Tag: Speech

Categories
Culture

shĂčdĂČng

shĂčdĂČng (shĂč·dĂČng tree · hole → [tree hollow] 树掞 æšč掞) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Romans 12:15 tells Christian ministers:

Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.

Also, at 1 Corinthians 9:22, the apostle Paul wrote:

To the weak I became weak, in order to gain the weak. I have become all things to people of all sorts, so that I might by all possible means save some.

Ones who grew up exposed to Western culture may find it challenging to understand and relate to people in the Mandarin field, whether householders or publishers, who grew up marinated in Eastern culture. One area in which this is especially true is the expressing or sharing of personal feelings.

Comparing Eastern culture to Western culture, Western culture is generally more encouraging of individual development and individual expression, whereas Eastern culture in contrast encourages subordinating individual concerns to those of the group. This suppression of individual concerns can cause them to get deeply buried inside people, and at times, it goes so far that people feel the need to find unconventional outlets.

One example involves this week’s MEotW, “shĂčdĂČng (shĂč·dĂČng tree · hole → [tree hollow] 树掞 æšč掞)”, which means “tree hollow’. The Wikipedia entry for the Chinese movie In the Mood for Love provides this summary of what one of the movie’s characters said about this:

While dining with a friend, Chow relays a story about how in older times, when a person had a secret that could not be shared, he would instead go atop a mountain, make a hollow in a tree, whisper the secret into that hollow and cover it with mud.

tree hollow
Creative Commons Public Domain logo

A Modern, Digital Version

As our world has become more digitized and people spend more time on the Internet, some relatively obscure corners of it have come to be used by Chinese people as cyber tree hollows. One article in the magazine The World of Chinese discusses a couple of examples:

Mocha Official, an obscure video blogger with just 200 followers on Bilibili, will never know that his homepage has become a sanctuary for the internet’s depressed and lonely. Since the 19-year-old was found dead in his rental home on January 19, his videos—which used to only attract comments in the single digits—have been flooded with over six million danmu (ćŒčćč•, “bullet screen”) messages that flash across the screen in real time, offering condolence and sympathy to the vlogger who can no longer see them.




Viewers’ debates eventually turned to how Mocha’s life and death changed their own attitudes to life. Bilibili has preserved Mocha’s content in a “memorial account,” and it has since then become a “tree hollow (树掞),” a term for spaces on the internet where users can make digital pilgrimages to confess their secrets.


the preserved accounts of the dead often attract netizens moved by the life or death of their owner, or else simply wishing to confide in a listener who will always be there and never betray them. The Weibo page of Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who died from Covid-19 in February 2020 and was named a national martyr, is now one of the most frequented “tree hollows” in the Chinese cyberspace.

The article goes on to quote one professor’s explanation of this phenomenon:

“Leaving a message in an anonymous cyber place has a special effect, especially for patients with mental illnesses, who always feel a strong stigma around their disease. People want to confess their private feelings, and cyber tree hollows can fulfill their requirements,” Huang Zhisheng, a professor of computer science at the Free University Amsterdam, tells TWOC. “It’s nice to feel as if someone is listening.”

Listening and Understanding

Indeed, many Chinese people could really benefit from having someone to listen to them, someone to talk to. That emphasizes why it’s especially important for those of us serving in the Chinese fields to apply the scriptures cited at the beginning of this post. A couple of other relevant scriptures are:

The thoughts of a man’s heart are like deep waters,
But the discerning man draws them out.
—Proverbs 20:5

Know this, my beloved brothers: Everyone must be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger,
—James 1:19

Of course, to be able to listen with understanding, and to eventually speak understandably and helpfully, a basic requirement is that we need to become sufficiently proficient with the speech of those we want to help in the Mandarin field—it’s not enough just to be able to mentally recognize a bunch of Chinese characters. As 1 Corinthians 14:8–11 says:

8 For if the trumpet sounds an indistinct call, who will get ready for battle? 9 In the same way, unless you with the tongue use speech that is easily understood, how will anyone know what is being said? You will, in fact, be speaking into the air. 10 It may be that there are many kinds of speech in the world, and yet no kind is without meaning. 11 For if I do not understand the sense of the speech, I will be a foreigner to the one speaking, and the one speaking will be a foreigner to me.

