‘I very want your deceitful surface’

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A newspaper in China ran the following humor piece: Qiānwàn bié luàn yòng pīnyīn shūrùfǎ! Fǒuzé… (“For heaven’s sake don’t sloppily use Pinyin input! Otherwise…” / 千万别乱用拼音输入法！否则……).

The piece takes the form of an imagined text-message conversation between two people identified as “GG” (gēge 哥哥) and “MM” (mèimei 妹妹), i.e. a boy and a girl (probably both around high school age).

The joke here is that the couple are being sloppy in how they’re using pinyin to input Chinese characters, occasionally resulting in incorrect characters being displayed.

GG：你嚎！
MM：你嚎！你在哪里？
GG：我在忘八里。你呢？
MM：我也在忘八里。
GG：你是哪里人？
MM：我是鬼州人。你呢？
GG：我是山洞人。
MM：你似男似女？
GG：我当然是难生了。你肯定是女生吧？
MM：是啊。
GG：你霉不霉？
MM：还行吧，人家都说我是大霉女。你衰不衰？
GG：还好啊，很多人都说我是大衰哥。
MM：真的呀？咱们多怜惜好不好？
GG：好呀，你的瘦鸡多少号？
MM：咱别用瘦鸡，瘦鸡多贵呀，你有球球吗？
GG：有啊。
MM：你球球多少号呀？
GG：＊＊＊＊＊＊＊，你真可爱，我很想同你奸面。
MM：慢慢来啊，虽然隔得远，也有鸡会啦。

Since this particular text is meant to be weird, I think the product of an online translator captures the spirit well:

GG: You are howling!
MM: You are howling! Where are you at?
GG: I in [expletive deleted] in. You?
MM: I also in [expletive deleted] in.
GG: Where person are you?
MM: I am the clever state person. You?
GG: I am the cave person.
MM: You resemble male resemble the female?
GG: I certainly was difficult to live. You definitely are the female student?
MM: Yes.
GG: Your mildew?
MM: Also good, others all said I am the big mildew female. Do you fade?
GG: Fortunately, very many people all said I am greatly fade the elder brother.
MM: Really? Are we take pity on good?
GG: Good, your thin chicken how many numbers?
MM: We with the thin chicken, the thin chicken be inexpensive, you have the ball ball?
GG: Has.
MM: Your ball ball how many numbers?
GG: [number] You are really lovable, I very want with your deceitful surface.
MM: Slowly comes, although separates far, also has the chicken to meet.

Readers in China will probably laugh and get the message that, yeah, you have to be careful with pinyin. Otherwise you could end up writing altogether the wrong thing.

But let’s have a look at the dialog when presented in pinyin. The text is clear, even with almost all of the tone marks omitted.

GG: Ni hao!
MM: Ni hao! Ni zai nali?
GG: Wo zai wǎngba li. Ni ne?
MM: Wo ye zai wǎngba li.
GG: Ni shi nali ren?
MM: Wo shi Guizhou ren. Ni ne?
GG: Wo shi Shandong ren.
MM: Ni shi nan shi nu?
GG: Wo dangran shi nansheng le. Ni kending shi nusheng ba?
MM: Shi’a.
GG: Ni mei bu mei?
MM: Hai xing ba, renjia dou shuo wo shi da meinu. Ni shuai bu shuai?
GG: Hai hao a. Hen duo ren dou shuo wo shi da shuaige.
MM: Zhen de ya? Zanmen duo liánxí, haobuhao?
GG: Hao ya. Ni de shouji duoshao hao?
MM: Zan bie yong shouji; shouji duo gui ya. Ni you qiuqiu ma?
GG: You a.
MM: Ni qiuqiu duoshao hao ya?
GG: [number]. Ni zhen ke’ai. Wo henxiang tong ni jianmian.
MM: Manman lai a, suiran ge de yuan, yeyou jihui la.

There’s no homophone problem here. That’s because Pinyin doesn’t really have one, despite frequent claims to the contrary.

A few words and expressions in the dialog strike me as odd: the use of wǎngba rather than wǎngka, for instance. And I’ve never heard of a “qiuqiu.” But that can probably be ascribed to differences between Mandarin in China and Taiwan, and to the fact that I’m not a young Mandarin speaker up on all the latest slang.

Here’s a rough English translation of what the couple was really saying:

GG: Hi!
MM: Hi! Where are you?
GG: I’m in an Internet café. How about you?
MM: I’m also in an Internet café.
GG: Where are you from?
MM: I’m from Guizhou. And you?
GG: I’m from Shandong.
MM: Are you a boy or a girl?
GG: I’m a guy, of course. You’re definitely a girl, right?
MM: Yes.
GG: Are you beautiful or not?
MM: Not bad. People all say I’m a real beauty. Are you handsome or not?
GG: I’m OK. Lots of people say I’m a really handsome guy.
MM: Really? Let’s keep in touch, OK?
GG: OK. What’s your cellphone number?
MM: I don’t use a cellphone; they’re expensive. Do you have a qiuqiu?
GG: Yes.
MM: What’s your qiuqiu number?
GG: [gives number]. You’re really cute. I’m eager to meet you.
MM: Don’t hurry. [This is a polite expression, not a brush-off.] Although we’re far apart, we’ll still have the opportunity to meet.

