REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

How Do You Say 'Badonkadonk' in Chinese?

Feb 8 2012, 3:09 PM ET The story of OMG! Meiyu, Jessica Beinecke's wildly popular web video series for Chinese who want to learn American slang.

That language shapes culture and vice versa seems intuitive and axiomatic. Language and educational exchanges have always been a defining feature of the U.S.-China relationship. Regular people-to-people exchanges, including the State Department's "100,000 Strong" initiative started under President Obama, have been important to the bilateral relationship because of persistent and often serious mutual distrust. The experience of teaching English in China was perhaps most memorably captured in Peter Hessler's book Rivertown. Like Hessler and many Americans since, I too was once an English teacher in China, attempting to dissect the ingenuity of Jay-Z and explicating Hamlet's neurosis to my students. Though I can't say they fully understood the significance of H.O.V.A and To Be or Not to Be (I'm still not sure I do either), I hope they at least learned something about the diversity of America.

Given that experience, I was delighted to discover that, in the age of YouTube and social media, American English lessons have been taken to another level. Meet Jessica Beinecke, a Voice of America journalist who decided that she could leverage all the web 2.0 tools at her disposal to create a show that taught Chinese youth American slang. It's shot with only a webcam and was exclusively on Chinese Youku until recently migrating to YouTube. A profile in the Washington Post describes the show:

Read more at The Atlantic

Pinyin faux amis

We'd better get used to it; pinyin romanizations will be showing up in English with increasing regularity. For example, someone who catches a glimpse of this sign may think that it has something to do with writing instruments:

 The photograph, however, shows two bumper cars. What then, is this mysterious "Super pen pen car" that the sign is advertising? In fact, "pen pen" is incorrect pinyin for pèngpèng 碰碰 ("bump"), and a pèngpèngchē 碰碰车 is a "bumper car" ride that you can often find in Chinese amusement parks.

Many pinyin-English faux amis are humorous. For example, there's a girl named You Shiting 尤诗婷. When she came to America to study, her name was given in the usual Western order as Shiting You, which led to much merriment.

When I first went to China in 1981, I was tricked by some naughty girls who kept asking me how to pronounce fuxing 復興 ("rebirth, renaissance, resurgence") and what it meant in English. A major hotel in Beijing had to change its name from Fuxing Hotel to Beijing Hotel because tourists were reluctant to stay in it when it had the former appellation.

Some pinyin-English faux amis can be politically or ideologically inconvenient. As I wrote in the first chapter of The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (p. 54):

Some writers have begun to play with pinyin mixed in among Chinese characters. A notorious example was the 1980s spoken drama "Women" (Us), which had its title written only in pinyin "Women") and used pinyin for the first-person plural pronoun women ("we, us") throughout in some versions of the script. It is difficult to determine precisely what the authors (a collective from a military unit, no less!) meant by this usage (perhaps a subtle pun on the English word written with the same letters? — a so-called faux ami), but the government was sufficiently incensed to ban the play before it actually opened.

Other pinyin-English faux amis and related phenomena are discussed in "Flirtatious Evacuation", "YouCool", and "Transletteration".

[A tip of the hat to Jiang Ranting]

January 16, 2012 @ 3:07 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation

Southwest path information gap, a cloister

Filed by Victor Mair under Lost in translation

Someone recently told Tom Bishop (creator of Wenlin software for learning Chinese) that Google Translate is really good now, so he tried translating this English paragraph into Chinese (chosen randomly from the cave adventure game):

You are on one side of a large, deep chasm.  A heavy white mist rising up from below obscures all view of the far side.  A southwest path leads away from the chasm into a winding corridor.

The result is:

Nín shì yīgè dà de, shēn de hónggōu de yībiān. Yīgè chénzhòng de bái wù, cóng xiàmiàn shàngshēng yǎngàile suǒyǒu de yuǎnfāng de kànfǎ. Xīnán lùjìng xìnxī hónggōu, chéngwéi yīgè huíláng. 您是一个大的，深的鸿沟的一边。一个沉重的白雾，从下面上升掩盖了所有的远方的看法。西南路径信息鸿沟，成为一个回廊。

 

And the result of converting that Chinese back to English is:

You are a big, deep side of the gap. A heavy white mist, rising from below to cover all of the distant view. Southwest path information gap, a cloister.

Converting that back into Chinese produces:

Nǐ shì yīgè dà de chājù shēn chù. Yīgè chénzhòng de bái wù, cóng xiàmiàn shàngshēng dào hángài suǒyǒu de yuǎnjǐng. Xīnán lùjìng xìnxī de chājù, huíláng. 你是一个大的差距深处。一个沉重的白雾，从下面上升到涵盖所有的远景。西南路径信息的差距，回廊。

Back to English:

You are a big gap between the depths. A heavy white mist, rising from below to cover all of the vision. Southwest path information gaps, corridors.

Read more at Language Log

THE CHINA CONUNDRUM

Andrew Councill for The New York Times

Wenting Tang says her English wasn't strong enough to write the admissions essay for the University of Delaware, where she is now a junior in marketing. More Photos »

By TOM BARTLETT and KARIN FISCHER

Published: November 3, 2011

This article is a collaboration between The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, a daily source of news, opinion and commentary for professors, administrators and others interested in academe. Tom Bartlett is a senior writer at The Chronicle covering ideas and research; Karin Fischer is a senior reporter covering international education.

---

Andrew Councill for The New York Times

LANGUAGE BARRIER Yisu Fan, left, was conditionally admitted to the University of Delaware until his language skills improve. Some professors say they've had to alter their teaching because of the influx of students from China. More Photos »

DOZENS of new students crowded into a lobby of the University of Delaware’s student center at the start of the school year. Many were stylishly attired in distressed jeans and bright-colored sneakers; half tapped away silently on smartphones while the rest engaged in boisterous conversations. Eavesdropping on those conversations, however, would have been difficult for an observer not fluent in Mandarin. That’s because, with the exception of one lost-looking soul from Colombia, all the students were from China.

Among them was Yisu Fan, whose flight from Shanghai had arrived six hours earlier. Too excited to sleep, he had stayed up all night waiting for orientation at the English Language Institute to begin. Like nearly all the Chinese students at Delaware, Mr. Yisu was conditionally admitted — that is, he can begin taking university classes once he successfully completes an English program. He plans to major in finance and, after graduation, to return home and work for his father’s construction company. He was wearing hip, dark-framed glasses and a dog tag around his neck with a Chinese dragon on it. He chose to attend college more than 7,000 miles from home, Mr. Yisu said, because “the Americans, their education is very good.”

That opinion is widely shared in China, which is part of the reason the number of Chinese undergraduates in the United States has tripled in just three years, to 40,000, making them the largest group of foreign students at American colleges. While other countries, like South Korea and India, have for many years sent high numbers of undergraduates to the United States, it’s the sudden and startling uptick in applicants from China that has caused a stir at universities — many of them big, public institutions with special English-language programs — that are particularly welcoming toward international students. Universities like Delaware, where the number of Chinese students has leapt to 517 this year, from 8 in 2007.

The students are mostly from China’s rapidly expanding middle class and can afford to pay full tuition, a godsend for universities that have faced sharp budget cuts in recent years. But what seems at first glance a boon for colleges and students alike is, on closer inspection, a tricky fit for both.

Colleges, eager to bolster their diversity and expand their international appeal, have rushed to recruit in China, where fierce competition for seats at Chinese universities and an aggressive admissions-agent industry feed a frenzy to land spots on American campuses. College officials and consultants say they are seeing widespread fabrication on applications, whether that means a personal essay written by an agent or an English proficiency score that doesn’t jibe with a student’s speaking ability. American colleges, new to the Chinese market, struggle to distinguish between good applicants and those who are too good to be true.

Once in the classroom, students with limited English labor to keep up with discussions. And though they’re excelling, struggling and failing at the same rate as their American counterparts, some professors say they have had to alter how they teach.

Colleges have been slow to adjust to the challenges they’ve encountered, but are beginning to try new strategies, both to better acclimate students and to deal with the application problems. The onus is on them, says Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Peking University High School, one of Beijing’s top schools, and director of its international division. “Are American universities unhappy? Because Chinese students and parents aren’t.”

“Nothing will change,” Mr. Jiang says, “unless American colleges make it clear to students and parents that it has to.”

WENTING TANG is quick to laugh, listens to high-energy bands like Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and OK Go, and describes herself on her Facebook page as “really really fun” and “really really serious.” Ms. Tang, a junior majoring in management and international business, speaks confident, if not flawless, English. That wasn’t always the case. When she applied to the University of Delaware, her English was, in her estimation, very poor.

Ms. Tang, who went to high school in Shanghai, didn’t exactly choose to attend Delaware, a public institution of about 21,000 students that admits about half its applicants — and counts Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. among prominent graduates. Ms. Tang’s mother wanted her to attend college in the United States, and so they visited the offices of a dozen or more agents, patiently listening to their promises and stories of success.

Read more at The New York Times

Fried scholar's

Last Sunday, Rebecca Fu went to a Cantonese restaurant called Xǐ yùn lái dà jiǔdiàn 喜運來大酒店 (Happy Fortune Arrives Grand Hotel — actually a modest establisment) in Manhattan's Chinatown.  When she saw the following entry on the menu, she had no idea what it was:  xiāngjiān shìde 香煎士的.  The xiāngjiān 香煎 was not a problem; it means simply "fried" or "pan fried".  But, even though she's a graduate of Peking University, Rebecca drew a complete blank on shìde 士的.  The characters seem to mean "scholar's", but "fried scholar's" just doesn't make sense.  It was only when Rebecca asked the waiter how to pronounce 士的 in Cantonese — whereupon he said "si6 dik1″– that she understood what 士的 meant.

The usual way to say "steak" in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is niúpái 牛排, and that expression is also used in Cantonese, where it is pronounced ngau4 paai4.  But si6 dik1 士的 ("steak") is also used very commonly in speech and even, as on restaurant menus, in writing.  This is a good example of how a parallel vocabulary develops in Cantonese and other Sinitic languages:  one based on indigenous morphemes, and one on loanwords.

