Tag: Chinese Characters

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Current Events

biànzhǒng

biànzhǒng (biàn·zhǒng changed · kind; type; variety → [mutation; variant; variety] 变种 變種) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

[Note: Tap/click on a Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to reveal its “flashcard”, tap/click on a “flashcard” or its Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) expression to hide the “flashcard”.]

As of this writing, deep in the year 2021, the subject of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, to say the least, on people’s minds now for a while. So, it would be good to be able to refer to things related to it in Mandarin when speaking to people in the Mandarin field, or when speaking to our brothers and sisters in the truth.

electron microscope image of SARS-CoV-2—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19

An electron microscope image of SARS-CoV-2—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19
Creative Commons Attribution License logo NIAID

A Variety of Mandarin Expressions for “Variant”

My research has turned up a variety of Mandarin expressions that appear to correspond with the English word “variant”, as in “the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19”. To get a rough idea of how commonly used these expressions are compared to each other, I decided to do a little experiment and compare some Google search results involving these expressions.

biànzhǒng (biàn·zhǒng changed · kind; type; variety → [mutation; variant; variety] 变种 變種)
Search Terms Google Results Approx. No.
covid 变种 4,570,000
"delta变种" 3,240,000
biàntǐ (biàn·tǐ changed · {body → [form]} → [variant; variation; variety] 变体 變體)
Search Terms Google Results Approx. No.
covid 变体 22,100,000
"delta变体" 215,000
biànyì bìngdú zhū ((biàn·yì changed · {to be different} 变异 變異) (bìng·dú disease · poison → [virus] 病毒) (zhū {trunk of a tree} → [strain] 株) → [virus strain/variant])
Search Terms Google Results Approx. No.
covid 变异病毒株 2,350,000
"delta变异病毒株" 83,600
biànyì dúzhū ((biàn·yì changed · {to be different} 变异 變異) (dú·zhū {poison → [virus]} · {trunk of a tree → [strain]} 毒株) → [virus strain/variant])
Search Terms Google Results Approx. No.
covid 变异毒株 974,000
"delta变异毒株" 507,000
biànyì zhū ((biàn·yì changed · {to be different} 变异 變異) (zhū {trunk of a tree → [strain]} 株) → [(virus) strain/variant])
Search Terms Google Results Approx. No.
covid 变异株 3,210,000
"delta变异株" 1,730,000
bìngdú zhū ((bìng·dú disease · poison → [virus] 病毒) (zhū {trunk of a tree → [strain]} 株) → [virus strain/variant])
Search Terms Google Results Approx. No.
covid 病毒株 4,940,000
"delta病毒株" 245,000
dúzhū (dú·zhū {poison; toxin → [virus]} · {trunk of a tree → [strain]} → [virus strain] 毒株)
Search Terms Google Results Approx. No.
covid 毒株 3,380,000
"delta毒株" 408,000

Of the Mandarin expressions listed above, it seems that this week’s MEotW, “biànzhǒng (biàn·zhǒng changed · kind; type; variety → [mutation; variant; variety] 变种 變種)”, is the one most commonly used on the web at this time to correspond with the English word “variant” when referring to variants of the virus that causes COVID-19. (Note that the results above that are for the search terms in quotation marks, e.g. "delta变种", are the best ones to compare to determine this, since the quotation marks tell Google to look for the exact sequences of characters that are inside the quotation marks.)

By the Way…

Here are some other things I noticed as well:

  • It is common for English words like “COVID” and “Delta” to appear in texts that are mainly made up of Chinese characters, even though Mandarin expressions that correspond with these English words do exist.
  • Some Mandarin expressions that are longer may be more technically accurate or informative, but often, shorter expressions will be used more, because of convenience.
  • Searching for Simplified Chinese characters on Google will sometimes return results that use those characters’ Traditional counterparts, and vice versa.
Categories
Culture Theocratic

liángshàn

liángshàn ({[is] good} [→ [goodness]] 良善) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

The sixth part of the fruitage of the spirit listed is goodness.— Jiālātàishū (Jiālātài·shū Galatia · Book → [Galatians] 加拉太书 加拉太書) 5:22, 23.

Galatians 5:22, 23 (WOL nwtsty-CHS+Pinyin)

The English word “goodness” is translated into Mandarin in the above scripture as “liángshàn ({[is] good} [→ [goodness]] 良善)”, this week’s MEotW.

Note that the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus information for “liángshàn ({[is] good} [→ [goodness]] 良善)” (← tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”) shows that when put together in this context, both of the morphemes that make up “liángshàn ({[is] good} [→ [goodness]] 良善)” individually basically mean “good” or “goodness”, and so the resulting whole word also means “good” or “goodness”.

