Tag: Chinese Culture

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Culture Language Learning Science Theocratic

yīnyì

yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Appendix A2 of the English New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Study Edition), entitled “Features of This Revision”, discusses vocabulary changes that have been made in the current revision, words that have been translated differently than before. As noted in various entries in the excellent resource Referenced Theo. Expressions (RTE), Appendix A2 of the current Mandarin version of the New World Translation Bible (nwtsty) correspondingly discusses words that have been translated differently in the current revision of the Mandarin NWT Bible, compared to how they had been translated before.

Since we base what we say in Jehovah’s service on his Word the Bible, the vocabulary used in it—and the way those vocabulary words are translated—should be reflected in how we speak in our ministry, at our meetings, etc. So, it is beneficial for us Mandarin field language learners to be familiar with the latest thinking from the organization on how Bible terms should be translated into Mandarin.

Units of Measurement

Appendix A2 of the current Mandarin version of the New World Translation Bible (nwtsty) points out that in previous editions of the Mandarin New World Translation, basically metric system units of measurement were used, although sometimes units from the original language were used. However, the whole number metric measurements that were considered best to use in the main text generally ended up being inexact conversions from the original measurements. Also, some metric units of measurement are named differently in different places. For example, some places use “mǐ (metre 米)” to mean “metre”, while other places use “gōngchǐ (gōng·chǐ {collective → [metric]} · {Chinese foot (⅓ of a metre)} → [metre] 公尺)”. So, the current version of the Mandarin NWT in most scriptures uses the original language units of measurement through what in Mandarin is called “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)”, and in footnotes it provides the metric equivalents and perhaps other information.

What does “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)” involve? Some Chinese-English dictionaries say that this word is used to mean either “transliterate”/“transliteration” or “transcribe”/“transcription”. What’s the difference? Is there a difference?

[Note on terminology: “Writing system” and “script” are synonymous, while an “orthography” is a “set of conventions [connected to a writing system/script] for writing a language, including norms of spelling, capitalization, emphasis, hyphenation, punctuation, and word breaks”.]

Transliteration?

The Wikipedia page on transliteration provides the following summaries to help define transliteration:

Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways

Transliteration is not primarily concerned with representing the sounds of the original but rather with representing the characters, ideally accurately and unambiguously.

Systematic transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, typically grapheme to grapheme [e.g., letter to letter]. Most transliteration systems are one-to-one, so a reader who knows the system can reconstruct the original spelling.

Echoing the above quote, the academic paper “Two Steps Toward Digraphia in China” (Sino-Platonic Paper Number 134), by Xieyan Hincha, provides this rigorous definition of transliteration:

By transliteration is meant the letter-by-letter conversion of a text written in an alphabet into another alphabetical script, if necessary using diacritical marks, in such a way that the text can be correctly converted back into the original text by means of a transliteration table.

Transcription?

Now, compare the above to summaries provided by the Wikipedia page on transcription that help to define transcription:

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of spoken language in written form.

There are two main types of linguistic transcription. Phonetic transcription focuses on phonetic and phonological properties of spoken language. Systems for phonetic transcription thus furnish rules for mapping individual sounds or phones to written symbols. Systems for orthographic transcription, by contrast, consist of rules for mapping spoken words onto written forms as prescribed by the orthography of a given language. Phonetic transcription operates with specially defined character sets, usually the International Phonetic Alphabet. [emphasis added]

The above-mentioned academic paper “Two Steps Toward Digraphia in China” also provides a rigorous definition for transcription, which seems to specifically refer to phonetic transcription, as referred to in the Wikipedia quote above:

It is time to ask what exactly is a transcription system. It is a graphic system whose elements unambiguously represent the sounds of a spoken language. The transcription can be narrow or broad: in both cases one graphic symbol represents in principle precisely one single sound.

“There is Too Much…Let Me Sum Up”


To sum up, basically transliteration refers to mapping from one writing system to another writing system, while transcription refers to mapping from a language’s sounds to a graphic system like the IPA (phonetic transcription), or to a writing system with an orthography (orthographic transcription).

Thus, I would say that it’s not really appropriate to use “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)”—which literally means “sound translating”—to mean “transliterate” or “transliteration”. From the literal meanings of its morphemes, “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)” is a much better fit for meaning “transcribe” or “transcription”, which refer to mapping the sounds of a language to a graphic system or a writing system.

Going back to Appendix A2 of the current Mandarin version of the NWT Bible, when it says that this version in most scriptures yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translates → [transcribes] 音译 音譯) (transcribes) the original language’s units of measurement, that means that it uses Chinese characters/Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) to represent (as well as they can) how these units of measurement sounded in the original language. For example, the original language unit of measurement translated into English as “seah measure” is translated into Mandarin as “xìyà ({seah (measure)} 细亚 細亞)”.—2 Kings 7:1 (English/Mandarin).