Cantonese has been especially prolific in borrowing words from other languages, and many of these words (I'll mention a few of them below) have entered the standard MSM lexicon.  Shanghainese has also borrowed many foreign words directly via their sounds ("clamp," "captain," "last car," etc.), and these too have often passed into the MSM lexicon.  The same is true of other topolects that are not normally written (or are not wholly writable) in Chinese characters.  In contrast, MSM is more apt to create loan translations for new terms and ideas that enter the language from abroad through calquing or through recycling (by redefinition) of old words (e.g., the MSM words for "philosophy", "religion", "economics", "literature", and so forth).  When the latter (recycled and redefined words) pass through Japan (China –> Japan [where the redefinition takes place] –> China), we may refer to such loans as "round-trip words".

Read more AT lANGUAGE lOG

BILINGUAL NET NEWSPAPER.

John Emerson, frequent commenter and proprietor of the one and only Idiocentrism (investigating the historical nooks and crannies no one else dares enter), sent me a link to this story at ChinaSmack, pointing out that:

This newspaper is not only interesting in itself, but every story and every letter to the editor is there in English and Chinese. Just hover your mouse arrow and the Chinese will pop up. The translations are idiomatic and very carefully done, as far as I can tell, and are a convenient way to build vocabulary, including slang in the letters. (E.g., 装 B "being a pretentious cunt").

What a great idea! I hope this sort of thing catches on (though, being a lot of work for little obvious profit, it probably won't). Posted by languagehat at August 31, 2011 08:44 PM

Comments

Presumably the B is being used because a lot of PRC software will literally not let you write the word for cunt (which I believe is 傻屄 - shabi in pinyin). Grass mud horse, and all that.

Posted by: afinetheorem at September 1, 2011 12:05 AM

傻屄 is 'stupid cunt'.

There are other kinds of cunt. I once heard a woman cursing someone as 笑屄 xiào bī 'laughing cunt', presumably because they were laughing. But it was a long time ago and I could have got it wrong.

屄样 bī-yàng is one I'm not sure how to translate, but it means something like 'cuntishness'. It's a curse on someone for their attitude or actions. Maybe a native speaker could explain these things better. There's a fine art to all this.

Posted by: Bathrobe at September 1, 2011 05:52 AM

Well, the ChinaSmack site says:

装B = 装屄 [zhuāng bī / zhuang1 bi1] verb. To show off, be a poser, or to act self-righteous, self-important, egotistical. To be a “pretentious cunt”. A popular version on the Shanghainese KDS BBS discussion forum is “IB” or “install B” because “zhuang” means “install” as well as “pretend.” The “B” could be any Chinese character with the “bi” sound like 逼 or 比. It can also be 13 which looks like a capital “B”. In fact, 屄 is the true character but almost never used.

On Steve Jobs, there's:

To this day, three apples have changed the world: One seduced Eve, one awakened Newton, the third one is in the hands of Steve Jobs. These three applies represent three stages: Lust, knowledge, and being a pretentious cunt, steps in mankind’s progress. We have already entered the highest state of inflated desire! Now that Jobs is gone, will you still buy the iPhone5?

Language Hat

On Google Translate, again

In a couple of postings last winter (see here and here), I already discussed Google's machine translation tool, Google Translate (GT) and expressed my skepticism about it. Today, another article on GT by David Bellos from The Independent has crossed my desktop. Three points made in that article are worth discussing.

Point number one: as I showed experimentally with my little "gay goose" investigation, and as the article confirms, GT does not really translate from any one of its 58 languages to any one of the 58 languages directly. Only a few pairs are subject to direct translation. So in fact GT does not really provide 3,306 separate translation services, as advertised. Rather, it uses the so-called "pivots", or intermediary languages. For example, if you ask GT to translate a bit of text from Farsi into Icelandic (or vice versa), the translation will be mediated by English (which is indeed the most common intermediary language, for obvious reasons).

The reason that GT uses intermediary languages is because GT does not really "translate". Instead, it searches an enormous database of translations already made by human translators for a good match. Believe it or not, a big chunk of that database is mystery novels (I just knew it that mystery novels are good for something!!!). Thus, as the author of the article puts it, "John Grisham makes a bigger contribution to the quality of GT's Icelandic-Farsi translation device than Rumi or Halldór Laxness ever will". As any human translator would know, using intermediary languages doesn't improve the quality of the translation. Many anecdotal stories about such "mediated" translations are out there and you might have heard some. If you still don't believe it, read what happened to the "happy geese" in my mediated translation exercise.

Point number two: although the author of the article David Bellos admits that GT "may also produce nonsense", he claims that

"the kind of nonsense a translation machine produces is usually less dangerous than human-sourced bloopers. You can usually see instantly when GT has failed to get it right, because the output makes no sense, and so you disregard it. (This is why you should never use GT to translate into a language you do not know very well. Use it only to translate into a language in which you are sure you can recognise nonsense.)"

Read more at Languages of The World

How Google Translate works

The web giant's translation service might serve up the odd batch of nonsense, but it's still one of the smartest communication tools of all time, as David Bellos explains

PA

Find the right words: human translators behave in a similar way to Google Translate

• enlarge

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn't an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.

In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.

It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.

Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

Much of the time, it works. It's quite stunning. And it is largely responsible for the new mood of optimism about the prospects for "fully automated high-quality machine translation".

Google Translate could not work without a very large pre-existing corpus of translations. It is built upon the millions of hours of labour of human translators who produced the texts that GT scours.

Read more at The Independent

THE MOST CHINESE CHARACTER.

Victor Mair has a fascinating post at the Log about the Chinese character 和 hé ("harmony, peace"). It starts from the relatively uninteresting fact that it has been chosen "The Most 'Chinese' Chinese Character," as the title of Josh Chin's Wall Street Journal story has it, but Mair goes on to point out that it is used to write at least five other words or morphemes beyond the one in question, and that the Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang and the Gwoyeu Tsyrdean (Guoyu Cidian) give different sets of six pronunciations:

It is interesting that, on the Mainland, the language authorities have declared that the pronunciation hàn ("with, and") no longer exists, and we cannot find it in even such unabridged dictionaries of record as Hanyu Da Zidian... and Hanyu Da Cidian.... Thus, on the Mainland, people do not understand me when I say the name of one of my favorite series in Taiwan, Shū hàn Rén 書和人 (Books and People), a set of books that I avidly devoured in Taiwan four decades ago, and can still today buy new volumes under the same title and with the same pronunciation.

Then he goes on to discuss the history of the character:

Even its graphic form is complicated by the fact that 和 is actually an early (probably more than a couple of thousand years old) simplified character. The original form — going all the way back to the oracle bone inscriptions 3,200 years ago — was 龢, with 22 strokes. On the left is a musical instrument, now called yuè, which depicts a mouth blowing over a row of windpipes — this is the semantophore, which conveys the notion of "harmony" or, perhaps more accurately, something like "consonance" (not of the verbal sort, but of the musical type), or just "having to do with a pleasant sound." On the right was the phonophore, hé 禾 ("cereal crop, millet"), which functioned as the sound-bearing element. Later, people surely must have grown weary of writing all those strokes for the row of musical pipes and their openings at the top, and decided to dispense with them, leaving just the mouth that blew into the openings of the pipes. This (the mouth), somewhat surprisingly, got shifted to the right side of the character, hence the character was transformed from the cumbersome 龢 to the streamlined, but less explicit, 和. I say that the move of the mouth from the left to the right is rather unexpected, because usually characters with mouth radicals — of which there are roughly two thousand — have the mouth on the left side, where it began (top left) in the old form of 龢.

Read more at languagehat

The Most ‘Chinese’ Chinese Character?

If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, you can infer a nation’s spirit from its language, then what to make of modern Chinese?

Associated Press

Pupils write the Chinese character “He” — recently named the most Chinese of Chinese characters — with brushes during a ceremony to celebrate Confucius’ birthday at the Confucius Temple in Qufu, his birthplace, east China’s Shandong Province.

In a revealing exercise, China Heritage—a National Geographic-like monthly with a glossy interest in the roots of Chineseness—recently organized an effort to identify the 100 Chinese characters that “carry the most meaning for Chinese culture.”

The results are fascinating, alternately rife with political irony and revealing of a Chinese reality not always apparent to outsiders.

Culled from an initial pool of 374 characters suggested by an unidentified committee of historians and linguists, the most Chinese of Chinese ideograms was identified as 和 (pronounced ‘huh’ and typically Romanized as ‘he’)—the character for an indistinct concept often (though clumsily) translated as “peace” or “togetherness.”

The selection won’t come as a surprise to China watchers. He is the first character in both “harmonious society” (和谐社会; hexie shehui) and “peaceful rise” (和平崛起; heping jueqi) —terms the Chinese Communist Party has recently coined to explain its domestic and foreign policies, respectively, and which are therefore printed ad nauseam in newspapers and on propaganda banners throughout the country. (As a Xinhua report about the list notes, the words “harmony” and “peace” featured heavily in the Zhang Yimou-directed opening ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.)

Read more at CHINAREALTIMEREPORT

etymology of an insult

etymology of an insult

So this morning an American friend and I were negotiating with my friend's ayi to come and clean for us once a week, and worked out a figure of about 250 kuai a month as fair (about 25 quid). I offered that and she laughed and said that was fine, but could it be 260, because 250 was a swearword.  And both my friend and I were "Huh?"  Which wouldn't be strange if it was just me, but said friend has really, really good Chinese.

