Noncompositional

On a recent trip to Chinatown in San Francisco, I noticed that although most American banks have transparent names in Chinese (e.g., Bank of America is 美洲銀行 ‘America(n continent) Bank’, WaMu is 華盛頓互惠銀行 ‘Washington Reciprocate Bank’). However, Citibank is called 花旗銀行, literally ‘flower flag bank.’ Could it be an attempt to approximate the sound of citi? In Mandarin it would be hua1 qi2, and in Cantonese faa1 kei4. Okay, so it’s not the sound. Maybe some previous name of Citibank had something to do with flags or flowers, or had a name that sounded more like the Chinese characters? Well, no. So what is the answer?

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The street name Broadway is often rendered 百老匯 in Chinese. In particular, Broadway in NYC is so-named, and street signs in Oakland near the Chinatown area have signs with this name (as I recall). I like this name, for several reasons. First, the first two characters (bai3 lao3 in Mandarin) are reminiscent of the word 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4), which means ‘commoners,’ (though it literally means ‘old hundred names’); this fits with (the sorts of streets that are named) Broadway as a sort of common place for normal people to gather or travel on. The third character, hui4, has a meaning of ‘converge’, ‘flow,’ or ‘gather together’. Again, all broadly fitting with Broadway.

Of course, in order to be a good rendition the pronunciation has to fit reasonably well. Now, [bai laʊ xueɪ] is really only acceptable if you’re aware of the limitations of Mandarin phonology, as well as the fact that most famous place names (at least in America) were not given Chinese names by speakers of Mandarin, but by speakers of other Chinese languages that preserved useful things like syllable-final oral stops. I suspected that it was a speaker or group of speakers of a southern Chinese language like Cantonese that first used words like 百老匯, but the Chinese Wikipedia article says that it was likely a speaker of Shanghainese or Ningpo that first coined the term, along with the word for Washington, 華盛頓 (Mandarin hua2 sheng4 dun4 [xwa ʂɣŋ duən]). According to the indices on a Wu Dictionary website, Broadway is pronounced (sans tone) [paʔ lɔ uɛ], and Washington is [uo zã təŋ]. For the curious, the standard Cantonese would be [baak lou (w)ui] and [wa siŋ dœn] (hopefully I didn’t mangle that; I just started trying to learn Cantonese).

It definitely seems that (modern) Cantonese sounds much closer than either Mandarin or Shanghainese for Washington, but the coda k makes its Broadway a bit anomalous. The more source-language-loyal conventions currently used(*) in Mandarin for foreign names might get something closer, like bu luo de wei, but it would create a rather long name, which (IMO) looks and sounds rather ungraceful, and doesn’t have the punch of something like 百老匯.

(*) I actually have only a very limited grasp of how sounds (in English) are usually written out with characters in Mandarin, and have only intuited that there is some sort of standard that may in truth only be limited to official discourse.

Part of my Chinese class involves translation of short paragraphs from English into Chinese. The paragraphs are in the workbook that accompanies this textbook). Normally they are very good exercises, and the paragraphs are written in a way to make you think about how to use your relatively limited skills in Chinese to render a good translation. But sometimes they do something that’s…well, a little wrong. Below is one of the paragraphs that we translated in class today:

Recently, there has been more news on students bringing guns to school and threatening their teachers and classmates. Parents not only blame the school for not being able to educate children well, but also blame the media for having a bad influence on their children. However, many parents have never thought that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior.

The interesting part is the last clause, that they themselves are mostly responsible for their children’s behavior. A student might have at least two problems at this point. One is that the book has not introduced a way to express the idea of being responsible. Instead there is a way to express take responsibility (for X). Unfortunately, the student might not be sure that there was any clear way to modify “responsibility” except for perhaps 負最大的責任 ‘bear the biggest responsibility’ (note: I’m not sure if this means the right thing, though it’s commonly attested on Google).

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I was recently shopping for a good Chinese-English (and E-C) dictionary, and noticed a difference between character lookup methods between Chinese and Japanese. In all the Chinese dictionaries I looked at (not a lot, admittedly), there were a total of two methods: by radical, and by pronunciation. Japanese dictionaries add a third method: total number of strokes. Now, of course number of strokes is important for Chinese dictionaries as well: the radicals and the characters listed under them are organized by stroke count. But the Japanese dictionaries I have/had allow for total strokes in the character (presumably for cases where it’s unclear what the radical is — at least, that’s usually why I use that method). Maybe some non-foreign-language Chinese dictionaries also have such a list and I didn’t see it…but it would be interesting if they didn’t! (and just to point it out, Japanese has many options in the pronunciation-lookup method, thanks to the ridiculous numbers of pronunciations for characters: the electronic kanji dictionary that I have even allows me to look up the pronunciation of the radical! (which comes in handy if…uh…I don’t feel like inputting digits).

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The rules for combining initials and finals (rimes) in pinyin are not exactly simple, though the complications do sometimes end up being sort of intuitive (intuitive enough for a classrooms full of American schoolchildren to learn fairly quickly). But sometimes things are hidden. Things that people (like me) notice only very infrequently for periods of up to 10 years before finally figuring out.