Transliteration, Transcription, and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)

Besides offering definitions of transliteration and transcription, the academic paper “Two Steps Toward Digraphia in China” mentioned above also discusses whether these terms apply to Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音). Here are a couple of quotes:

In the case of Chinese characters, ISO has established that a transliteration between Chinese characters and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is impossible: the supposedly more than 40,000 (“ideo-phonographic”) characters cannot be represented by the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. There is no doubt about that. This clearly shows that Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案) is not a transliteration system, because it does not fulfill all the criteria of a transliteration system.

If Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案) were a transcription system, this table would contain three state-prescribed violations of the transcription principle, namely: y+i, y+in, and y+ing. In all three of these cases, two letters represent one sound. The same is true when writing y+u and w+u. This rule does not concern phonetic transcription; rather, it is an orthographic rule: in these cases <y> and <w> are artificial and arbitrary initial symbols. But phonetically these are not consonants. Consequently, in this respect Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案) is not a transcription system.

The above quote explains that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) does not qualify as a phonetic transcription system. However, it shows that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) has orthographic rules connected to it, meaning it could be used for orthographic transcription…

No, Could It Be?

So, this academic paper concludes that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is not a system for transliterating Chinese characters, nor is it a system for phonetically transcribing Mandarin speech. What is it, then? The paper comes to this conclusion:

As is well known, the Chinese leadership refuses to recognize Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as a script and to permit digraphia [the state of having two standard scripts, Chinese characters and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)]. But scientific facts demonstrate that Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案), including its orthography, is a writing system for Chinese. [emphasis added]

Categories
Culture History

chá

chá (tea 茶) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Long before drinking tea became a big part of English culture, it had been a big part of Chinese culture. As Wikipedia summarizes:

An early credible record of tea drinking dates to the third century AD, in a medical text written by Chinese physician Hua Tuo.[source] It was popularised as a recreational drink during the Chinese Tang dynasty [(618–907 CE)], and tea drinking subsequently spread to other East Asian countries. Portuguese priests and merchants introduced it to Europe during the 16th century.[source] During the 17th century, drinking tea became fashionable among the English, who started to plant tea on a large scale in British India.

Similarly, the English word “tea” and its doublet “chai” originally came from the words for “tea” in different Chinese languages. This week’s MEotW, “chá (tea 茶)”, is the word for “tea” in Mandarin.

“Tea” and its Doublet

Hold on, you may say, what’s a doublet? Here is a definition:

doublet

One of two (or more) words in a language that have the same etymological root but have come to the modern language through different routes.

So, how did “tea” and its doublet “chai” both end up in the English language after having come from the same root through different routes?

Linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne discussed this on their podcast Lingthusiasm:

Lauren: One of the things I always find interesting about these loanwords that come to us in batches from particular domains is how it highlights global history, and usually global histories of trade and different power dynamics that have operated over that history. One of my absolute favourite stories is the story of tea. We’ve already talked about “chai” and “chia” in Nepali, “tea” in English. The words for “tea” in many of the world’s languages appear to be related. They’ll either have some kind of /te/ or /ti/ pronunciation or some kind of /t͡ʃ/ – “chia,” “chai” pronunciation. That’s because there were two main places in China from which tea travelled to all the different markets in the world.

Gretchen: In Mandarin, which is historically more spoken towards the centre of China, the word for tea is “cha,” but in Min Nan, which is also a variety of Chinese as spoken in the coastal province of Fujian, it’s pronounced /te/. They use the same character, but they’re pronounced differently, which is very common for how Chinese gets written. The key thing here is “coastal” because people who encountered the plant and the drink tea via the sea, via Fujianese traders, learned to pronounce it /te/ or variants on /te/. In French and German, it’s /te/. In English, it used to be /te/ until the vowel shifted. Whereas people who encountered tea through Central China, through land routes like the silk road – so through Sinitic “cha” – you get Mandarin “cha,” Korean “cha,” Japanese “ocha,” but also Hindi “chai,” Persian “chai,” Arabic “shai,” Turkish “chai,” Russian “chai,” and you’re down to Swahili “chai,” all goes through that land route, and sometimes via Persia, to get from “cha” to “chai.” The great maps that people have produced where you can tell if people encountered tea through the land route where they get “cha,” which becomes “chai,” or through the sea route, which becomes “te” and variants on “te” like “tea.”

The Development of Modern Mandarin

The mention above of historical Mandarin reminds me of a book that I read a while ago, A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language, by David Moser. Here is an excerpt:

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912, an urgent priority for the new Chinese government was the task of establishing a common language for a linguistically fractured China. When Mao took power in 1949, language unification continued to be of vital importance to the nation building agenda. Faced with the challenge of unifying a vast country populated with hundreds of ethnicities, languages, and dialects, these political leaders were confronted with some of the same linguistic problems and conundrums raised above: Is there such a thing as ‘the Chinese language’? Should the Chinese people share a common tongue? How should it be defined? How should pronunciation, vocabulary, and correct usage be determined? Should one standard language replace the numerous other regional variations, or should all other forms of Chinese continue to flourish? Should written Chinese continue to use the centuries-old character system, or should it be replaced with an alphabet, or some other phonetic system? And who, after all, is the final arbiter for such decisions?