Anyway, I asked a couple of people and they confirmed that yes, 250 was either "crazy" or "stupid." So I assumed that it must sound like a similar phrase, but couldn't think of it, and my Chinese friends said, nope, 250 just meant stupid and they had no idea why.  My friend Baidu'd it up, and -

Apparently it comes from the custom of stringing copper cash into strings called diao in ancient china.And one diao had 1000 cash on it.So there evolved a humble term "ban diaozi,“ ”half a diao," that literary types would use self-deprecatingly.That's not considered an insult now.  But then the insult "250" emerged, because it's half a half a diao, i.e., a guy who really is stupid.

That is one hell of a complex insult.  But I can see "sanba" (3.8/bitch) sticking around for the same reasons - that one was invented fairly recently, because March 8 is Woman's Day.

BLOOD & TREASURE

Lu Xun, An Outsider's Chats about Written Language

translation by Victor H. Mair

Lu Xun1 (1881–1936) is generally regarded as the greatest Chinese writer of the twentieth century.

He never produced a novel, but he wrote numerous memorable short stories and countless essays and letters that had an enormous impact on modern China. Among his most celebrated works are "The True Story of Ah-Q" (A-Q zhengzhuan), "Diary of a Madman" (Kuangren riji), and "My Old Hometown" (Guxiang). Lu Xun was also a deeply learned chronicler and critic of Chinese literature; his Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe) remains authoritative to this day.

From the Hawai'i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, edited by Victor H. Mair, Nancy S. Steinhardt, and Paul R. Goldin, © 2005 by the University of Hawai'i Press. Used with the permission of the University of Hawai'i Press. This translation is by Victor H. Mair.

But Lu Xun was much more than an outstanding littérateur. He was also a trenchant social commentator whose impassioned pleas for reform were instrumental in guiding China's path toward progress — even for many decades after his death. He made bitterly honest comments on virtually all aspects of Chinese institutions, culture, and customs. Among the subjects that attracted Lu Xun's attention was the Chinese script. So deep were his feelings about the Chinese writing system that he was reported to have proclaimed shortly before his death, "Hanzi bu mie, Zhongguo bi wang" (If Chinese characters do not fade away, China will perish!). While this is admittedly a radical formulation of the problem posed by China's archaic script in the context of efforts to modernize the nation, Lu Xun was by no means the first Chinese scholar to blame the writing system for his nation's backwardness. Indeed, Lu Xun had been preceded by dozens of individuals from the late-Qing period onward who had devised simple and more efficient writing systems, including alphabets, for the various Chinese languages. And, as early as the Song dynasty, the renowned and erudite polymath Zheng Qiao (1104–1162) had noted some of the deficiencies of the Chinese script.

Lu Xun returned to the subject of the Chinese writing system on numerous occasions throughout his career, but his most sustained and probing examination of the characters is to be found in the remarkable text translated here. Because An Outsider's Chats about Written Language (Menwai wentan) is both enormously informative and richly entertaining, we have chosen to present the text in its entirety. It should be noted that the first word of the title, Menwai, is multivalent. Among its applicable meanings here are "outdoors" and — with han (man, fellow) understood at the end — "novice, layman, greenhorn." Since Lu Xun was deeply familiar with the script, its nature, and history, he was obviously being polite in styling himself a menwai(han).

Menwai wentan first appeared in the pages of the "Free Discussions" (Ziyou tan) supplement of the influential Shanghai newspaper Shen bao, from August 24 through September, 1934 under the pseudonym Hua Yu. This name may literally be rendered as "China's Prison," but it is also a perfect homophone for "China's Language," a pun that was almost surely in the back of Lu Xun's mind when he chose it for this particular work. — VHM

1. Introduction

I'm told that the heat in Shanghai this year hasn't been equaled in the past sixty years. During the day, we'd go out to grub for a living, and, in the evening, we'd return with our heads hanging. In our rooms it would still be hot, and, on top of that, there were mosquitoes. At such times, paradise could only be found outdoors (menwai). Probably because [Shanghai is] next to the sea, there's always a breeze so you don't need to fan yourself. The neighbors who lived in the flats and garrets in the vicinity would also sit outside. Although we knew each other somewhat, we didn't often have a chance to meet. Some of them were shop clerks, others were proofreaders in publishing houses, and still others were accomplished draftsmen. Everybody would be totally exhausted and sighing over how hard life was. But at least this was a time when we were free, and so we would talk freely.

The limits of our conversations were actually quite broad. We talked about the drought, praying for rain,2 picking up girls,3 a three-inch shrunken mummy,4 foreign rice,5 naked gams,6 and we also talked about classical writing, vernacular language, and colloquial speech.7 Because I'd written several pieces in the vernacular language, when it came to such subjects as classical writing, they were particularly interested in hearing what I had to say, and, to oblige them, I did speak a great deal. In this way, we passed two or three nights before we were diverted by other topics and, at any rate, had exhausted the subject. Little did I expect that, a few days later, several of my neighbors would ask me to write out what I had said.

Among them, there were those who believed me because I had read some old books, others who believed me because I had read a few foreign books, and still others who believed me because I had read both old books and foreign books. But several of them, on the contrary, for these very reasons did not believe me and said that I was a "bat."8 When I touched upon classical writing, they would say with a smile, "You're not one of the eight great prose stylists9 of the Tang and Song periods. Can we believe you?" When I talked about colloquial speech, they again said with a smile, "You're not one of the toiling masses. What sort of big talk are you feeding us?"

Yet there is some truth to this. When we were discussing the drought, mention was made of an official who went to the countryside to inspect the drought conditions. He claimed that there were some places that really wouldn't have had to experience the drought but were now experiencing it because the peasants were lazy and had not manned the irrigation pails. But one newspaper carried a report about a sixty-year-old man who, because his son had died of exhaustion while manning the irrigation pails and, seeing that the drought continued as before, committed suicide since he had no other way out. The views of the official and the country-folk are so far apart as this! Such being the case, I'm afraid that ultimately my evening chats are no more than the idle words of an outsider in his leisure.

After the tropical storm passed, the weather became a bit cooler; but (sic) I finally fulfilled the wishes of those who had hoped that I would write out my opinions. What I have written is much simpler than the words I had spoken, but the overall import differs little and may be considered a copy for my peers to read. At the time, I simply relied on my memory to cite old books here and there. The spoken word, like the wind, rushes past the ear, and so it is not important if you make some mistakes. Committing it to paper made me hesitate, and, furthermore, I was stymied by not having the original texts to check. All I can do is ask my reader to correct my errors as he encounters them.

Written and inscribed on the night of August 16, 1934

2. Who Invented the Written Word?

Who invented the written word?

We are accustomed to hearing stories about how a certain thing was always invented by a sage of ancient times. Naturally, we would ask the same question about the written word. At once, there is an answer from some forgotten source: writing was invented by Cang Jie.10 This is what is advocated by most scholars, and naturally they have their sources for it. I have even seen a portrait of this Cang Jie. He was a monkish11 old man with four eyes. It would seem that, if one is going to create writing, he'd first off better have an unusual visage. Those of us who have just two eyes are not only insufficiently talented; even our features are unsuited for the task.

However, the author of the Book of Changes ([original note:] I don't know who he was) was rather more intelligent. He said, "In high antiquity, government was carried out with knotted cords12 [to make records]. The sages of subsequent ages substituted [written] documents and contracts for these." He does not mention Cang Jie but only says "the sages of subsequent ages."

And he does not mention "invented" but only speaks of an exchange. He was really being very cautious. Perhaps, without thinking about it, he did not believe that in antiquity there could have been a person who created a large number of graphs all by himself so he just gives us this one vague sentence.

But what sort of figure was responsible for replacing knotted cords with documents and contracts? Was he a writer? That's not a bad answer, judged from the current reality of the so-called "writers" who are most fond of flaunting their writing skills but utterly inept when their pens are snatched away from them. Indeed, one must first think of them, and, indeed, they ought to expend a bit of effort on behalf of their own bread-winning tool. Yet this is not true. Although people in prehistoric times sang songs when they worked and sang songs when they were wooing, by no means did they make drafts of their songs or keep manuscripts of them. This is because, even in their dreams, they wouldn't have been able to conceive of selling manuscripts of their poems or of compiling their collected works. Furthermore, in the society of that time, there were no newspaper publishers and bookstores, so writing was of no utility whatsoever. According to what some scholars tell us, it would appear that those who devoted their labors to script must have been the historians.

In primitive society, at first there were probably only mages13 [who were in charge of spiritual and ritual matters]. It was not until after a period of gradual evolution when things became complicated that there was a need to record such matters as sacrifice, hunting, war, and so forth. The mages were then forced to think of a way to make records in addition to carrying out their basic duty of "inviting the spirits to descend."14 This is the beginning of "the [professional] historian."15 Moreover, as we can tell from the phrase "[cause the exploits of the feudal lords to] rise up to Heaven,"16 another of their basic duties was to burn the booklets in which they had recorded the major events concerning their tribal chieftain and his administration so that god above could read them. Consequently, they likewise had to write compositions, although this was probably something that occurred subsequently. Still later, duties were divided up even more clearly, whereupon there came into being the historian, who specialized in keeping records of things. Script is an indispensable instrument for the historian. Some ancient has said, "Cang Jie was the Yellow Emperor's historian."17 We cannot trust the first part of the sentence, but the fact that it does point out the relationship between history and script is very interesting. As for the later "men of letters" who used script to write such fine lines as "Oh, my love! Ah, I am dying!" they were merely enjoying the fruits of others' labors and "do not merit consideration here."

3. How Did the Characters Come into Existence?

According to the Book of Changes, before there were documents and contracts, there clearly were knotted cords. Whenever the country-folk where I'm from have something important they want to do the next day and are afraid of forgetting it, they often say, "Tie a knot in your belt!" Then did our ancient sages also use a long cord in which they tied a knot for everything? I'm afraid this wouldn't work. If there were only a few knots you could still remember [what they signified], but once there were many it would be hopeless. Or perhaps that was precisely something like the eight trigrams18 of Emperor Fuxi,19 with three cords in each unit. If all were unknotted that would be qian (male, Heaven), but if all three had a knot in the center that would be kun (female, Earth). I'm afraid this isn't right either. If there were only eight units, you still might be able [to get by], but if there were sixty-four units, it would be difficult to remember [what they all stood for], much less if there were 512 units!20 There still survives in Peru the quipu.21 It uses a horizontal cord and a number of vertical strings hanging from it which, pulled back and forth, are knotted [and unknotted]. Although it looks like a net without really being one, it seems as though it could actually be used to represent a relatively large amount of ideas. I suspect that the knotted cords of our prehistoric ancestors were like this. However, since they were replaced by documents and contracts and were not the direct ancestors of the latter, there's no harm setting them aside for the moment.

