Tag: John DeFrancis

Categories
Culture History Names

dài

dài ({take the place of}; replace; subsitute | replacing; substituting → [acting; substitute | generation [→ [period; era; age]]] 代) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

This week’s MEotW, “dài ({take the place of}; replace; subsitute | replacing; substituting → [acting; substitute | generation [→ [period; era; age]]] 代)”, basically literally means “take the place of” or “replace”. Why, then, is it used to mean “generation”? This tweet briefly explains:

Yes, the Chinese concept of a “generation” is that it is something that takes the place of or replaces what was there before—the emphasis seems to be on continuation, and a new generation is viewed as having done well if it lived up to or maintained what came before it. In contrast, in the English-speaking world, a “generation” is something new that is generated—the emphasis seems to be more on innovation, progress, and a new generation is viewed as having done well if it improved upon what came before it, and moved things ahead. For example, the English expression “next generation” indeed implies innovation and progress compared to previous generations, such as when applied to vehicles, computers, and other technology.

The Case of Star Trek: The Next Generation

Fans of Star Trek also generally naturally accept that of course in many aspects the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation is more advanced than the world of Star Trek: The Original Series—the ships are faster and more powerful, the special effects are better, etc. (Note that Star Trek: The Original Series was just called Star Trek when it first came out. “Star Trek: The Original Series” is a retronym that was applied to the show after other shows based on it began to appear.)

However, some Star Trek fans prefer Star Trek: The Original Series to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and do not view Star Trek: The Next Generation as better in every way compared to the original show. For example, many fans view original series characters like Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy as their favourite characters in all the Star Trek shows. Indeed, some would say Mr. Spock is the most iconic Star Trek character of them all.

By the way, the Mandarin translation of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in mainland China is apparently “Xīngjì Lǚxíng: Xià-Yí-Dài ((Xīng·jì Stars · {Boundaries → [Among]} → [Interstellar] 星际 星際) (Lǚ·xíng Travelling · Going → [Journeying] 旅行): (Xià Below → [Next] 下)-(Yí One 一)-(Dài Replacing → [Generation] 代) → [Star Trek: The Next Generation (mainland China translation)])”, according to the mainland Chinese version of Wikipedia. In contrast, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” is apparently called “Yín Hé Fēilóng (((Yín Silver 银 銀) (Hé River 河) → [Milky Way]) (Fēi·lóng Flying · Dragon [→ [Pterosaur]] 飞龙 飛龍) → [Star Trek: The Next Generation (Taiwan translation)])” (obviously not a literal translation) in Taiwan. While Wikipedia is of course not always right, in this case I have not been able to find any better source.

However, in an article on the official Star Trek website, I did find out about a big (literally) Chinese connection to Star Trek:

The building, according to Mashable.com, is the headquarters of NetDragon Websoft, a Chinese gaming and mobile Internet company. And the site notes, “Company Chairman Liu DeJian is reportedly an uberTrekkie, licensing from CBS the rights to build an Enterprise replica. Construction began in 2008 and was finished in 2014; the project cost $160 million total. The building is the only officially licensed Star Trek building on the planet.”

The Case of Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)

Speaking of generations of technology, and of replacings, it’s good for us Mandarin field language learners to remember that writing systems are technologies, and technologies are known to sometimes get replaced by newer generations of technologies. Also, with regard to Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) specifically, the original plan for modern-day China was for Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) to one day replace Chinese characters. As the article “Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Was Plan A” says:

Pīnyīn was actually Plan A for modern-day China, but Plan A has not been fully followed through on, largely because of old-fashioned selfish pride, nationalism/“culturalism”, and traditionalism, with some intellectual self-indulgence thrown in there for good measure. As Jehovah’s people, we have been trained to recognize that these are very bad reasons for doing something, or for not doing something.

Letter from Mao Zedong re a “basic reform” of Chinese writing, involving a transition from Chinese characters to alphabetic writing

(The above picture is from the book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, by John DeFrancis.)

Nostalgia, Progress, and Generations

While humans of different cultures and generations disagree as to whether new generations are necessarily better, whether in technology, Star Trek, writing systems, or life in general, God’s Word helps us to understand his view of passing generations of humans and human activity.