Perhaps it’s true that it’s best to use Chinese characters in some situations, such as when texting or emailing is the best or only communication method available. However, generally, it’s better to talk to someone than to write to someone, if possible, especially when discussing personal matters.

By all means, let us do what it takes to help honest-hearted ones in the Mandarin field who have been “skinned and thrown about like sheep without a shepherd”, so that they can benefit from the love and care provided by Jehovah and his universal family. Let us not keep on being ‘foreigners’ to such ones.—Matthew 9:36.

Categories
Languages

XÄ«bānyĂĄ Yǔ

XÄ«bānyĂĄ (Spanish è„żç­ç‰™) Yǔ (Language; Speech èŻ­ èȘž) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

In addition to all the English-speaking publishers who are helping in the Mandarin field, there are also many whose mother tongue is Spanish. “Spanish” in Spanish is “español”, and in Mandarin, it’s “XÄ«bānyĂĄ (Spanish è„żç­ç‰™) Yǔ (Language; Speech èŻ­ èȘž)”, this week’s MEotW.

ES Spanish Language Symbol ISO 639-1 IETF Language Tag Icon
es is the ISO 639-1 code and the IETF language tag for Spanish.

The syllables/morphemes that make up “XÄ«bānyĂĄ (Spain | Spanish è„żç­ç‰™)”—“xÄ« (west | western è„ż)”, “bān (class; team | squad | {work shift} 班)”, and “yĂĄ (tooth [→ [ivory]] 牙)”—seem to have no semantic or meaningful connection to Spain or Spanish things, so it is evident that they were chosen because of sounding at least vaguely like “Spain” when spoken together.

As for “yǔ (language; speech | saying; proverb | words; expression | speak; say èŻ­ èȘž)”, as mentioned in the MEotW post on “YÄ«ngyǔ (YÄ«ng·yǔ English · Language; Speech è‹±èŻ­ 英èȘž)”, “yǔ (language; speech | saying; proverb | words; expression | speak; say èŻ­ èȘž)” refers specifically to the speech of a language—its linguistically primary aspect—not to any writing that came to be developed based on that speech.

Interesting Statistics

Wikipedia provides the following interesting statistics on Spanish:

Today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese,[source][source] and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi.

(Note that one of the sources for the above quote is the Ethnologue website, which seems to be one of the foremost authorities on the world’s languages.)

With so many Spanish-speakers in the world, it’s little wonder that they are so well represented in the worldwide Mandarin field.

Spanish’s Place in Its Language Family Tree

Wikipedia also tells us the following regarding Spanish’s place in its language family tree:

Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century.

This language family tree placement seems to be generally accepted, and is confirmed, for example, by American sinologist and University of Pennsylvania Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Victor H. Mair in his article “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms” (p. 2), which can be found here (PDF) and here (web page) on his website Sino-Platonic Papers.

In comparison, English is also generally considered to be in the Indo-European language family, but in the Germanic group, not in the Ibero-Romance group like Spanish is.

Categories
Culture History

bĂĄihuĂ 

bĂĄihuĂ  (bĂĄi·huĂ  {white → [colloquial; vernacular]} · speech [→ [writing based on vernacular speech]] ç™œèŻ 癜話) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

As mentioned in last week’s MEotW on “chĂ©ngyǔ (chĂ©ng·yǔ {(sth. that) has become} · saying → [set phrase (typically of 4 characters); idiom] æˆèŻ­ 成èȘž)”, Literary Chinese was the standard style of writing in China for a long, long time. Since language naturally changes as time goes by, though, the way people actually talked became more and more different from Literary Chinese.

Eventually, starting about a century ago, in the early 1920s, written vernacular Chinese, or bĂĄihuĂ  (bĂĄi·huĂ  {white → [colloquial; vernacular]} · speech [→ [writing based on vernacular speech]] ç™œèŻ 癜話)—this week’s MEotW—began replacing Literary Chinese in literary works, and it eventually became the standard style of writing for Modern Standard Mandarin.