The "Goulan Stele Inscription"22 of Emperor Yu23 of the Xia dynasty was forged by Taoists.

The oldest characters that we can see on genuine artifacts are the oracle-bone inscriptions and bronze inscriptions of the Shang dynasty.24 But these are already quite advanced, so it is virtually impossible to find a single primitive form. Occasionally, however, one can glimpse a small amount of realistic pictography, for example a deer or an elephant. From these pictographic shapes, one can discover clues related to script: the Chinese script is founded on pictography.

The buffalo painted in the Altamira Caves25 of Spain are famous remains of primitive man, and many art historians say that this is truly "art for art's sake," that primitive man painted them for amusement. But this explanation cannot escape from being overly "modern,"26 because primitive man did not have as much leisure as nineteenth-century 27 artists. He had a reason for painting each buffalo, something that had to do with buffalo, whether it was hunting the buffalo or casting a spell on them. Even now people gawk at the advertisements for cigarettes and movies [posted] on walls in Shanghai. One can imagine what a commotion such an extraordinary sight must have caused in unsophisticated, primitive society! As they looked at [the paintings], they would come to know that this thing [called] a buffalo could, after all, be drawn on a flat surface with lines. At the same time, it seems as though they came to recognize [the drawing as a graph representing the word] "buffalo." While admiring the artists' ability, nobody invited them to earn some money by writing their autobiography, so their names have passed into obscurity. However, there was more than one Cang Jie in [ancient] society. Some of them carved designs on sword hilts; others drew pictures on doors. [Such pictographic representations] made an impression and were passed on from mind to mind, from mouth to mouth. [In this fashion,] the number of characters increased [to the point that], once the scribes collected them, they could make do to record events. I suspect that the origins of Chinese writing are to be found within this sort of process.

Naturally, later on there must have been a continual increase in the number of characters, but this is something that the scribes could have managed by themselves. By inserting the new characters — which, moreover, were pictographic — among the familiar characters, others would have easily guessed what they signified.28 Even up to the present time, China is still producing new characters. However, if anyone is intent on being a new Cang Jie, they will surely fail. Zhu Yu29 of [the southern kingdom of] Wu and Wu Zetian30 of the Tang [dynasty] both created bizarre characters, but all their efforts were wasted.

Nowadays, it is Chinese chemists who are the best at creating characters. [The characters they come up with for] the names of many elements and compounds are very hard to recognize, and it is even difficult to read out their sounds. To tell the truth, whenever I see [such characters] I get a headache. I feel that it would be far better and more straightforward to use the Latin names current in all other nations. If you are incapable of recognizing the twenty-some letters [of the Roman alphabet] — please pardon me for speaking bluntly — then you probably won't be able to learn chemistry very well either.

Read more at Pinyin.info

The Monks of Kubla Khan

Text based on Budge, E.A. Wallis. The Monk of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China; or The History of the Life and Travels of Rabban Sawma, Envoy and Plenipotentiary of the Mongol Khans to the Kings of Europe and Markos who as Yahbh-Allaha III Became Patriarch of the Nestorian Church in Asia. London: The Religious Tract Society, 1928.

Bar Sauma

 

Brief Biography: Bar Sauma, born in Tai-tu (Northern China) about 1260, was a descendant of the Onggud Turks who joined the Mongols early in the reign of Chinggis Khan. Like other Onggud Turks, his family were members of the Nestorian church, the most active Christian church in Central Asia. By the age of twenty-five, Sauma had taken vows to become a Nestorian monk and built a cell to meditate in isolation. Able to read Syraic, Turkic, and possibly Chinese, he was well-educated as well as pious. Fired by a zeal to visit Nestorian monuments in the Middle East and Jerusalem, Sauma and his student Markos, later to become the patriarch and leader of the Nestorian church centered in Baghdad, set out on their arduous pilgrimage sometime before 1278. They reached the Mongol territories in Persia, but were unable to continue their journey to Jerusalem because of the political situation. Instead Sauma eventually found himself appointed to a diplomatic mission which would take him to Constantinople, Genoa, Paris, Bordeaux, and Rome and which would involve negotiations for joint operations to force the Mamluks of Egypt out of the Holy Land. He died in Baghdad in 1313 without reaching Jerusalem.

Brief Itinerary: Leaving Taitu shortly after Marco Polo arrived in China, Sauma and Markos followed the Yellow River southwest to Ningxia. From there, they took the southern silk road below the Taklamakan Desert passing through Miran and following a course along the Chenchen river for about 500 miles to Khotan. The section of their travel from Ningxia to Khotan took two months. They proceeded to Kashgar, Talas, and Tus, the Ilykhan capital of Khurasan, Maragha, and finally Baghdad. From there the two men travelled to Nestorian centers in Beth Garmai, Arbil, Mosul, and back to Baghdad. From there they went to Tabriz and Ani, and then headed to port cities abong the Black Sea. At this point Armenian and Georgian friends advised them of the great danger of trying to reach the Holy Land, so they return to Maragha.

Syrian translator's Prayer and Preface omitted.

CHAPTER I.

THE HISTORY OF RABBAN SAWMA.

There was a certain man who was a believer, and he was a nobleman and a fearer of God. He was rich in the things of this world, and he was well endowed with the qualities of nature; he belonged to a famous family and a well-known tribe. His name was SHIBAN the Sa'ora (i.e. the Inspector or Visitor--Periodeutes). He dwelt in the city which is called KHAN BALIGH or KHAN BALIK (i.e. Pekin), that is to say (4) the royal city in the country of the East. He married according to the law a woman whose name was KEYAMTA. And when they had lived together for a long time, and they had no heir, they prayed to God continually and besought Him with frequent supplications not to deprive them of a son who would continue [their] race. And He who giveth comfort in His gracious mercy received their petition, and He showed them compassion. For it is His wont to receive the entreaty of those who are broken of heart, and-to hearken unto the groaning of those who make supplications and petitions [to Him]. " Everyone who asketh

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receiveth; and he who seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it is opened to him " (Matt. vii. 8), He said, confidently concerning the certain hope. And behold, this is performed for both orders (i.e. sexes), namely, men and women, when petitions are presented with a right intention. For behold, Hanna, the wife of Halkana was not prohibited, seeing that she made entreaty with a right object (I Sam. i. 10 ff.), and the wife of Menokh (Manoah) was not rejected, and she received the angel readily in her chamber (Judges xiii. 2 f.).

Now God made the spirit of conception to breathe upon the woman Keyamta, and she brought forth a (5) son, and they called his name " SAWMA" [i.e. the son who was obtained by fasting; his full name was " BAR SAWMA," i.e.; the " son of the fast."]. And they rejoiced [with] a great joy, neighbours of his family and his relations rejoiced at his birth.

And when they had brought him (after a praiseworthy system of education) to the period when he was capable of receiving instruction, they handed him over to a worthy teacher, and before him (i.e. under his direction) they trained him diligently in ecclesiastical learning; and they betrothed him to a maiden and rejoiced in him. He was held to be worthy to receive the grade of priest, and he was numbered among the ranks (?) of the clergy, and he became Keeper in

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the church of above-mentioned city. He led a life of strict chastity and humility, and he devoted himself with great diligence to the acquisition of spiritual excellences, and he struggled to make himself fit for the things of the world which is to come. And when he was twenty years of age the divine fire was kindled in his heart, and it burned up the brambles (or thorny growth) of sin, and cleansed his chaste soul from impurity and contamination of every kind. For he preferred more than any other thing whatsoever the love of his Lord, and, grasping the plough, he was unwilling to look behind him (Luke ix. 62). He cast away forthwith the shadow of the world, and renounced straightway the desirable things thereof. (6) He esteemed dainty meats as things which had no existence, and he rejected wholly the drinks which make a man drunk.

Now when his parents perceived this, great pain overtook them, and acute sorrow cleaved to them, because their only son was separating himself from them. They rose up and with broken hearts made supplication to him, and brought before him promises of things of this world, saying, "Why, O our precious son, is separation from us beloved by thee? How is it that our affliction is desired by thee? Why is our mourning sweet in thy sight? Consider now. To whom will our wealth revert? Think, who is our heir? Ponder well who will be the master of the [produce of] our toil?

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How can it possibly be pleasing to thee for our seed and name to be blotted out? Why doth the thought of thy heart suggest that strangers should be our heirs?" And having persuaded him with tears in this manner, and having stirred up grief in him by their lamentation and talk similar [to that given above], he hearkened to them outwardly, and dwelt with them as far as his body was concerned, but very unwillingly. And during the three years in which he ministered to his parents according to the body, he never (7) ceased from his toil, and he contended continually in his laborious career.

And when [his parents] saw that their exhortations were of no avail, and that, in comparison with the love of Christ, their words were accounted as nothing, they left him to perform his desire. Then he divided all his possessions, that is to say, his apparel and his clothing generally (or furniture), among the poor, and took the garb of the monk; and he received the tonsure from the holy and pious father, Mar Giwargis (George) the Metropolitan. And he began to toil in the vineyard of his Lord with the hope of the kingdom which is to come, and the confidence the possession of heavenly happiness, and that he would receive the whole dinar as his wages. (Matt. xx. 1-16). He set apart a cell for himself and he shut himself up therein seven years; and after that [period] he decided to remove

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himself from the children of men, and to practice himself in the ascetic life in the mountain, in a place which was wholly isolated, so that he might rest there [undisturbed] in his life as a recluse. Then he set out and went a journey of one day from their [i.e. his parents'] city, and he elected to dwell there. And he found (8) a certain place where there was a cave, and there was by the side of it in that mountain a spring of water. And he dwelt there peacefully and thanked his Lord, which held him to be so worthy that at length the report of him went forth in that region, and men used to gather together about him to hear his words, and honour was set apart for him (i.e. ascribed to him) by every man.