Here are a few scriptures that come to mind in that regard:

A generation is going, and a generation is coming,
But the earth remains forever.
—Ecclesiastes 1:4

Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?” for it is not out of wisdom that you ask this.
—Ecclesiastes 7:10

Jesus said to him: “No man who has put his hand to a plow and looks at the things behind is well-suited for the Kingdom of God.”
—Luke 9:62

Brothers, I do not yet consider myself as having taken hold of it; but one thing is certain: Forgetting the things behind and stretching forward to the things ahead,
—Philippians 3:13

“In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed. And this kingdom will not be passed on to any other people. It will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, and it alone will stand forever,
—Daniel 2:44

Furthermore, the world is passing away and so is its desire, but the one who does the will of God remains forever.
—1 John 2:17

Categories
Culture Theocratic

wēnhé

wēnhé (wēn·hé {[is] warm} · {[is] gentle}; {[is] mild}; {[is] moderate} [→ [mildness]] 温和 溫和) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

The eighth part of the fruitage of the spirit listed is mildness.— 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 “mildness” is translated into Mandarin in the above scripture as “wēnhé (wēn·hé {being warm} · {being mild} → [mildness] 温和 溫和)”, this week’s MEotW.

Note that the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus information for “wēnhé (wēn·hé {being warm} · {being mild} → [mildness] 温和 溫和)” (← tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”), as used in the above context, shows that in the above context it literally means “being warm, being mild”, which in turn effectively means “mildness”. The Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus information renders the literal meaning this way because in this case “wēnhé (wēn·hé {being warm} · {being mild} → [mildness] 温和 溫和)” is a stative verb.

Stative Verbs

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 stative verbs:

S.V. (Stative Verb, Xíngróngcí 形容词).

These entries are frequently translated into English as adjectives, even though they actually behave in Chinese as verbs. That is, the sense of ‘to be’ is already incorporated into these verbs, e.g. Zhèige hěn hǎo ‘This is quite good.’ In fact, it is simply ungrammatical to place the verb shì, ‘to be’, directly in front of a stative verb.

Because stative verbs are actually verbs, they are directly negated by bù, e.g. bù hǎo ‘not good’, and can be further modified by adverbs of degree such as hěn ‘quite’, fēicháng ‘extremely’ and shífēn ‘very; utterly’. One common function of stative verbs is that they may serve as adverbs to other actions, e.g. mànmàn in mànmàn chī ‘Take your time (eating)’ and rènzhēn in rènzhēn de xiě ‘write carefully’.

Sometimes a Verbal Noun

One might wonder, though, why “wēnhé (wēn·hé {being warm} · {being mild} → [mildness] 温和 溫和)” is used in the above scripture to translate “mildness”, a noun, if “wēnhé (wēn·hé {being warm} · {being mild} → [mildness] 温和 溫和)” is a stative verb there. This seems to be a case of “wēnhé (wēn·hé {being warm} · {being mild} → [mildness] 温和 溫和)” acting as a verbal noun, or gerundial noun. Verbal/gerundial nouns were discussed in the MEotW post on “jiàodǎo (jiào·dǎo teaching · {guiding [→ [instructing]]} 教导 教導)”:

One interesting thing to note about “jiàodǎo (jiào·dǎo teaching · {guiding [→ [instructing]]} 教导 教導)” (and about “jiàoxun (teaching → [reprimanding | knowledge gained from an error] 教训 教訓)”, for that matter) is that their component morphemes seem to basically be verbs. In certain contexts, however, they are used as nouns. An example of this being done in English is that “teach” and “teaching” are verbs (e.g. “Jesus was teaching the crowd.”), but in certain contexts, “teaching” is used as a noun (e.g. “The crowd was amazed at the teaching Jesus shared with them.”). When a word is used this way, it’s called a verbal noun, or a gerundial noun. Verbal nouns are quite common in Mandarin.

Multifaceted

“Wēnhé (Wēn·hé {[is] warm} · {[is] gentle}; {[is] mild}; {[is] moderate} [→ [mildness]] 温和 溫和)”, then, like many Mandarin words, is multifaceted. Sometimes it acts as an adjective, sometimes it’s a stative verb that seems like an adjective, and other times it functions as a noun. Here are examples of it being used in these different ways:

Used as an adjective:
📖 📄 📘 Tā (he 他) shì (is 是) ge ([mw] 个 個/个) hěn (very 很) wēnhé (wēn·hé warm · mild → [mild] 温和 溫和) de (’s 的) rén (person 人).

Used as a stative verb that seems like an adjective:
📖 📄 📘 Tā (he 他) hěn ({very much} 很) wēnhé (wēn·hé {is warm} · {is mild} → [is mild] 温和 溫和).

Used as a verbal noun:
📖 📄 📘 Tā (he 他) hěn ({very much} 很) yǒu (has 有) wēnhé (wēn·hé {being warm} · {being mild} → [mildness] 温和 溫和).

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.”