A side note: the Mandarin Chinese word for “opportunity” in the last line is jihui. Note that the word for “opportunity” is jihui, not just ji, which means something altogether different. So the next time someone tries to tell you that the Chinese word for “crisis” consists of “danger” plus “opportunity,” you can explain to them that, no, it doesn’t. For more on this, see “Crisis” Does Not Equal “Danger” Plus “Opportunity”.

Using Hakka in Taiwan’s legislature

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After the head of Taiwan’s Cabinet-level Council of Hakka Affairs gave a report in Hakka last week in the Legislature, KMT Legislator Zhū Fèngzhī (朱鳳芝) complained, saying this was a “self-abasing action” showing a “lack of confidence,” according to a report in the Taipei Times. This led to harsh words from representatives and organizations from the Hakka community.

According to Peter Lo (羅能平), the secretary-general of the Taiwanese Hakka Association of the World, Chu’s comment indicated that many Taiwanese politicians do not respect different ethnic groups and minorities.

“Chu’s comment was disrespectful and degrading to the Hakka people, and we want her to give an open apology to our people,” Lo said.

Yang Chang-chen (楊長鎮), director of the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of Ethnic Affairs, spoke of the discrimination he had received as a schoolboy for speaking Hakka, adding that Mandarin should not be imposed on everybody.

Yang said the opposition paid lip service to diversity, but in reality practiced “fake” diversity and imposed a “cultural quarantine,” in which Hakka rights were suppressed.

The department is pushing to establish a language equality law, and has encouraged Aboriginal legislators to give their official reports in their mother languages.

Former DPP chairman Lin Yi-hsiung (林義雄) said that the Legislative Yuan had “no class,” and that politicians were causing racial segregation and discrimination in Taiwan.

This isn’t the first time in recent years that conservative legislators have complained about the use in the Legislature of languages other than Mandarin.

Tonal languages and the tone deaf

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In its most recent column, USA Today‘s Wonderquest takes up the question “How do tone-deaf Chinese communicate?” The author, April Holladay, gets the most important point correct:

Tone-deaf Chinese talk just like other Chinese. Their profound musical disability makes no real difference in understanding and talking a tonal language.

She continues:

You’d think it would. Tone deaf means a person cannot hear the difference between two successive tones. The two tones are indistinguishable. In a tonal language, like Chinese, different tones give words different meanings.

The phrasing here is a little off in saying that “different tones give words different meanings.” Compare with the following sentence I created for the purpose of this example: “In English, different vowels give words different meanings: cat, cot, cut, cute, coat.” I hope this makes it easier to see the problem. Vowels don’t change the meanings. (From what?) But this is not a particularly important point.

Here’s an example of two different tones each meaning a different word from the Mandarin Chinese dialect (using diacritics to indicate the tones). See figure for the corresponding pictographs.

mā — pronounced with a long high level tone, meaning woman [sic]
mǎ — pronounced with a low tone, dipping down briefly before slowly rising to the high-~ tone, meaning horse

First, mā is not the Mandarin word for “woman.” It’s a word for “mother.” (The more common Mandarin word for “mother” is the same as it is in many, many other languages: māmā.) But let’s skip that for now.

Holladay gets a point for using “Mandarin” rather than just “Chinese,” but she slides back a notch for the common but still incorrect label of “dialect.” And the use of the word “pictograph” to describe Chinese characters is very wrong indeed, as is clear from even the limited example given in the article.

Here’s the article’s pullbox, which is labeled “Mandarin Chinese pictographs”:

媽 [妈] mā Woman
馬 [马] mǎ Horse

(The characters in brackets are simplified forms. Both forms appear in the article just as they do here.)

These characters are unmistakably related to each other — the one on the second line comprising part of the one on the first. So, if the second one is a pictograph of a horse — which, indeed, is how that character started out — how exactly is the first one a pictograph of a woman? Or, more properly, how exactly is the first one a pictograph of a mother? (Remember that the identification of mā/媽 with “woman” is wrong.) Does a mother really look like a horse standing next to a 女? Of course not.

So if 媽 isn’t a pictograph, what is it? The answer is a phonetic compound, which is what the vast majority of Chinese characters are. In 媽, 馬 is a phonetic element that hints that the character is probably pronounced sort of like mǎ. The 女 portion is one of the so-called radicals. In the 媽 character, 女 serves to hint that the meaning of the character might be related in some way with women.

This is a fairly transparent example. But the connection is not always so clear.

So, you’d think that a tone-deaf Chinese would be stuck. How can he tell the difference in speech between, say, “woman” and “horse” with only their distinct tones to distinguish the meanings?