 

CHAPTER II.

THE HISTORY OF MAR YAHBH-ALLAHA,

THE CATHOLICUS AND PATRIARCH OF THE EAST.

In the foreknowledge of God everything is known. And the thoughts of the children of men, whether they belong to the right hand (i.e. be good), or whether they belong to the left hand (i.e. be bad), all of them, even before they are formed in the breast, are revealed unto Him. He therefore, in accordance with their character, elects and makes righteous [if they be good], and because of them [if they be bad] He chastiseth and punisheth. Now unto Moses it was said, "Behold, I have given thee [as] God to Pharaoh." (Exod. vii. I). And his election maketh known concerning the good disposition [of Moses] (9) and the hardness of the heart of Pharaoh. For even before Pharaoh existed, it was known [to God] that he would be hard: [of heart], and he was rejected. For unto Jeremiah God said, " Before I had formed thee in the belly I knew thee, 'and before thou didst go forth from the womb I sanctified thee and gave thee to be a prophet to the nations" (Jer. i. 5). And Paul said, "God hath not cast aside His people who from the very beginning were known to Him" (Rom. xi. I, 2),

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because assuredly, of [their] good will and pure thoughts. Now, certain characteristics of election make themselves visible in the person of him that is elected, and certain radiances shine forth from him which makes known that he is worthy of grace. The man who hath an enlightened mind perceiveth these, but the man who hath not an understanding mind knoweth them not. Since the person about whom we are going to speak was elected because of his superior discipline (or, exalted life), it is necessary for us to describe the manner of his election, and show how of a certainty it contributed to the perfect will.

There was, in the city of KAWSHANG, of the country of the East, a certain righteous and believing man (10), pure and spotless, who served God continually in His church, and observed His laws strictly and carefully. [The city of Kawshang, i.e. Kung-Tschang lay between Pekin and Tangut, and was about fifteen days' journey from the former city. Chabot would identify it with Ho-tchung-fu in the province of Shan-si.] His name was BAYNIEL; he was an archdeacon and he had four sons. The youngest of them [who was born in the year of our Lord 1245] was called MARKOS (Mark), and he was trained in ecclesiastical learning more than all his brethren……….

[The text is defective here, or some words have been omitted.]

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and they admonished (or exhorted) him concerning these and much like matters, and it seemed to them that they might be talking rather to a statue than to a rational man. But even after suffering affliction in many ways he did not turn back from his course, and his mind did not resist from its quest. On the contrary he made straight his aim, and after fifteen days of great labour he arrived at the place where RABBAN SAWMA was. And he gave the salutation of peace to RABBAN SAWMA, who rejoiced in him and received him gladly.

And after MARK had rested and was refreshed RABBAN SAWMA asked him, saying, "My son, whence comest thou? And how did it happen to thee that thou hast come to this mountain? (11) In what city do thy kinsfolk dwell? Who is thy father, and whose son art thou? "

And MARK answered him, saying, " I am the son of Bayniel the archdeacon of the city of Kawshang, and I am called ' Mark.' "

And RABBAN SAWMA said unto him, "What is thy reason for coming to me with such labour and fatigue?" And MARK said unto him, "I wish to become a monk (or anchorite). Because I heard the report of thee I dropped everything and have sought thee; deprive me not of my desire." And RABBAN SAWMA said unto him, "O our brother, this path is difficult. Even the old [and experienced] monks endure the hardness

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thereof with the greatest difficulty; shall I permit youths and children to Journey on it?" And having besought him for many reasons to return to his parents, and MARK having refused to do so, RABBAN SAWMA admitted him [to his cell] and taught him; and he clothed him in a woollen garment, and made him to labour in the ascetic life. After three years MARK received the tonsure, that is to say the garb of the monk, from the pious Metropolitan MAR NESTORIS (Nestorius) on the first day of the week, or the Sunday [when the prayer beginning] "Rukha Paraklita" is said. And he continued to perform many ascetic labours and kept the fasts which lasted all day until the evening. And [the monks] in that mountain used to toil in (12) the cultivation of purity and holiness, and they were comforted by God unto Whom they had committed their souls.

CHAPTER III.

RABBAN SAWMA AND RABBAN MARKOS WISH

TO GO

TO JERUSALEM

One day they meditated, saying, "It would be exceedingly helpful to us if we were to leave this region and set out for the West, for we could then [visit] the tombs of the holy martyrs and Catholic Fathers and be blessed [by them]. And if Christ, the Lord of the Universe, prolonged our lives, and sustained us by His grace, we could go to Jerusalem, so that we might receive complete pardon for our offences, and absolution for our sins of foolishness. Now although RABBAN SAWMA opposed RABBAN MARK, and [tried to] frighten him with the toil of the journey, and the fatigue of travelling, and the terror of the ways, and the tribulations that would beset him in a (13) foreign country, RABBAN MARK burned to set out on the road. His mind seemed to reveal to him that there were treasures laid up for him in the West, and he pressed RABBAN SAWMA with his words, and importuned him to depart. And the two of them having agreed together that neither of them should be separated from his companion, even if one of them might have to

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submit to what was evil for his sake, they rose up and distributed their furniture, and the objects which they used in everyday life, among the poor, and they went to that city (i.e. Pekin) so that they might take companions for the journey [i.e. join a caravan] and provide themselves with food for the way.

Now when the Christians who were living there became acquainted with them, and knew their intention, they gathered together about them so that they might make them abandon their plan. And they said [unto them}, "Peradventure ye do not know how very far off that region is to which ye would go? Or, perhaps ye have not the least idea in your minds, or have forgotten, how difficult it will be for you to travel over the roads, and that ye will never reach there? Nay, sit ye down here, and strive to perform the works whereunto ye have been called. For it is said, 'The kingdom of heaven is within you'" (Luke xvii. 21). And RABBAN SAWMA and RABBAN MARK replied, "It is a long time since we (14) put on the garb of the monastic life, and we have renounced the world; we consider ourselves to be dead men in respect of it. Toil doth not terrify us, neither doth fear disturb us. There is, however, one thing which we ask of you: for the love of Christ pray for us. And ye shall cast away the word which would produce doubt (or hesitation), and shall make supplication to God that our desire may be

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fulfilled." [And the Christians of that city] said, "Depart in peace." And they kissed each other, and parted with bitter tears and distressful words, saying, "Depart in peace. And may our Lord, Whom ye seek, be with you, and may He allot to you that which is pleasing to Him, and will be of help to you! Amen."

And RABBAN SAWMA and RABBAN MARK came to the city of KAWSHANG. And when the people of the city and the parents of RABBAN MARK heard that these two monks had come there, they went out to meet them with joy, and they welcomed them with gladness and delight, and they escorted them into the church with great honour. And they enquired of them how they had come to make the journey thither. Now they thought that the two monks were going to tarry with them, and that RABBAN MARK had done so in order that he might be near the people of his family (I5). And when they knew of a certainty that they were going to Jerusalem, and that they had made their plan to travel to the West, they suffered greatly and were sorely afflicted.

And the report of the arrival of the two monks reached the lords of that city, KONBOGHA (i.e. Sun-worshipper) and IFOGHA (or IBOGHA) (i.e. Moon-worshipper), the sons-in-law of the King of Kings, KUBLAI KHAN (Plate XII), and as soon as they heard the report they sent messengers and had

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the two monks brought to the Camp. And they received them with gladness, and the fire of love for them burned in their breasts. And when the Lords knew that they were "going to flee from us," they began to say unto them, "Why are ye leaving this country of ours and going to the West? For we have taken very great trouble to draw hither monks and fathers from the West. How can we allow you to go away?" RABBAN SAWMA said unto them, "We (16) have cast away the world. And as long as we live in the society of men there will be no peace to us. Therefore it is right that we should flee because of the love of Christ, Who gave Himself unto death for our redemption. Whatsoever is in the world we have cast behind us. Although your love moveth us not to depart, and your gracious goodness would hold us fast, and your alms are bestowed upon us lavishly; and although it is grateful to us to sojourn with you, we remember the Lord's word which saith, 'What shall it profit a man if he possess the whole world and lose his soul? And what shall a man give as a substitute for his soul?' (Matt. xvi. 26). We earnestly desire the separation, but wherever we shall be we shall always remember, according to our feebleness, both by night and by day, your kingdom in [our] prayers."

And when the Lords of the city saw that their words had no effect upon them, and that they would

TRAVELS OF SAWMA AND MARKOS 137

not yield to their persuasion, they selected for them gifts, namely, beasts on which to ride, and gold, and silver, and wearing apparel [and rugs]. Then the two monks said, "We have no need of any [of these things]. For what can we do with these possessions? (17) And how can we possibly carry such a weight [as] this?" And the kings mentioned above replied, "Ye have no knowledge of the length of this journey, and the expenses which it demands. We, however, do know, and we advise you not to set out empty [handed]; if ye do ye will be unable to arrive at the place which ye have decided to be your destination. Accept then these gifts from us as a loan (or trust), and if some occasion of necessity should befall you, spend what ye need from them; if, on the other hand, the necessity does not arise, and ye arrive safe and sound, distribute them among the monasteries and habitations of the monks which are there, and the Fathers (i.e. Bishops), so that we may enjoy association with our Western Fathers. For it is said, 'Let your superfluity be [a supply] for those who are in want' " (2 Cor. viii. 13). Then the two monks, seeing that the kings were giving with a sincere heart, accepted what they gave to them. And they bade farewell to them sorrowfully, and they shed tears wherewith joy was mingled.

