Tag: David Moser

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tíbǐ‐wàng‐zì

tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

This week’s MEotW, “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)”, is generally translated as “character amnesia”. Its literal meaning well describes what it’s like to experience it—you pick up your pen, pencil, brush, etc. to write a certain Chinese character and you…just…can’t…remember how to write it. This can happen with complex, rarely used characters, but it can also happen with fairly commonly used characters, and even with characters you’re sure you once knew well.

It occurs to me that while “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)” literally refers to forgetting a character while trying to write it by hand, and while “character amnesia” is similarly defined as forgetting how to write certain characters, people also often forget characters—and thus fail to recognize them—when they are just reading. There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding common Mandarin expression for this, though, probably because it is generally harder to write than it is to read, and so forgetting a character while engaged in the harder task of writing is generally a more significant emotional event compared to forgetting a character when reading.

It Happens to Chinese People Too

It’s also worth noting that “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)” is an expression that Chinese people do apply to themselves—it doesn’t just describe a problem that only other people experience while learning a language typically written with Chinese characters. Chinese people are also only human, so it is ultimately practically impossible for them too to learn and continue to remember how to write (or even “just” read) all the over 100,000 existing Chinese characters as well as the theoretically unlimited number of Chinese characters that could be invented in the future, even if they have spent, and are continuing to spend, their entire lives trying to do so.

While the government of China considers someone who can recognize “just” 2,000 characters to be literate, the truth is that even those who are considered literate by this standard can surprisingly often be unable to read or write relatively common characters that they once knew, never mind obscure characters that they never learned.

One example of even relatively highly literate native Mandarin speakers having trouble remembering how to write a not terribly uncommon character is related in David Moser’s well-known essay “Why Chinese Is So…Hard”, which has a section devoted to character amnesia:

this phonetic aspect of the language doesn’t really become very useful until you’ve learned a few hundred characters, and even when you’ve learned two thousand, the feeble phoneticity of Chinese will never provide you with the constant memory prod that the phonetic quality of English does.

Which means that often you just completely forget how to write a character. Period. If there is no obvious semantic clue in the radical, and no helpful phonetic component somewhere in the character, you’re just sunk. And you’re sunk whether your native language is Chinese or not; contrary to popular myth, Chinese people are not born with the ability to memorize arbitrary squiggles. In fact, one of the most gratifying experiences a foreign student of Chinese can have is to see a native speaker come up a complete blank when called upon to write the characters for some relatively common word. You feel an enormous sense of vindication and relief to see a native speaker experience the exact same difficulty you experience every day.

This is such a gratifying experience, in fact, that I have actually kept a list of characters that I have observed Chinese people forget how to write. (A sick, obsessive activity, I know.) I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like “tin can”, “knee”, “screwdriver”, “snap” (as in “to snap one’s fingers”), “elbow”, “ginger”, “cushion”, “firecracker”, and so on. And when I say “forget”, I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like “knee” or “tin can”? Or even a rarely-seen word like “scabbard” or “ragamuffin”? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn’t remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 “to sneeze”. I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the “Harvard of China”. Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word “sneeze”?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.

Truly, the phenomenon of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) is nothing to sneeze at! (Sorry, I couldn’t help it 😜.)

Carrying on, this YouTube video from Asian Boss shows how some people on the streets of Shanghai fared when asked to write some Chinese characters. (One of the interviewees uses “tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)” at around 7:10.)

Relatively highly literate native Mandarin speakers can also have problems recognizing or remembering characters when “just” reading, as discussed in the tiandi.info blog post “An Avoidable Minefield of Human Tradition and Cultural Pride”:

A few nights ago, my Mandarin congregation had a Memorial meeting that went well overall. However, there was a momentary hiccup that I think we Chinese field publishers can learn from.

The speaker who gave the talk is a fluent, eloquent native Mandarin speaker originally from mainland China, and he is one of the best Mandarin speakers in a city of several Mandarin congregations. In fact, he was one of the instructors in the very first official Mandarin class ever held in this country. However, while reading a scripture from his paper Bible as he was giving the Memorial talk, he, of all people, just…got…stuck…on…a…Chinese…character…. He struggled with it for what felt like quite a while, and eventually, a young brother who was serving as an attendant at the side of the stage approached and gave him a hint, and he was able to carry on.