Of the two morphemes that make up “liángshàn ({[is] good} [→ [goodness]] 良善)”, “shàn ({[is] good [at]} [→ [charitable; kind; friendly; virtuous]] 善)” is sometimes used as a word on its own, but the other morpheme “liáng (good; fine; desirable; virtuous (bound form) 良)” is not used as a word on its own—it’s what’s known as a bound form.

Bound Forms

The ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, edited by John DeFrancis and Victor H. Mair, among others, tells us the following about the entries in it that are marked as bound forms:

B.F. (Bound Form, Niánzhuó Císù 粘着词素).

Morphemes which do not function as free words in a sentence and cannot be handled using one of the other bound category labels, such as prefix, suffix, measure word, or particle. A given character may represent a free word in one or more of its meanings but a bound morpheme in other meanings. E.g. qiǎng 抢 is a bound form meaning ‘take emergency measures’ in qiǎngshòu 抢收 but a free form as a verb meaning ‘pillage’.)

In addition to these meaningful bound forms, which we define and illustrate with one or more examples, there are many characters which have no meaning of their own but simply represent a syllabic sound. E.g. 8pú 葡 and 6táo 萄 in pútao 葡萄 ‘grapes’. For these entries we provide neither entry label nor definition but simply note words in which the character occurs.

The Monosyllabic Myth

This seems to be a good place to mention the Monosyllabic Myth. This is the mistaken belief that in Chinese, every word is monosyllabic (one syllable), represented by a character, and that conversely, every syllable is a word.

One factor that contributes to this mistaken belief is that unlike how words are obviously separated by spaces in English writing, the Chinese characters writing system puts all characters the same distance apart from each other regardless of word boundaries—the main units below sentences seem to be characters, not words. Another contributing factor is that in good old paper Chinese dictionaries, the main entries are each based on a single character, not on a single word, which may contain more than one syllable—while English dictionaries are dictionaries of words, traditional Chinese dictionaries have been dictionaries of characters.

The Reality of Mandarin Syllables

The reality, though, as newer Chinese dictionary apps like Pleco make obvious, is that in Mandarin there are syllables like “liáng (good; fine; desirable; virtuous (bound form) 良)”, which is not a word on its own, but which combine with other syllables to form words like “liángshàn ({[is] good} [→ [goodness]] 良善)”, which have two or more syllables. While text written in Chinese characters all runs together into a single hard-to-parse mass, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) text uses word separation to clearly show word boundaries, like how in the above image it’s clear that “liángshàn ({[is] good} [→ [goodness]] 良善)” is a separate word from the words before and after it.

John DeFrancis, in his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (pp. 184–185), explains the different types of syllables in Mandarin, with regard to how free they are to stand on their own as words:

DEGREES OF SYLLABIC FREEDOM

Syllables like wǒ that are intelligible even in isolation are at the opposite extreme from syllables like hù, allegedly “butterfly” but actually a mere phonetic element devoid of meaning and tightly bound as part of the two-syllable expression hùdiǎr. Between these two extremes are meaningful syllables that are semibound in the sense that they always occur bound but have a certain flexibility in joining with other syllables. There are thus three types of Chinese syllables:

  1. F: free, meaningful
  2. SB: semibound, meaningful
  3. CB: completely bound, meaningless

These three categories are roughly comparable in English to the free form teach, the semibound form er in “teacher” and “preacher,” and the completely bound forms cor and al in “coral.”

Categories
Culture Science Technology Theocratic

diǎnliàng

diǎnliàng (diǎn·liàng {dot → [light (v); ignite]} · {to be bright} [→ [illuminate; shine light on]] 点亮 點亮) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

This week’s MEotW, “diǎnliàng (diǎn·liàng {dot → [light (v); ignite]} · {to be bright} [→ [illuminate; shine light on]] 点亮 點亮)”, is used to good effect in lesson 02 point 5 (WOL, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus) of the Mandarin Enjoy Life Forever! (lffi) brochure (and of the Mandarin Enjoy Life Forever! (lff) book).

“Diǎnliàng” in _Enjoy Life Forever!_ br., lesson 02 point 5 (WOL CHS+Pinyin, _Pīnyīn_ Plus)

Translating the English text “The Bible’s hope can make a difference”, the Mandarin text means ‘The Bible’s hope shines a light on human life’.

What’s a Word?

Note that the Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY currently renders the morphemes “”diǎn (dots → [lights (v)] 点 點)” and “liàng ({to be bright} 亮)” as two separate words, whereas the unofficial Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus resource renders them together as one word, as many past official Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) publications would likely have done. Is one of these renderings “right” and the other “wrong”? Is one better and the other worse? How much does it matter?