Easily enough, it turns out. Mostly, he uses context and other language clues. Homonyms in Chinese (or English: “I’m a little hoarse”), rarely confuse a listener — when heard in context.

This is an extremely important point — and a correct one.

For a little more on Chinese characters and pictographs, see my earlier post software designer on Chinese.

source: Tonal languages for the tone-deaf [or a horse is a hoarse of course of coarse], USA Today, October 6, 2005

Mystery of old simplified Chinese characters?

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Archeologists working off the coast of Pingtan County, Fujian, have discovered a pottery-laden boat they believe dates back to the reign of the Kangxi emperor (1662-1723).

One small plate decorated with plum blossoms especially caught the attention of the researchers. On its underside is inscribed the words Shuang Long, or “double dragons”, in simplified Chinese characters. As simplified Chinese characters were adopted in printing and writing only after 1949 and the two simplified Chinese were unlikely to be any discernible pattern, experts regard this as a mystery. They can only be sure of the fact that the plate was produced more than 300 years ago during the reign of Emperor Kangxi.

In other words, “double dragons” was written 双龙 rather than the expected 雙龍.

But the use of 双 for what is pronounced shuāng in modern standard Mandarin has been around for hundreds of years. I suspect the same is true of 龙, though I lack the reference material to check this. (Someone help me out here.)

What really interests me here, though, isn’t the specifics about the dates of the forms 双 and 龙. Rather, it is the assertion that “simplified Chinese characters were adopted in … writing only after 1949,” which is incorrect. When developing the various schemes of officially sanctioned “simplified” Chinese characters, China’s script reformers took a variety of approaches. But they preferred to give sanction to forms that had already been in use for many, many years — though these forms may not have been standardized in print. Often they were used in calligraphy and, more simply, in handwritten documents.

I sometimes see assertions that people in Taiwan often use simplified characters when they write by hand. Such claims are misleading. Generally speaking, if people in Taiwan ever use “simplified” Chinese characters, they do so by continuing a centuries-old tradition, not by copying forms now standardized in China.

For example, if a person in Taiwan writes (by hand) 话 instead of 話, this is simply because the use of 讠 for 言 has been common in handwriting for ages. But if the character is printed, people in Taiwan will select the traditional style: 言. Quite simply, people in Taiwan aren’t moving toward using China’s simplified characters.

And, as long as I’m on the subject, I don’t think they should, either.

source: Ancient porcelain clue to maritime Silk Road (Xinhua’s “China View,” Sept. 23, 2005)

Malaysian advertising and language reality

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Radio Television Malaysia (RTM) will review its advertisement code of ethics which had been claimed as being too rigid that it hampered the creativity of advertisement production agencies, said Information Minister Datuk Seri Abdul Kadir Sheikh Fadzir.

“We don’t feel that RTM is rigid but we have the responsibility to build a society that is united and courteous. However, we will look into this matter,” he told reporters after a dialogue with the Association of Accredited Advertising Agents Malaysia (4As).

Abdul Kadir said advertisers encountered difficulty as they sometimes had to make two different versions of an advertisement, one to be aired over RTM and another over private stations, thus incurring high production cost.

Among the supposedly rigid code of ethics was the use of models, actors or actresses with the Pan Asian look, and sexually offensive and violent scenes, he said.

Meanwhile, 4As President Datuk Vincent Lee told Bernama that the strict code of ethics “is killing advertisement creativity in Malaysia”.

He described the advertisement scenario in Malaysia as way behind that in Singapore and Thailand due to many regulations of “double standards”.

“For example, in drama, you can use English and Malay but in advertisements we cannot mix the languages. The problem is that in the local Hokkien dialect, 30 per cent of the Hokkien words are Malay words,” he said.

This problem made it difficult for advertisements in Malaysia to portray the real Malaysian society of various communities and ways, he said.

He admitted that there were no problems with the private stations as they were more open.

source: RTM To Review Ads Code Of Ethics Following ‘Too Rigid’ Claims, from Bernama (Malaysia’s national news service), on October 4, 2005

Wm Hannas to speak in Philadelphia

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William Hannas, author of The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity and Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma, will speak at the University of Pennsylvania on Wednesday, October 5. His talk will cover his controversial thesis on the impact of orthography on patterns of thought. For details, see the events calendar of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for East Asian Studies.

Those of you in the Philadelphia area should make an effort to attend.

first anniversary of Pinyin News

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Pinyin News is one year old today. (The main site, Pinyin Info, is several years older and continues to grow. But I’ve lost track of just when it began.)

I’d like to take advantage of this occasion to thank the many people who’ve written — in comments, in their own blogs, or through e-mail — about the site. I’m grateful for your interest and, well, thankful that anyone at all reads any of the things I post here.

Comments and questions are always welcome — as are links to news items of possible interest.

I hope the coming year of Pinyin News will be even better received than the first.

–Mark