For Real, It’s Not You

Yes, from considering both the basic design of the Chinese characters writing system as well as real-life experiences like the ones related above, it is evident that the objective truth is that the Chinese characters writing system is by its very nature fundamentally unfit for human use. So, the blame for the all-too-real phenomenon of even relatively highly literate people surprisingly often forgetting characters while reading or writing should be squarely placed on the Chinese characters writing system, not on the imperfect humans whom it should serve, but for whom it so often causes huge problems instead.

It is thus unfortunate, not admirable, that many still cling to the problematic Chinese characters writing system because of tradition, pride, cultural inertia, apathy, inability to walk away from sunk costs, etc. Such ones simply accept tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) as “normal” rather than recognize it as the institutionalized inhuman madness that it is, while dismissing as madness and heresy any suggestion of using a human-appropriate alphabetic writing system like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) to read and write Mandarin.

New Technology Is Not the Problem

Of course, these days, many people hardly ever write characters by hand anymore. Indeed, many would say that’s the problem! Instead of staying in practice with their handwriting, now, to write something in Mandarin using characters, people generally type Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) with a keyboard and then select the characters they want from the ones their computer or mobile device presents to them in response to their typing. (In such settings, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is like the assistant who does the real work while the big boss, the characters writing system, gets all the credit and recognition, even if many individual characters don’t get recognized when they need to be!)

However, is it really fair to blame the fine new technology for people getting out of practice with the old ways? Consider that if we were to continue with this line of thinking, we could then say that pen/pencil/brush/etc. and paper should in turn be villified for making people forget how to engrave stone tablets! Really, though, people in general got so used to enjoying the advantages of writing on paper compared to having to carve into stone tablets that they didn’t consider it much of a loss that eventually few were able to do the latter. Similarly, few people now lament that with the ubiquity of cars, not many people are now able to ride horses—most people are too busy enjoying their cars to worry about that.

Indeed, rather than blaming keyboards and computing devices for the phenomenon of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字), some feel that keyboards and computing devices have helped to alleviate the problem. This is because even if they tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (characters 字) when they are trying to type Chinese characters, they feel they can hope in and rely on the visual designs of the characters they want to help them “know them when they see them” when they pop up in response to the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) that they type, making handwriting of characters unnecessary in most situations.

The Actual Problem, the Actual Solution

The thing is, the actual fundamental problem that leads to tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字) is that while “know it when you see it” may be how the visually oriented characters must work (when they work), that’s not the primary way that human language works. With human language overall, speech is actually primary, not writing, so it’s really more important in the grand scheme of things for us—including and especially in our preaching and teaching work—to be able to “know it when we hear it”.

While using the unnecessarily complex and inhumanly numerous visually oriented Chinese characters for this is like trying to put a spiky, sharp-edged object in a round hole, the simple and elegant phonetically oriented Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) writing system is a great fit for “know it when you hear it”. If you know how an expression should sound and you know the easy-to-learn-and-remember Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) writing system, you’re all set—no danger of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)!

Of course, you may still encounter occasional situations in which Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is not an option, and you can’t avoid reading or writing characters. In such situations, all you can do is just do your best. When you can use Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音), though, don’t let pride, prejudice, etc. prevent you from making good use of it to completely sidestep the very real problem of tíbǐ (tí·bǐ {carry (hanging down from the hand) → [raise; lift]} · pen; pencil; {writing brush} [→ [start writing; write]] 提笔 提筆)‐wàng (forget 忘)‐zì (character 字)!

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 History Language Learning Languages Science

fāngyán

fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

The term “fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言)” has been used in the Chinese-speaking world in various ways, but the literal meanings of the words that make it up indicate that it refers to the speech pattern of a place, even a place as small as a village. For reference, the “fāng (direction [→ [side; party | place; region | method; way [→ [prescription; recipe]] | power (math.)]] | {[is] square} [→ [[is] upright; honest]] | [mw for square things] 方)” in “fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言)” is the “fāng (direction [→ [side; party | place; region | method; way [→ [prescription; recipe]] | power (math.)]] | {[is] square} [→ [[is] upright; honest]] | [mw for square things] 方)” in “dìfang (dì·fang {(section of) earth → [place]} · {direction → [place]} → [place] 地方)”, and the “yán (speech; word; talk; language | say; talk; speak | character; syllable; word 言)” in “fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言)” is the “yán (speech; word; talk; language | say; talk; speak | character; syllable; word 言)” in “yǔyán (yǔ·yán language · {(type of) speech} 语言 語言)”.

“Fāngyán (Fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言)” has customarily been translated into English as “dialect”, but this practice can be misleading and confusing, because while “fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言)” and “dialect” can sometimes both be applied to a particular speech pattern, the two terms don’t mean exactly the same thing.