Of course, if Wikipedia had existed back when I was in high school, I could have just consulted its table of Mandarin finals and noted that what is written ing in pinyin is pronounced [iɤŋ]. Or I could have looked at bopomofo and realized that there is no single symbol for the ing final (though there is one for ang and eng). Instead it is a combination of i and eng [ɤŋ].

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Al Gore appeared on Larry King Live today and spread vicious lies about Chinese lexical semantics. In his book, he writes,

As many know, the Chinese expression for “crisis” consists of two characters side by side. The first is the symbol for “danger,” the second the symbol for “opportunity.” (taken from an npr interview, though he basically repeated it on the show)

He should know that the worldwide scientific consensus is that the Chinese word (”expression”) for ‘crisis’ absolutely does not have this meaning. Oy. Blog posts over the past few months covering his book and movie help perpetuate the myth (though untrue, using it probably has some rhetorical payoff), even getting wrong what Gore gets right: that the word consists of two characters. Ethan Zuckerman at WorldChanging says: “He quotes the old saw that the Chinese character for crisis includes signs for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity.’” Similarly, JD Lasica at New Media Musings wrote: the Chinese symbol for crisis [is] a symbol that epitomizes tragedy on one side but opportunity on the other. Of course, some blogs get it right, and some people replied to posts with the correct information. And of course Language Log has coverage.

This reminds me of people in grade and high school constantly misspelling my name, even while looking at a correct version and copying it onto a piece of paper

[inevitably this post will fall into line with Hartman's law...]

My apologies to anyone who’s had trouble accessing the site over the past few days - the server that is hosting it has been going off- and online several times per day. Hopefully it will be all over soon.

And for a small bit of actual content: I was reading through an introductory Mandarin Chinese textbook today (basically to review all that I learned in high school before I start summer classes — I’ll have some things to say about the textbook itself at a later date), and found something interesting. It seems that as of January 18, 2005, the (South) Korean “Committee on the New Chinese Name (’notation’) for Seoul” decided that the name of its capital city should be written 首爾 (Shǒu’ěr), rather than 漢城 (Hànchéng). This is of course old news in the blogging community, and I recommend this entry on Hunjangûi karûch’im for details and links to earlier progress reports on the matter, and a post on languagehat on a related matter involving the same committee.

I don’t want to comment directly on the political or ideological reasons behind the decision or any potential (or actual) controversy. However, I did find this line in the Japanese Wikipedia entry for Seoul intriguing:

一方、中国側では当初、「漢字表記は中国が決めるもの」として「首爾」の使用に消極的であったが

Which means, ‘On the other hand, China was initially negative regarding the use of 首爾, as “Chinese writing is to be determined by China.”‘ No reference is given to the quote, which may not even be a direct quotation. I’ve been trying to find a Japanese paper that actually has a line like this, or similar to it, but so far no luck. I’m not convinced that Chinese officials would actually say that all uses of Chinese characters must be approved by China, and the quote leaves open the possibility that it just refers to China-internal matters (which would not an unreasonable thing to say, I think).

Another point of interest: the Korean committee did not decide to do what Japan has been doing for a long time: invent kun-yomi for Chinese characters. As far as I know, the only way Chinese characters are/were used in Korean is to write actual Chinese loan words from. In contrast, Japanese makes use of characters for their meanings alone. Thus in Japanese a verb like ‘read’ is written 読む /yomu/, where the character is pronounced /yo/, with no connection to its Chinese-derived reading, /doku/. In Korean the verb for ‘read,’ /ilk-/, is always written with hangul, rather than using 読. That character does exist in borrowed words, though, and it is pronounced /du/. For more details see Hanja on everyone’s favorite site.

But getting back to the committee: it would have been interesting if they decided to take the meaning of “Seoul,” which is ‘capital city,’ and just chose characters that mean that, regardless of their Chinese pronunciations. I’m not sure what would happen if they asked China to start writing 首都 ‘capital city’ for Seoul. It could get confusing. On the other hand, as a (non-native, fluent) speaker of Chinese pointed out to me, if they wanted to go that route they could have chosen a nonexistent compound like 首城 or 首市, both of which clearly mean ‘capital city’ but don’t actually exist as words, AFAIK. It could have been a renaissance of hanja in Korea! Okay, probably not.

Before leaving on a two-week trip through the main island of Japan with my girlfriend Lindsay, she predicted that there would be many cases of a Japanese person expecting her to be able to speak Japanese (looking East Asian as she does), and me not able to, and confusion arising when these expectations are defeated. I suppose I thought that it would happen from time to time, but not all that often. In particular, I imagined that I would be initiating a majority of the conversations with the locals, and so there would be no confusion regarding who of us is doing the speaking. There were two things I should have realized, though: first, we are obviously a couple, and so effectively a single person, and so to some degree either of us could be addressed regardless who was previously established as speaker, and second, (surprise!) sometimes we would start on the addressee side of the conversation. Then there was the thing that I perhaps couldn’t have expected: some people are very persistent in assuming that the East Asian-looking person should be speaking the Japanese, while the non-native person remains silent.

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