And they came from thence to the city of TANGOTH [i.e. TANGKUT, or TANGAT, or THANGCHU,

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a country in Central Asia; its capital was HIATCHEU, or NING-HIA-FU]. When the people of that city heard (18) that RABBAN SAWMA and RABBAN MARK had come there in order to go to Jerusalem, they went forth eagerly to meet them, that is to say, old men and women, young men and youths, and boys and young children, for the people of TANGOTH were ardent believers, and their minds were pure. And they loaded the two monks with gifts of every kind, and they received their blessings, and a crowd escorted them on their way, and shed tears, saying, "The Lord Who hath elected you to the honour of His service shall Himself be with you. Amen."

And from there they went to the country of LOTON [? KHOTAN, or HO-THIAN, or YUTHIAN, a city between TANGOTH and KASHGAR], a toilsome and fatiguing journey of two months; the region was a bare and barren desert and it was without inhabitants, because its waters were bitter, and no crops are sown there. And on the whole journey there were only eight days when, with the greatest difficulty, was sweet water found which the travellers could carry with them.(1) And in the days when they arrived at LOTON it happened that a war was raging between the King of Kings (19) KUBLAI KHAN and King OKO ['O-'ho, Commander-in-chief of the army of Mien?].

---

(1) Or perhaps the meaning is, "was sweet water found wherewith to load (i.e. to fill) the water-skins."

---

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And OKO had fled from him and had entered [this] country, and destroyed thousands of men therein. The caravan roads and ways had been cut, and grain (?) was scarce and could not be found; and many died of hunger and perished through want.

And after six months the two monks went forth from that place and came to the country of KASHKAR [or KASHGAR, a city on the frontiers of CHINA and TURKESTAN]. And they saw that the city was empty of its inhabitants, because it had been already plundered by the enemy. And because the aim of the monks was right, and they pleased God with all their hearts, He delivered them from every affliction, and no suffering attacked them, and He saved them from obstructions by highway robbers and thieves.

And they came to the place where King KAIDO [a nephew of KUBLAI KHAN] was encamped by the Teleos (i.e. TALAS). And they went into his presence, and prayed that his life would be preserved, and they blessed his kingdom, and they asked him for a written order so that no man in his country might do them harm. And with the greatest difficulty (20) and in a state of exhaustion whereto fear was added, they arrived at KHORASAN, [a province of north-eastern Persia, which lay between Persian 'Irak and Afghanistan]. Having lost the greater part of what they had on the road, they went to the monastery of Saint MAR SEHYON,

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which was in the neighbourhood of the city of TUS [the capital of KHORASAN], and they were blessed by the bishop who lived therein and by the monks. And they thought (i.e. felt) that they had been born into the world anew, and they gave thanks unto God in Whom they had trusted; they had placed their hope in Him, and had been delivered, for He is the sustainer and helper of every one who maketh entreaty unto Him.

And having enjoyed the conversation of those brethren they set out to go to ADHORBIJAN [a frontier province of Persia, on the north-west], so that they might travel from there to BAGHDAD, to MAR DENHA, the Catholicus [he succeeded MAKIKA A.GR. I577=A.D. 1266, according to Bar Hebraeus, Chron. Eccles., sect. ii, p. 439]. Now; it happened that Mar Catholicus had come to MARAGHAH [a town of ADHORBIJAN the capital of HULAGU KHAN], and they met him there. And at the sight of him their joy grew great, and their gladness was increased, and their minds were made to be at peace, and their anxious thoughts were set at rest. And they fell down on the ground before him, and they wept as they did homage to him (21) and they behaved as if they saw our Lord JESUS CHRIST in the person of MAR DENHA, the Catholicus. May his memory be for blessing! And they said unto him, "The mercies of God [shown to us] are many, and His grace is poured out abundantly upon us since

TRAVELS OF SAWMA AND MARKOS 141

we have seen the glorious and spiritual face of our General Father." And when he asked them, "Whence [come] ye?" they replied, "From the countries of the East, from KHAN BALIK, the city of the King of Kings [KUBLAI] KHAN. We have come to be blessed by you, and by the Fathers (i.e. Bishops), and the monks, and the holy men of this quarter of the world. And if a road [openeth] to us, and God hath mercy upon us, we shall go to JERUSALEM.

And when the Catholicus saw their tears, and that they were moved with gladness at their meeting with him, his mercy showed itself unto them, and he comforted them and said unto them, Assuredly, O my sons, the Angel of Providence shall protect you on this difficult journey, and he shall be a guide unto you until the completion of your quest. Let not your toil make you sad, for it is said in the Prophet (22) 'Those who sow in tears, shall reap in joy' (Ps. cxxvi. 5). That for which ye hope ye shall attain, and in return for the sufferings and tribulations which ye will have to bear, ye shall receive a perfect recompense and wages twofold in this world, and never-failing good things and never-ending delights in the world which is to come." And they did homage to him, and gave thanks to him.

And having enjoyed intercourse with him for a few days they brought forward [the following]

142 THE MONKS OF KUBLAI KHAN

request: " If we have found mercy (i.e. favour) in the eyes of Mar our Father, let him permit us to go to BAGHDAD, in order that we may receive a blessing from the holy sepulchres (or relics?) of MAR MARI [the disciple of Saint ADDAI, Bar Hebraeus, Chron. Eccles., sect. ii, p. 15], the Apostle, the teacher of the East, and those of the Fathers that are there. And from there we would go to the monasteries that are in the countries of BETH GARMAI and in NISIBIS that we may be blessed there also, and demand assistance."

And when the Catholicus saw the beauty of their object, and the innocence of their minds, and the honesty of their thoughts, he said unto them, "Go ye, my sons, and may Christ, the Lord of the Universe, grant unto you your petition (23) from His rich and overflowing treasury, and may He grant you a full measure of His grace, and may His compassion accompany you whithersoever ye go. And he wrote for them a pethikha (i.e. a letter of introduction) to these countries so that they might be honourably entreated whithersoever they went; and he sent with them a man to show them the way, and to act as guide along the roads.

And they arrived in Baghdad, and thence they went to the Great Church of KOKE [at Ctesiphon wherein every Catholicus was consecrated]. And they went to the monastery of MAR MARI, the Apostle, and received a blessing from the sepulchres

TRAVELS OF SAWMA AND MARKOS 143

(or relics?) of that country. And from there they turned back and came to the country of BETH GARMAI, and they received blessings from the shrine (or tomb) of MAR EZEKIEL [the prophet, near Dakok], which was full of helps and healings. And from there they went to ARBIL, and thence to MAWSIL (i.e. Mosul on the Tigris). And they went SHIGAR (SINJAR), and NISIBIS, and MERDA (MARDIN); and were blessed by the shrine [containing] the bones of MAR AWGIN, the second CHRIST. And thence they went to GAZARTA of BETH ZABHDAI, and they were blessed by all the shrines and monasteries, and the religious houses, and monks, and the Fathers (i.e. Bishops) in their dioceses. And they paid the vows which they had laid upon themselves, and they spread (24) tables of food [wherefrom all might eat], and they gave alms and oblations wherever they went. And they turned back and came to the holy monastery of MAR MICHAEL of TAR'IL. And they bought a cell, and both of them were received by the monks who were there. And the thought which made them toil through the journey had rest, although they had not arrived at the end of [their] expectation.

Now when MAR DENHA or DENKHA, the Catholicus, heard of their manner of life, he sent and asked them to go to him; and they went forthwith and gave him the customary salutation.

And he said unto them, " We have heard that ye

144 THE MONKS OF KUBLAI KHAN

have been received into a monastery. This however, doth not please us. For whilst the two of you sojourn in the monastery ye will be able to make perfect your own peace (or rest), and that is all that ye will do, but if ye abide with us ye will bring benefit and peace (or rest) to the whole community. Therefore stay ye with us, and support the Door of the Kingdom [compare Sublime Porte] in whatever manner cometh to your hands." And they said unto him, "Whatsoever thou commandest (25), O our Father, we will do." And the Catholicus said unto them, "Ye shall go to King ABGHA [or ABAGHA KHAN, or ABAKA KHAN, the son and successor of HULAGU KHAN, and great grandson of Chingiz Khan, who ascended the throne of Persia as the second Mongol Khan in 1265], and obtain for us PUKDANE (i.e. written orders, or letters patent confirming his appointment as Catholicus)." And the two monks said unto him, "Thus shall it be, but let Mar our Father send with us a man who shall take the Pukdana [from the king] and give it to him (i.e. the Catholicus), and we will go on from there to JERUSALEM." And the Catholicus granted them this [request], and gave them blessings on their journey.

And when the two monks went to the Blessed Camp, the Amirs brought them in before the King, and he asked them about the object of their coming, and what their native country was;

TRAVELS OF SAWMA AND MARKOS 145

and they made a reply to him which revealed unto him their object. And ABHGHA KHAN commanded the nobles of his kingdom to fulfil their petition, and to give them the written orders (Pukdane)which they had asked for. And the two monks sent the written order which Mar Catholicus had demanded to him by the hands of his messenger, and they and their companions set out for JERUSALEM.

And when they arrived at the city of Animto [i.e. ANI, the ancient capital of Christian ARMENIA, situated on an affluent of the river Araxes], and saw (26) the monasteries and the churches therein, they marvelled at the great extent of the buildings and at their magnificence. And thence they went towards BETH GURGAYE (i.e. the country of Georgia), so that they might travel by a clear (or safe?) road, but when they arrived there they heard from the inhabitants of the country that the road was cut because of the murders and robberies which had taken place along it.

