Compass Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Mandarin Expression of the Week

rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪熱浪) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Currently, many around the world are being affected by heat waves, which scientists say is part of a pattern of global warming caused by human activity. As of this writing, jw.org is featuring the article “Climate Change and Our Future—What the Bible Says”. The Mandarin version of this article uses the expression “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪熱浪)”, this week’s MEotW, to translate the English expression “heat wave”.

It seems that “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪熱浪)” is just a simple, straightforward exact translation of “heat wave”. While sometimes, like with “zhǐnán‐zhēn ((zhǐ·nán {(points with) finger → [points]} · south 指南)‐(zhēn needle 针針) → [compass])” (a previous MEotW), the Mandarin expression for “compass”, East and West approached the same thing from opposite directions, other times, like with “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪熱浪)” and “heat wave”, the reality referred to is so simple and the applicable metaphors are so obvious that East and West settled on the same linguistic solution.

While “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪熱浪)” is definitely not a loanword (like previous MEotW “kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK)” is), which is a word that’s adopted from one language into another language without translation, it seems possible that it’s a calque, or loan translation, which is “a word or phrase in a language formed by word-for-word or morpheme-by-morpheme translation of a word in another language”, according to one of the definitions of “calque” listed by Wordnik.

Wordnik—Chinese Field Connections

By the way, while this blog is mainly about Mandarin expressions, it’s written in English, mainly for English-speakers, and often it will compare Mandarin expressions to English expressions. Of course, it will use English words—like “loanword” and “calque”—to discuss Mandarin expressions. So, it’s good for it to have a resource to refer to like Wordnik, which claims to be “the world’s biggest online English dictionary, by number of words”. Being online, it is not constrained by the limitations imposed by the millennia-old medium of paper, as delightfully explained in this TED talk given by Erin McKean, the founder of Wordnik:

Here are a few quotes from the above video:

Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan? You can’t get a smaller ham—the English language is as big as it is. So if you have a ham butt problem and you’re thinking about the ham butt problem, the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counter-intuitive—paper is the enemy of words.

They’re like, “Oh my, people are going to take away my beautiful paper dictionaries?” No, there will still be paper dictionaries. When we had cars, when cars became the dominant mode of transportation, we didn’t round up all the horses and shoot them. You know, there’re still going to be paper dictionaries but it’s not going to be the dominant dictionary. The book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in, and it’s not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in.

[I still use the illustration about cars and horses when talking to people who worry about what would happen to Chinese characters if Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) were ever to get widely adopted.]

Lexicography [the practice of compiling dictionaries] is not rocket science, but even if it were, rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days. You know, it can’t be that hard to find some words.

This is a little-known technological fact about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm, and words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography. Isn’t that great?

If we get a bigger pan, then we can put all the words in. We can put in all the meanings. Doesn’t everyone want more meaning in their lives?

The web page for this TED talk says it was part of the TED2007 conference. I remember that after I saw it, it influenced my thinking as I subsequently contributed to some of the projects for Chinese-field unofficial language-learning resources. (E.g., “We can do this, whether or not it’s rocket science!” “We can transcend paper now!” “Including the meanings is good! Doesn’t everyone want more meaning in their lives?”) Many such resources, like the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus Expressions (Web) resource, the Referenced Theocratic Expressions (RTE) resource, and even, in a way, the 3-line, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus, etc. material resources can be thought of as specialized dictionaries. (In 3-line, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus, etc. material resources, you can look up Mandarin words in the order in which they appear in certain official Mandarin publications!)

Making Good Use of Bigger Pans

Years ago, there was one project that was discussed, for creating an unofficial pocket-sized paper dictionary for Chinese theocratic terms that was to be…about the size of what we now call a smartphone, except, of course, thicker. Looking back, it’s not surprising that that project never came to fruition, partly because of the limitations of paper. Those limitations would have necessitated selecting for inclusion in the proposed pocket-sized dictionary a subset of the full dictionary also being worked on (which we now have in the form of the RTE), and they also would have led to difficulties regarding formatting and printing out for such a small form factor—it was just too small a pan.