In the PRC, the twentieth century quest for a solution to these problems has resulted in a version of Chinese called Putonghua. How did China arrive at this common language?

In what follows, I will present a brief historical overview of that process, and trace the trajectory of Putonghua as it moved into the twenty-first century.

The Cantonese Connection

Getting back to how historical words for “tea” in different Chinese languages ended up leading to the words “tea” and “chai” in English, here is some other information, that I found on the World Atlas of Language Structures website:

Most words for ‘tea’ found in the world’s languages are ultimately of Chinese origin, but they differ significantly in their form due to their coming via different routes. The differences begin already on Chinese soil. Most Sinitic languages have a form similar to Mandarin chá, but Min Nan Chinese, spoken e.g. in Fujian and Taiwan, has instead forms like te55 (Chaozhou). The Dutch traders, who were the main importers of tea into Europe, happened to have their main contacts in Amoy (Xiamen) in Fujian. This is why they adopted the word for ‘tea’ as thee, and in this form it then spread to large parts of Europe. The influence from Amoy is also visible in many languages spoken in the former Dutch colonies, as in Malay/Indonesian and Javanese teh. However, the first European tea importers were not the Dutch but the Portuguese, in the 16th century; their trade route went via Macao rather than via Amoy, and consequently Portuguese uses chá, derived from Cantonese cha.

Thus, as in other aspects, it seems that the first contact between the West and China when it comes to tea involved the Cantonese.

Categories
Culture Language Learning Technology

yǔyán

yǔyán (yǔ·yán language; tongue · {(type of) speech} 语言 語言) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

The Mandarin field is an example of a language field. What though, is a language? For a long time, the production output of the earthly part of Jehovah’s organization was exclusively or mainly paper publications. So, when it would count the languages it was supporting in its production, it was really counting the writing systems that it printed on paper. Meanwhile, in worldly Chinese culture, there is an obsession with the Chinese characters writing system, which has become a proud and deeply embedded cultural tradition. Such factors may influence people serving in the Mandarin field to focus on the Chinese characters writing system when they think of the Mandarin language.

However, linguists, people who study language scientifically, hold that when it comes to languages, speech is primary, and writing is secondary. This excerpt from the MEotW post on “zuìchū (zuì·chū most · {at the beginning} [→ [initial[ly]; prime; [at] first; original[ly]]] 最初)” summarizes the scientific evidence in this regard:

First Things First in Language Learning

The way God made us, zuìchū (zuì·chū most · {at the beginning} 最初), language-wise, there was speech. Only later did imperfect humans eventually come up with some writing systems to visually represent and record some forms of speech. Indeed, there have been, and there still are, many speech-only languages, with no corresponding writing system. Ethnologue, a resource on world languages, says:

Ethnologue (24th edition) has data to indicate that of the currently listed 7,139 living languages, 4,065 have a developed writing system. We don’t always know, however, if the existing writing systems are widely used. That is, while an alphabet may exist there may not be very many people who are literate and actually using the alphabet. The remaining 3,074 are likely unwritten.

Technological First Priority

Writing systems are technologies. About writing, linguist Gretchen McCulloch says:

It really is a technology. It’s a thing you do on top of language to do stuff with language, but it’s not the language itself. There are thousands and possibly millions of languages that have never been written down in the history of humanity. We have no idea. We’ve never met a society of humans, or heard of a society of humans, without language. But those are spoken and signed languages, which are just kind of there. Writing, by contrast, was invented somewhere between 3 and 4 times in the history of humanity.

What Do the Words Actually Mean?

It’s also worth considering the actual root meanings contained in the words used in English and Mandarin to mean “language”. Regarding the etymology of the English word “language”, the Online Etymology Dictionary says:

late 13c., langage “words, what is said, conversation, talk,” from Old French langage “speech, words, oratory; a tribe, people, nation” (12c.), from Vulgar Latin *linguaticum, from Latin lingua “tongue,” also “speech, language,” from PIE [Proto-Indo-European] root *dnghu- “tongue.”

Clearly, the focus of the root meanings above is on speech and the tongue, which is used for speech—writing is not even mentioned.

Consider also this week’s MEotW, the Mandarin word generally used to mean “language”, “yǔyán (yǔ·yán language; tongue · {(type of) speech} 语言 語言)”. As can be seen from this expression’s Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus information, the morphemes used in this Mandarin expression also focus on speech and the tongue, which is used for speech—writing is not even mentioned.

So, when we think of a language, a yǔyán (yǔ·yán language; tongue · {(type of) speech} 语言 語言), even a Chinese one, we should really be thinking about a way of speaking, a variety of speech, not any writing system, even one as traditionally revered and glamourized as Chinese characters are. Thus, the Mandarin language field is not the field in which we preach to and teach people who read and write with Chinese characters. After all, if people speak Mandarin but cannot read or write the Chinese characters, they still count as being among those we are trying to help in the Mandarin field. That’s because the Mandarin language field is actually the field in which we preach to and teach people whose mother tongue—their first language or way of speaking—is Mandarin.