These seemingly simple questions turn out to actually be not that simple to answer. Especially in languages like Mandarin that have historically been written using the Chinese characters writing system—a system that probably for traditional stylistic reasons neglects to clearly and conveniently put spaces between words like alphabetic writing systems generally do—there is not always a consensus regarding the answers to the questions of “What’s a word?” and “What morphemes should be put together as words?” As the Wikipedia article on “Word” says:

There still remains no consensus among linguists about the proper definition of “word” in a spoken language that is independent of its writing system, nor about the precise distinction between it and “morpheme”.[source] This issue is particularly debated for Chinese and other languages of East Asia,[source]

Standards and Conventions

Unlike the Chinese characters writing system, the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) alphabetic writing system does clearly and conveniently put spaces between words—such word separation is in fact a big advantage of Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) compared to the Chinese characters writing system. However, the question of what constitutes a word that is to be separated from other words by spaces remains one that may be answered differently by different people.

The technical linguistic term that relates to such matters is orthography. The Wikipedia article on that provides this summary of what that means:

An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation.

One might wonder whether there are official rules and standards regarding Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) orthography, and indeed there are. In fact, the PRC government has an official national standard for Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) orthography, with the designation GB/T 16159-2012. (A convenient annotated web version (rendered in Simplified Chinese characters) has been made available here on the independent website Pīnyīn.info.)

What the letters “GB/T” stand for is significant. Wikipedia provides this summary:

GB stands for Guobiao (simplified Chinese: 国标; traditional Chinese: 國標; pinyin: Guóbiāo), Chinese for national standard.

Mandatory standards are prefixed “GB”. Recommended standards are prefixed “GB/T” (T from Chinese language 推荐; tuījiàn; ‘recommended’).

(The above summary is confirmed elsewhere on the web, e.g. here on legal analysis website Lexology.)

So, while the PRC’s GB/T 16159-2012 provides many basic rules regarding Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) orthography, even within China it is not a mandatory standard—the “T” in “GB/T 16159-2012” indicates that even within China, it is at most a set of recommendations.

(An interesting contrast is the mandatory PRC standard GB 18030, which relates to software support for the PRC’s Chinese characters, both simplified and traditional, and which, for example, Microsoft makes its Windows software comply with.)

Regarding standards and conventions, even officially recommended ones, for things like language and writing, views and practices vary in different places, and at different times. For example, Chinese writing in the past didn’t have punctuation, and now it has punctuation largely modeled after European punctuation. (For reference: Chinese punctuation – Wikipedia, Q&A: When were punctuation marks first used? – HistoryExtra, history – When was punctuation introduced into Chinese? – Chinese Language Stack Exchange)

Even today, within the same time frame, there are differing views and practices regarding how things should be written. For example, in English, there are differing views and practices regarding British vs. American spellings, whether or not to use the Oxford (serial) comma, how titles should be capitalized, what should be italicized/bolded/underlined, etc.

When it comes to Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), another factor to keep in mind is that due primarily to cultural prejudice, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) has simply not been used much overall, relatively speaking, especially as a full writing system on its own. So, it has not really gone through much of the process of receiving the widely agreed upon tweaks and refinements that a system typically receives as it gets tried out and put to extensive use by many people.

Verb-Complement Togetherness

Getting back to the MEotW “diǎnliàng (diǎn·liàng {dot → [light (v); ignite]} · {to be bright} [→ [illuminate; shine light on]] 点亮 點亮)”, the PRC national standard GB/T 16159-2012 recommends that, being made up of a single-syllable verb and its single-syllable complement, this expression should be written together. Recent official Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) publications such as those on the Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY often do not follow this recommendation regarding single-syllable verbs and their single-syllable complements, whereas older official Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) publications did follow this recommendation, and as do the unofficial Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus resources.

On the other hand, the unofficial Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus resources join the official Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) publications, old and new, in explicitly indicating tone sandhi for “bù (not 不)” and “yī (one 一)” (e.g., “búzài (bú·zài not · again; further; continuing; anymore 不再)” instead of the standard “bùzài (bù·zài not · again; further; continuing; anymore 不再)”) to make things easier for readers, even though this practice is not included in the GB/T 16159-2012 standard’s recommendations.

In the end, what matters most re how anything is written is not just what is officially recommended or what happens to be popular among changing, imperfect humans. Rather, what matters most is what really works best to accomplish the goal of writing: To communicate to readers. This is especially true when God-honouring and life-saving Bible truths need to be communicated. So, this blog and the other Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus resources will continue to seek to render Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) in ways that maximize how clearly, easily, effectively, and appropriately it communicates with readers.

For convenience:

The direct link for the current generation Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus resource for the Enjoy Life Forever! brochure is:

The direct link for the current generation Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus resource for the Enjoy Life Forever! book is:

The short link for Chinese field language-learning links for the Enjoy Life Forever! brochure is:

The short link for Chinese field language-learning links for the Enjoy Life Forever! book is:

More Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus web material based on the Mandarin Enjoy Life Forever! brochure and the Mandarin Enjoy Life Forever! book will be made available in the above-mentioned Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus web resources as time allows.