fa cai black moss, with restaurants and seafood shops cashing in on the belief that eating it gives an auspicious start to the Lunar New Year because its name is a homonym for “get rich.” The harvesting and export of the hair-like plant called fat choi in Cantonese was banned in 2000 to protect the environment. Fa cai grows in the thin arid soils of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Ningxia, Qinghai, and Gansu, and harvesting damages the environment because topsoil is raked loose, leading to soil erosion and desertification.

Staff at Guangzhou’s Ting Cheng Restaurant said fa cai with oysters was one auspicious dish on its menu. Seafood shops along Yide Road were also stocking the moss and asking customers what grade they wanted, leading some consumers to wonder whether some of the produce could be corn silk dyed to pass as fa cai.

While one shop owner acknowledged the ban, he said he was selling stock bought before it was implemented. “It’s not allowed to be harvested any more. My suppliers in Xinjiang are giving me stocks harvested before the ban,” he said.

Teacher Shu Chang said she paid 230 Yuan for 250 grams of fa cai. “I can’t really tell the real stuff from fake fa cai, but it must be real because it is expensive. If you soak it and the dye comes off, it must be fake,” she said.

Excessive harvesting has turned millions of hectares of pasture into desert. Before the ban, 40,000 sq. km. had been laid to waste in 20 years in Inner Mongolia.

I wanted to use a desert/dessert pun in the headline of this post. Facai, however, is used in soups and a few other types of dishes, not desserts. Oh well.

source: Auspicious moss stays on menus despite ban, South China Morning Post