Also, note that 2007, the year that the above-mentioned TED talk was given, was also the year that the iPhone came out. The iPad followed not long after in 2010, and pretty soon, smartphones and tablets proliferated among those in the Chinese fields, along with resources like apps, websites, digital publications, etc. that were designed for such mobile devices. When entire libraries can be contained in one’s smartphone or tablet, one is probably not usually inclined to seek out paper equivalents. Indeed, to many who grew up with touchscreen mobile devices, paper publications that don’t allow things like resizing of text or looking up information on words seem broken.

zhǐnán‐zhēn ((zhǐ·nán {(points with) finger → [points]} · south 指南)‐(zhēn needle 针針) → [compass]) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Jehovah’s organization has pointed out that it is significant that the Psalms rhyme in meaning, whether or not the words rhyme in sound.

The July 15, 1979 issue of The Watchtower expresses it this way:

THE book of Psalms constituted the book of poetry and song of the ancient Hebrew nation. …The poetry was not based on the rhyming of words, nor altogether on meter. Often, there is parallelism in thought, sometimes synonymous, sometimes contrasting. This enables the mind and the spirit of the reader to follow the thought smoothly so that much better understanding and motivation result.

Similarly, while many Westerners especially may be fascinated by the Chinese characters usually used to write Mandarin words, characters are ultimately merely superficial visual representations, as are idols used in idol worship. A much more truly meaningful (pun totally intended) benefit to Westerners of learning Mandarin words involves learning about the meanings of those Mandarin words, and how they reveal the contrastingly different ways that Chinese people have thought about things. As 2 Corinthians 4:18 says:

while we keep our eyes, not on the things seen, but on the things unseen. For the things seen are temporary, but the things unseen are everlasting.

One classic example of the contrastingly different ways that Chinese people have thought about things is this week’s MEotW, “zhǐnán‐zhēn ((zhǐ·nán {(points with) finger → [points]} · south 指南)‐(zhēn needle 针針) → [compass])”. While Westerners think of a compass as having a needle that points north, the literal meaning of the Mandarin word “zhǐnán‐zhēn ((zhǐ·nán {(points with) finger → [points]} · south 指南)‐(zhēn needle 针針) → [compass])” is “points south needle”. Did the Chinese get it wrong? Are Westerners wrong? Neither! The fact is that as one end of a compass needle points north, the other end simultaneously points south. So, in this case, Westerners and Chinese people are both right—they’re just looking at the same thing from different points of view.

Sometimes, considering a different point of view, a different perspective, can help give one the mental—or even emotional—leverage needed to make a leap of progress that one would not otherwise make, if one was limited to one way of looking at things.

The fact that different languages come from different cultures, with their different perspectives and ways of thinking, is also why there is truth in the quote from Charlemagne that “to have another language is to possess a second soul.” (Of course, we know that by “soul” he meant what is described in the Insight on the Scriptures book entry for “Spirit”, under the subheading “Impelling Mental Inclination”.)

A Great Invention

Speaking of the compass, it’s also noteworthy that the compass is one of what are called the Four Great Inventions (Sì (Four 四) Dà (Big → [Great] 大) Fāmíng (Fā·míng {Sendings Out → [Bringings into Existence]} · {to Be Distinct} → [Inventions] 发明發明)) from ancient China.

Chinese compass held at Queensland Museum c. 1938

As the Wikipedia article on the compass summarizes for us:

Among the Four Great Inventions, the magnetic compass was first invented as a device for divination as early as the Chinese Han Dynasty (since c. 206 BC),^[source]^[source] and later adopted for navigation by the Song Dynasty Chinese during the 11th century.^[source]^[source]^[source] The first usage of a compass recorded in Western Europe and the Islamic world occurred around 1190.^[source]^[source]

So, maybe the Chinese actually got first dibs on getting to say which way a compass needle points, for whatever that’s worth, considering that a compass needle simultaneously points in two opposite directions. 😄

But Wait, There’s More!

In addition to the weirdness about a compass needle pointing both north and south simultaneously, I found the below weirdness summarized in the Wikipedia article on the North Magnetic Pole:

All magnets have two poles, where the lines of magnetic flux enter and emerge. By analogy with Earth’s magnetic field, these are called the magnet’s “north” and “south” poles. The convention in early compasses was to call the end of the needle pointing to Earth’s North Magnetic Pole the “north pole” (or “north-seeking pole”) and the other end the “south pole” (the names are often abbreviated to “N” and “S”). Because opposite poles attract, this definition means that Earth’s North Magnetic Pole is actually a magnetic south pole and Earth’s South Magnetic Pole is a magnetic north pole.^[source]^[source]

rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪 熱浪) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”