What is a Chinese “Dialect”?

American sinologist and University of Pennsylvania Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Victor H. Mair wrote an extensive article on this subject, “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms”, which can be found here (PDF) and here (web page) on his website Sino-Platonic Papers.

It has been said that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy”, but in his article Professor Mair gives us a more linguistically correct and useful way to distinguish between a language and a dialect:

Regardless of the imprecision of lay usage, we should strive for a consistent means of distinguishing between language and dialect. Otherwise we might as well use the two terms interchangeably. That way lies chaos and the collapse of rational discourse. Mutual intelligibility [emphasis added] is normally accepted by most linguists as the only plausible criterion for making the distinction between language and dialect in the vast majority of cases. Put differently, no more suitable, workable device for distinguishing these two levels of speech has yet been proposed. If there are to be exceptions to the useful principle of mutual intelligibility, there should be compelling reasons for them. Above all, exceptions should not be made the rule.

What is mutual intelligibility? Simply put, in linguistics, two or more speech varieties are said to be mutually intelligible if they are “able to be understood by one another’s speakers”. For example, if one person only knows English, and another person only knows Spanish, they can’t really understand each other if they try to talk to each other—English and Spanish are not mutually intelligible, and are suitably recognized as being different languages, not just different dialects of “European”.

Similarly, if one person only knows Mandarin, and another person only knows Cantonese, they can’t really understand each other if they try to talk to each other—Mandarin and Cantonese are not mutually intelligible. So, while they may be “fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · {(patterns of) speech} 方言)”, linguistically, Mandarin and Cantonese should really be considered to be different languages, not just different dialects of “Chinese”.

If many of the varieties of speech in China are really different languages, as linguists would refer to them, why have so many people come to think that they are just dialects of a single Chinese language? China’s central government is highly motivated to convince people that China is one unified political and cultural entity which should thus be governed by one central government—them—so they have promoted this idea. In other words, it’s basically political propaganda!

Being Clear on What’s What

Why is it especially important for language-learners in a language field like the Mandarin field to recognize, in spite of the commonly accepted political propaganda, that Chinese varieties of speech like Mandarin and Cantonese really function like different languages, and not different dialects of the same language? Well, as someone who along with many others has come to the Mandarin field from the Cantonese field, I have had the dubious pleasure of observing how some have tried to speak Mandarin by just taking the Cantonese they knew and twisting it a little, since they were relying on the conventional wisdom that Mandarin and Cantonese are just different dialects of the same language. As well-meaning as they may have been, the results were often just as bad as when someone sings badly off-key, or as Star Trek fans may say, they often sounded like the language equivalent of a transporter accident 🙀. Even after decades in the Mandarin field, some publishers who had come over from the Cantonese field still say some Mandarin words with Cantonese-y pronunciations.

In contrast, when one recognizes, for example, that Cantonese is Cantonese and Mandarin is Mandarin, and that neither one is just a slightly mutated version of the other, then that paves the way for language-learning progress that is free of being distorted by untruthful and misleading beliefs. Yes, by recognizing and accepting a variety of speech for what it really is, we can go on to freely learn to speak it well and properly, so that we can be as effective as possible at helping people whose mother tongue is that variety of speech.

As with everything else in life, in language-learning too, the truth matters. As Jehovah’s people, we especially want to “worship the Father with spirit and truth”, and when we seek to do so as we learn a language to use it in Jehovah’s service, we will find that ‘the truth will set us free’ from the distortions and burdens of untruthful and misleading beliefs.—John 4:23; 8:32.

Some Official Recognition

The organization has recently demonstrated that it recognizes the truth about how different many of the Chinese varieties of speech are from one another. For example, whereas before there was one Chinese edition of each publication (using Mandarin wording), now, some publications are available in different Chinese editions for different Chinese languages (including Cantonese), each with different wording.

List of different Chinese languages in which publications are available on jw.org
jw.org now has publications in different Chinese languages.

To help reduce the confusion around the inappropriate use of the English word “dialect” to translate “fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言)”, Professor Mair proposed that the word “topolect” (topo- (“place”) +‎ -lect (“[language] variety”)) be used instead as an exact, neutral English translation of “fāngyán (fāng·yán {direction → [place]} · speech → [topolect; dialect (common but misleading translation)] 方言)”. While not as well-known as “dialect”, the word “topolect” has gained a certain amount of recognition, and it can now be found in several dictionaries, e.g., The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Wordnik, and Wiktionary.