Read more at The Monks of Kubla Khan

The Smurfs In Chinese

PINYIN: 蓝宝宝 lán bǎobao 惰惰 duò duò 聪聪 cōng cōng 健健 jiàn jiàn 厌厌 yàn yàn 格格巫 gé gé wū

蓝爸爸 lán bàba 婪婪 lán lán 蓝妹妹 lán mèimei 笨笨 bèn bèn 乐乐 lè lè 阿兹猫  Ācí māo

Computer Translation: (These are not the proper translations but are a funnier version of the translation)

Blue Baby, lazy lazy, quick at hearing quick at hearing, healthy healthy, to hate to hate, Gegewitch,

Blue dad, avaricious avaricious, Blue sister, stupid stupid, music music, Ards Cat (?)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 12:00 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Chinese Comics Online

Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang was the next to last of twelve children of a Chinese Presbyterian minister in a small town in the mountains, sixty miles inland from Amoy. He was educated in English at St John's in Shanghai. He studied at Tsinghua University from 1916 to 1919, during which time he encountered his Chinese heritage at its most concentrated.

His later education began in America, specifically at Harvard, where he worked under Bliss Perry and Milton Babbitt in the Comparative Literature Department. His third-person description of himself at Harvard reminds one of Thomas Wolfe's experience in that same library:

Things became financially tight. Lin's half tuition scholarship had been cut off, he was subsisting on personal loans from back home, and his wife had required surgery for acute appendicitis. The two of them left for France (he received his MA in absentia, in 1920) and Lin went to work for the YMCA, teaching basic literacy to the Chinese workers who had been brought to France during WW1. He discovered in the process the difficulties of mass education, of which in his own way he was to become a master. In 1921, assisted by the devaluation of the mark, he shifted to Leipzig, where he earned a PhD in linguistics in 1923, under Conrady (whose grasp of modern Chinese he found deficient). He returned to China, now fully accredited, as a professor at Peking National University (1923-1926) and Dean of Women's Normal College (1926).

And he wrote. He wrote effectively. His particular blend of sophistication and casualness found a wide audience, and he became a major humorous and critical presence in warlord China. Of the two literary factions in Peking, he headed one, and the other, slightly less opposed to the government, was led by his previous benefactor Hu Shr. He annoyed the warlords. One of them, whom he had ridiculed as the Dogmeat General, put him on a target list of intellectuals. Lin left, taking with him Lu Sywn, one of the writers in his faction, to Amoy University, where Lin became Dean of Arts. Notwithstanding his earlier criticism of the government, he briefly joined the Nationalist Government at Wuhan in 1927 as Secretary to the Foreign Ministry, but, as he later put it,"liked the revolution but got tired of the revolutionists." From the summer of 1927, he abandoned politics and devoted himself to writing for the popular press and editing three literary fortnightlies in Shanghai between 1929 and 1935. His linguistic studies were also done during this relatively quiet period in his life. As a journalist, chiefly in his column The Little Critic from 1930 on, he became famous as the principal voice of independent criticism in China. He further polished an intimate style, "the secret of which is, take your reader into confidence," that was sensationally effective. Pearl Buck became interested, and encouraged him to write a book explaining China to the West. To do this, he retired to the mountains in the summer of 1934. What he brought back from the mountains was the publishing sensation My Country and My People (1935), which hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Following this new path, Lin and his family moved back to America, where he produced a stream of articles for the New York Times and various magazines, and another book, The Importance of Living, in 1937. It was Lin's major statement of personal philosophy, a subject with he had wrestled all his life, and which had come to a focus with his study of Emerson under Emerson expert Bliss Perry. However abrasive Lin might be in advocacy, Lin greatly esteemed charm, and he was sensitive to charm in his own tradition. He thus rendered a Li Yw paragraph on the rules for an ideal home:

"Inside the gate there is a footpath, and the footpath must be winding. At the turning of the footpath there is an outdoor screen, and the screen must be small. Behind the screen, there is a terrace, and the terrace must be level. On the banks of the terrace there are flowers, and the flowers must be fresh. Beyond the flowers is a wall, and the wall must be low. By the side of the wall there is a pine tree, and the pine tree must be old. At the foot of the pine tree there are rocks, and the rocks must be quaint. Over the rocks there is a pavilion, and the pavilion must be simple. Behind the pavilion are bamboos, and the bamboos must be thin and sparse. At the end of the bamboos there is a house, and the house must be secluded. By the side of the house there is a road, and the road must branch off. At the point where the several roads come together there is a bridge, and the bridge must be tantalizing to cross. At the end of the bridge there are trees, and the trees must be tall. In the shade of the trees there is grass, and the grass must be green. Above the grass plot there is a ditch, and the ditch must be slender. At the top of the ditch there is a spring, and the spring must gurgle. Above the spring there is a hill, and the hill must be deep. Below the hill there is a hall, and the hall must be square. At the corner of the hall there is a vegetable garden, and the vegetable garden must be big. In the vegetable garden there is a stork, and the stork must dance. The stork announces that there is a guest, and the guest must not be vulgar. When the guest arrives, there is wine, and wine must not be declined. During the service of the wine, there is drunkenness, and the drunken guest must not want to go home." (p267-268)

It will emerge that the purpose of the home is not for the owner, but for the guest. This fresh way of looking at things, not merely exotic but sophisticated in an unfamiliar way, and formatted as an example of ancient but applicable wisdom, was a revelation to the English general reader. The poet Carolyn Kizer, who was given a copy of The Importance of Living in June 1938, by which time it was in its eleventh printing, not only marked certain passages in the margin, but made her own index of other passages in the back inside cover. Such was its impact on the already literate portion of the public.

WW2 began for China in July 1937, and Lin's subsequent publications sought to increase American support for China. His novel Moment in Peking (1939) gives a searing portrait of the Japanese invaders. With the American entry into the war in 1941, and foreseeing a Western victory, he became a critic of the West as the inevitable architect of the postwar world. This new posture did not sit well with his previous fans. The New York Times, long his friend and principal media channel, found Between Tears and Laughter (1943) to be "shrill, abusive, and vituperative." A return to China, intended to be for the duration of the war, ended after a month when his house in Chungking was destroyed by Japanese bombs. A second visit in late 1943 and early 1944 led to the book Vigil of a Nation, a tour of China at war, and a prediction that communism on the Russian model could never take root in China.

The book did not produce a negative reaction. It produced an uproar. It alienated everyone. It led to a break with Pearl Buck which in turn resulted in Lin's departure from his longtime publisher John Day (a firm owned by Buck's husband, Richard Walsh). For the period of the Chinese civil war that followed the end of WW2, Lin retreated from politics to the past.

In this new emphasis, he still remained a transmitter of the Chinese world to the West, a role which Lin shared with his contemporary Arthur Waley. Like Waley, he passed from extracts (including extracts from Confucius in 1938, plus Laudz and Jwangdz, which had made up several of his previous books) to full-length studies. He began with a biography of the brilliant and insouciant poet Su Dungpwo in 1947, a poet who was continually getting into trouble, in part through criticizing the government, and thus a congenial figure for Lin. He followed this, building on his earlier Laudz and Jwangdz extracts, with a complete Dau/Dv Jing in 1948, adding to its 81 chapters extracts from Jwangdz by way of commentary. Here for the first time he directly confronted Waley, whose complete DDJ had come out in 1934. Lin kept his independence, but he also kept his judgement. In a footnote to a line in DDJ 29, he says "I follow Waley's rendering, which conveys the meaning perfectly." And the first six lines of DDJ 30 conclude with this footnote:

These six lines are by Waley, for they cannot be improved upon.

It is the nod of one master to another. The rest of us get to stand by and watch

Read more here Sinologists

Chinese typewriter, part 2

On June 30, 2009, I wrote a post entitled "Chinese Typewriter". It's time now to do an update, because on March 9, 2011, I travelled to the University of Kansas to deliver the Wallace Johnson Memorial Lecture. So what do Wallace Johnson and the University of Kansas have to do with Chinese typewriters? It's simply that Wallace Johnson is the only Westerner I know who became proficient in the use of the kind of Chinese typewriter I wrote about in my 2009 post, and he happened to teach Chinese history at the University of Kansas from 1965 to 2007. I knew Wally Johnson because of his interest in Tang period law and because he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania under Derk Bodde, who was a good friend of mine.

When I went to Lawrence, Kansas last month to deliver a lecture in memory of Wally, aside from various scholarly and collegial activities, I was privileged to see the original rules for basketball written by Dr. James Naismith, which had recently been purchased for $4.3 million on behalf of the University by an alumnus, and I was greatly honored to see Wally Johnson's Chinese typewriter. The typewriter is kept in the office of Vickie Fu Doll, Chinese and Korean Studies Librarian in the East Asian Library of the University. When I arrived at her office, Vickie had brought out the typewriter and its many parts. She had them all laid out on a large library table. Let me tell you: I was in Chinese typewriter heaven!

(You can see more pictures of me playing with Wally's fabulous toy here.)

Vickie told me that I was the first person to type with Wally's typewriter since 1982 and added, "I don't expect any others to use it very soon."

As you can see, the typewriter is extremely complicated and cumbersome. The main tray — which is like a typesetter's font of lead type — has about two thousand of the most frequent characters. Two thousand characters are not nearly enough for literary and scholarly purposes, so there are also a number of supplementary trays from which less frequent characters may be retrieved when necessary. What is even more intimidating about a Chinese typewriter is that the characters as seen by the typist are backwards and upside down! Add to this challenging orientation the fact that the pieces of type are tiny and all of a single metallic shade, it becomes a maddening task to find the right character. But that is not all, since there is also the problem of the principle (or lack thereof) upon which the characters are ordered in the tray. By radical? By total stroke count? Both of these methods would result in numerous characters under the same heading. By rough frequency? By telegraph code? Unfortunately, nobody seems to have thought to use the easiest and most user-friendly method of arranging the characters according to their pronunciation.