A Literary Turning Point

The Wikipedia article on written vernacular Chinese provides this summary regarding this literary turning point:

Jin Shengtan, who edited several novels in vernacular Chinese in the 17th century, is widely regarded as the pioneer of literature in the vernacular style. However, it was not until after the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and the promotion by scholars and intellectuals such as pragmatist reformer Hu Shih, pioneering writer Chen Hengzhe, leftist Lu Xun, Chen Duxiu, and leftist Qian Xuantong that vernacular Chinese, or Bai hua, gained widespread importance. In particular, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun is generally accepted as the first modern work to fully utilize the vernacular language.[source]

The Wikipedia article on the May Fourth Movement adds the following:

In Chinese literature, the May Fourth Movement is regarded as the watershed after which the use of the vernacular language (baihua) gained currency over and eventually replaced the use of Literary Chinese in literary works. Intellectuals were driven toward expressing themselves using the spoken tongue under the slogan æˆ‘æ‰‹ć†™æˆ‘ćŁ [wǒ (my 我) shǒu (hand 手) xiě (writes 憙 毫) wǒ (my 我) kǒu ({mouth(’s utterances)} 揣)] (‘my hand writes [what] my mouth [speaks]’), although the change was actually gradual: Hu Shih had already argued for the use of the modern vernacular language in literature in his 1917 essay “Preliminary discussion on literary reform” (æ–‡ć­Šæ”čè‰Żćˆèźź), while the first short story written exclusively in the vernacular language, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun, was not published until 1921.

Punctuation! Arabic Numerals!

Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on written vernacular Chinese, quoted above, goes on to make the following claim about what came along with this change to the vernacular style:

Along with the growing popularity of vernacular writing in books in this period was the acceptance of punctuation, modeled after that used in Western languages (traditional Chinese literature was almost entirely unpunctuated), and the use of Arabic numerals.

The above claim about how it came to be that we now benefit from punctuation in modern Chinese writings is repeated in the separate Wikipedia article on Chinese punctuation:

Although there was a long native tradition of textual annotation to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses, the concept of punctuation marks being a mandatory and integral part of the text was only adapted in the written language during the 20th century due to Western influence.

A quick web search also turned up this post on the Chinese Language Stack Exchange website, part of which says:

I have seen some old Chinese books. The words flowed from top to bottom on the page and there was no punctuation.

We can be thankful that bĂĄihuĂ  (bĂĄi·huĂ  {white → [colloquial; vernacular]} · speech [→ [writing based on vernacular speech]] ç™œèŻ 癜話) (along with, apparently, punctuation and Arabic numerals) replaced Literary Chinese as the standard style of writing for Mandarin, just as I’m sure that the English-speakers among us are thankful that the standard written English of today is no longer the written English of Shakespeare or that of the King James Version of the Bible.

How About Cantonese, Shanghainese, Etc.?

BĂĄihuĂ  (BĂĄi·huĂ  {white → [colloquial; vernacular]} · speech [→ [writing based on vernacular speech]] ç™œèŻ 癜話) not only became the standard style of writing for Modern Standard Mandarin, but due to China’s particular language and political situation, it also became the standard style of writing for speakers of Cantonese and of other Chinese languages, as Wikipedia points out:

Since the early 1920s, this modern vernacular form has been the standard style of writing for speakers of all varieties of Chinese throughout mainland China, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore

As someone who was in the Cantonese field for a long time before joining the Mandarin field, I can attest to the fact that years ago in the Cantonese field, we would use official publications that were actually in written Mandarin, with its different vocabulary, etc., because bĂĄihuĂ  (bĂĄi·huĂ  {white → [colloquial; vernacular]} · speech [→ [writing based on vernacular speech]] ç™œèŻ 癜話), the standard writing style in the Chinese world, is based on Mandarin.

Recently, though, Jehovah’s organization has carried on in the direction gone in by bĂĄihuĂ  (bĂĄi·huĂ  {white → [colloquial; vernacular]} · speech [→ [writing based on vernacular speech]] ç™œèŻ 癜話), of having writing reflect how people actually talk, by making available publications in which the writing is based on spoken Cantonese, in addition to the existing publications using written Mandarin. (Publications in which the writing is based on other spoken Chinese languages are also available.) This is in harmony with a basic principle regarding how God designed and created humans to use language, which, as linguists have figured out, is that speech is primary and writing is secondary.

Different kinds of written Chinese on jw.org

Publications are available on jw.org in writing based on different Chinese languages, to better match how people actually talk in those languages.