Category: Languages

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Languages

Xībānyá Yǔ

Xībānyá (Spanish 西班牙) Yǔ (Language; Speech 语 語) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

In addition to all the English-speaking publishers who are helping in the Mandarin field, there are also many whose mother tongue is Spanish. “Spanish” in Spanish is “español”, and in Mandarin, it’s “Xībānyá (Spanish 西班牙) Yǔ (Language; Speech 语 語)”, this week’s MEotW.

ES Spanish Language Symbol ISO 639-1 IETF Language Tag Icon
es is the ISO 639-1 code and the IETF language tag for Spanish.

The syllables/morphemes that make up “Xībānyá (Spain | Spanish 西班牙)”—“xī (west | western 西)”, “bān (class; team | squad | {work shift} 班)”, and “yá (tooth [→ [ivory]] 牙)”—seem to have no semantic or meaningful connection to Spain or Spanish things, so it is evident that they were chosen because of sounding at least vaguely like “Spain” when spoken together.

As for “yǔ (language; speech | saying; proverb | words; expression | speak; say 语 語)”, as mentioned in the MEotW post on “Yīngyǔ (Yīng·yǔ English · Language; Speech 英语 英語)”, “yǔ (language; speech | saying; proverb | words; expression | speak; say 语 語)” refers specifically to the speech of a language—its linguistically primary aspect—not to any writing that came to be developed based on that speech.

Interesting Statistics

Wikipedia provides the following interesting statistics on Spanish:

Today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese,[source][source] and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi.

(Note that one of the sources for the above quote is the Ethnologue website, which seems to be one of the foremost authorities on the world’s languages.)

With so many Spanish-speakers in the world, it’s little wonder that they are so well represented in the worldwide Mandarin field.

Spanish’s Place in Its Language Family Tree

Wikipedia also tells us the following regarding Spanish’s place in its language family tree:

Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century.

This language family tree placement seems to be generally accepted, and is confirmed, for example, by American sinologist and University of Pennsylvania Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Victor H. Mair in his article “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms” (p. 2), which can be found here (PDF) and here (web page) on his website Sino-Platonic Papers.

In comparison, English is also generally considered to be in the Indo-European language family, but in the Germanic group, not in the Ibero-Romance group like Spanish is.

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Culture Language Learning Languages

ài

ài (love 爱 愛) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

The Mandarin word for “love”, “ài (love 爱 愛)”, is undoubtedly one of the first Mandarin words learned by Mandarin field language-learners.

One noteworthy thing about the Mandarin word “ài (love 爱 愛)” is that just like the English word “love” can be used as either a verb, as in “to love and be loved”, or a noun, as in “a crazy little thing called love”, “ài (love 爱 愛)” can also be used as either a verb or a noun.

Also noteworthy about the Mandarin word “ài (love 爱 愛)” are the contrasting ways in which it is written using a Traditional Chinese character, a Simplified Chinese character, and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), and what those contrasting ways of writing tell us about those different writing systems:

 

Besides Traditional Chinese characters, Simplified Chinese characters, and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), there is actually also another way in which the Mandarin word for “love” can be written:

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Culture Languages

zìmǔ

zìmǔ (zì·mǔ character; word · mothers → [letters (of an alphabet) [→ [alphabet]]] 字母) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

As previous MEotW posts (like this one) have shown, “zì (character; word; letter 字)” in Mandarin can mean “character”, such that “Hànzì (Hàn·zì {Han (Chinese)} · Characters 汉字 漢字)”, for example, means “Chinese characters”. In fact, even though “zì (character; word; letter 字)”, like its English counterpart “character”, can refer to printed or written letters or symbols in general, Hànzì (Hàn·zì {Han (Chinese)} · Characters 汉字 漢字) are such an 800-pound gorilla in Chinese culture that in Mandarin, “zì (character; word; letter 字)” by itself is often understood to specifically mean the Hànzì (Hàn·zì {Han (Chinese)} · Characters 汉字 漢字), the Chinese characters. This way of thinking has spilled over into the English-speaking world as well, which is why when English-speaking publishers in the Chinese fields speak of “the characters”, that’s generally understood to mean “the Chinese characters”, which in turn is understood to mean the 汉字 and not the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), even though Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is also Chinese and made up of characters (printed or written letters or symbols).

So, when we want to refer to a letter of an alphabet, as opposed to a Chinese character, when speaking Mandarin, we can make that clear by using this week’s MEotW, “zìmǔ (zì·mǔ character; word · mothers → [letters (of an alphabet) [→ [alphabet]]] 字母)”. In Mandarin, a zìmǔ (zì·mǔ character; word · mothers → [letters (of an alphabet) [→ [alphabet]]] 字母) is literally a “character/word mother”, something that characters or words come from.

How is it that even Chinese characters or words come from letters? Well, contrary to the traditional Chinese cultural view that Chinese characters are the primary aspect of Chinese languages, linguists (language scientists) now recognize that speech is primary and writing is secondary. So, a Mandarin expression is not primarily something written with Chinese characters, but rather is primarily something spoken in Mandarin. Whereas a Chinese character coarsely represents an entire syllable, letters of alphabets in general represent the individual speech sounds (called phonemes by linguists) that make up the spoken expressions that are the primary part of a language, and this is especially true of a purpose-designed phonetic alphabet like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音).

For example, whereas the Chinese character “字” represents an entire Mandarin syllable as one coarse unit, the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression “zì (character; word; letter 字)” finely spells out the initial sound, the final sound, and even the tone that actually make up that Mandarin syllable.

That speech and the individual sounds that make it up are the real foundation of any human language is such an important, unignorable linguistic principle that even schoolchildren in China (see especially the Z.T. subheading) learn basic Mandarin speech and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) before getting immersed in Hànzì (Hàn·zì {Han (Chinese)} · Characters 汉字 漢字), Chinese characters, as tradition dictates.

Perhaps, then, it would be appropriate for Chinese culture, which values filial piety, to be more respectful towards the letters of its phonetic alphabet Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), which, both linguistically and educationally, are the “mothers” of the characters it loves so much!