For all of the above reasons, using a Chinese typewriter was (and still is!) an excruciating experience. To give Language Log readers almost palpably visual evidence of what it is like to type with a Chinese typewriter, I here present a precious photograph of Wally working at his typewriter:

To view more photos and watch videos, go to Language Log

Chinese Typewriter

June 30, 2009 @ 6:51 pm · Filed by Victor Mair

This (the machine invented by the famous Chinese author, Lin Yutang, and described on the first page [first four paragraphs] of the Wikipedia article here) is probably the closest the Chinese ever got to decomposing their script into an "alphabet" consisting of "letters" (recurrent graphemic elements that can be combined in a principled way to form all of the characters / morphemes in their writing system).  You'll note that it didn't really work during their presentation to the Remington Typewriter Company executives.  The press conference demonstration they had the next day was probably of the carefully rehearsed, staged, orchestrated sort designers of Chinese information processing / technology software and hardware often present (the kind documented by Li-ching Chang in her film made at a vocational high school in Beijing), not one prepared to respond spontaneously to tasks posed by the audience.  Judging from my own experience with Chinese software and information processing / technology developers over more than a quarter of a century, this may have been what went wrong when Lin presented his typewriter to the Remington executives:  they asked him (or his operator) to type something impromptu.  Incidentally, the development of this fatally flawed typing machine left Lin — whose books were bestsellers in America — bankrupt.

 The "typewriter" described on the second page (fifth paragraph:  "Another kind of Chinese typewriter") section of the Wikipedia article cited above is the only kind of machine for writing Chinese that achieved fairly widespread use.  (Most of the typewriters shown here are of this sort.)  It was basically a limited font of about two to three thousand of the most common characters, with hundreds or thousands of more obscure characters kept in boxes nearby, to be laboriously sought out when needed (most typists just wrote such characters in by hand [if they knew them; but usually they were simply copying from a printed page or somebody's handwritten draft anyway — even now, except with pinyin-inputting systems, Chinese have not benefited very much from touch-typing] rather than try to find them in the boxes).  The Wikipedia article claims that "good operators were able to type around 70 words per minute."  First of all, this probably means "characters," not "words" (which are largely disyllabic).  Secondly, this could only have been true of a highly skilled operator presenting a carefully prepared and practiced text without any unusual characters (i.e., beyond those in the main tray).  The typists I observed using these machines in Taiwan, China, and at the UN back in the 70s and early 80s — all professionals, not casual typists — seldom exceeded about 10-12 characters per minute under the best circumstances (only common characters found in the main tray, and working from clean drafts or copying from printed materials).

Many of the difficulties outlined above have continued even into the computer age, which accounts for the (should I avoid using "literally"?) thousands of different inputting systems that have been devised during the past three decades.  The vast majority of individuals, both for short text messaging and for word processing with computers, now use various types of romanized inputting, with those methods that take advantage of word segmentation being the most efficient.

Thanks to Michael Carr for the first Wikipedia reference.

Language Log

China's Numbers Are Shorter Than Ours

Here are seven random numbers. Sort of like a telephone number, but arranged vertically. Take a glance — just a glance — then pause, take out a piece of paper and see how many you can recall.

Done?

According to the French neurologist and mathematician Stanislas Dehaene, about 50 percent of English speakers can remember all seven numbers. I'm in the other 50 percent. When people give me their phone number, I can make it about five digits through, then I moisten my finger and try to write the last two on the phone's surface (but that's just me).

If, however, you are a Chinese speaker, you tend to do much better. The average Chinese speaker can memorize nine numbers in this same amount of time.

Why The Difference?

The difference, says Dehaene, is how the words sound in your head. The Chinese words for the first nine numbers are all short, concise and bullet-like: "yi," "er," "san," "si," "wu," "liu," "qi," "ba," "jiu." He timed them and they average about a quarter of a second each.

 

In English we start with "one", "two", but "three" can stretch out a bit and "seven" is a real slower-downer, being two syllables long, so the English number-words take a little longer, a third of a second each.

Adam Cole/NPR

Collectively, says Dehaene, the difference matters. Chinese speakers can download nine numbers in two seconds, English speakers only seven. Dehaene thinks our brains scoop up information in two-second gulps, or loops, so the Chinese are regularly getting a number-retention advantage just because their number words are shorter.

Could this explain why Chinese students have lately (in Singapore and Shanghai) jumped to the top of international teenage math testing? I doubt it, though it can't hurt to be able to process numbers more quickly through your head.

The Other Advantage

I often hear about the other Chinese language advantage. Asian number-words (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) follow a regular pattern. "Eleven" is written as ten/one. "Twelve" is ten/two, "Thirteen" ten/three and so on. We, on the other hand, serve word-cocktails. "Eleven" doesn't make you think about its ingredients, ten and one; it sounds like something about bread (leaven). Same with "twelve"; you can hear the t for two in it, but what's with the "welve"? There's no clear pattern here. This isn't good, says math writer Alex Bellos:

Experiments have repeatedly shown that Asian children find it easier to learn to count than Europeans. In one study with Chinese and American 4- and 5-year-olds, the two nationalities performed similarly when learning to count to 12, but the Chinese were about a year ahead with higher numbers. A regular system (of number-words) also makes arithmetic clearer to understand.

Read more at NPR

Google Translate: Nothing short of magic

A Brief Disclaimer

I’m fully aware that many of my reviews come across as a bit effusive. For me, it’s far easier to review apps that I love rather than type out scathing critiques of the crapware that junks up most of the App Store’s virtual shelves. To be fair, witty criticism has its place in tech reviews and can certainly be as enjoyable to read as it is to write; however, I usually prefer writing on topics I feel passionate about, and I’m simply more inspired by apps that wow than by those that disappoint. All of that to say, the following review is another that could easily be filed under the heading: Glowing Reviews the Developer’s Marketing Team Will Love. In my defense, Google Translate deserves every ounce of praise it receives. And here’s why…

 

Bridging the Cultural Divide

Since July of 2010 I have been living in Kunming, China, a beautiful city in the southern province of Yunnan. As you might guess, Mandarin is not my native language, and although I’m currently studying Chinese, the language barrier often becomes a frustrating obstacle during my day-to-day life. I hoped my iPhone would be a useful tool in overcoming this obstacle when I first moved to Kunming, and I purchased several apps that promised to help with translation and language learning during my transition into a new culture. I tried Pleco, Jibbigo, a Lonely Planet app and several others, but none of them turned out to be as useful or convenient as the Google Translate app. What’s more, several of these apps cost between ten and twenty dollars, while Google’s app is—you guessed it—free. When an app is significantly better than its competitors and significantly cheaper (or in this case free), deciding which to use becomes ridiculously easy.

Since installing it a few hours after its debut in the App Store, Google Translate has not only carved itself a permanent spot on my home screen, but it has also become one of the most useful pieces of software that I own. Sure it does the easy stuff like translate individual words from English to Chinese and vice versa, but it also translates long paragraphs of text in an instant with stunning reliability. It allows queries to be input via speech or text and spits out results in both Chinese characters and Pinyin (the English alphabet’s phonetic equivalent for Chinese characters), and provides an option to play the result as an audio file spoken by a native Chinese speaker. Since Chinese is a tonal language, this last feature is actually indispensable. In a language where the only difference between saying mother and horse is the rise or fall of your voice, you don’t want to have to guess at proper pronunciation. The amount of functionality Google has crammed into this app, packaged within a remarkably simple and usable interface, is impressive to say the least. And did I mention all this goodness comes at the unbelievable price of free?

Read more at MACGASM

40 Million Foreigners Now Learning Chinese

There are now more than 40 million foreigners learning Chinese around the world. (Photo/ CFP)

Learning Chinese is hot nowadays. A senior official with the Confucius Institute Headquarters said on Saturday (Dec. 11) at the organization's fifth annual conference in Beijing that there are more than 40 million foreigners around the world learning Chinese.

The institute expected to dispatch 2,000 teachers and 3,000 volunteers from China, train 10,000 Chinese teachers and 10,000 local teachers, and release revised Standards for Teachers of Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL) next year.

40 new Confucius Institutes and 97 Confucius Classrooms opened worldwide this year, while eight countries also joined the program, Xu Lin, the headquarters' chief executive and director-general of the Office of Chinese Language Council International, or Hanban, said to the reporters.

Read more at WANT China Times

Arabic, Korean and Chinese deemed fastest-growing language courses at U.S. colleges

The surge in enrollment reflects a shift in response to current issues across the globe, officials say. Spanish and French, however, remain the most popular language courses.

Student enrollment in Arabic, Korean and Chinese classes is showing the fastest growth among foreign language courses at U.S. colleges, even though Spanish remains the most popular by a huge margin, a new study shows.

The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities by the Modern Language Assn., or MLA, found that enrollment in Arabic surged by 46% between 2006 and 2009. More U.S. college students are studying Arabic than Russian, a change that officials say reflects a shift of interest from Cold War concerns to current issues involving the Middle East and terrorism.

The study of Arabic by young Americans started to show significant growth immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and its enrollment has tripled since then, said Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA's executive director.

"It's a response to what's going on in the world," she said, noting that the same holds true for a recent increase in Chinese and Korean courses and such lesser studied languages as Hindi and Punjabi.

Last year, 865,000 U.S. college students were enrolled in Spanish, about four times as many as in French, its nearest rival, and nine times the number in German, the next highest-ranked, the report said. American Sign Language, an increasingly popular way for students to fulfill their language requirements, was next, followed by Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Russian, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Portuguese, Korean and Modern Hebrew.

Read more at The Los Angeles Times

Chinese regions fight back against surge of Mandarin

From the remote mountains of Tibet to the soaring skyscrapers of Shanghai and Guangzhou, an unlikely issue has emerged to both anger and unite China's disparate peoples -- their language.

The country's 1.3 billion people may be almost all exclusively educated in one tongue, the official medium of Mandarin, but decades of its promotion has failed to stifle popular attachment to regional vernaculars and dialects.

The banishing or planned banishment from the airwaves and classrooms of languages such as Cantonese, Shanghainese and Tibetan has sparked rare public protests, as people push back against a government with little time for cultural diversity.

At a rally in the booming southern city of Guangzhou in late July, protesters thronged against police and shouted obscenities, demanding the protection of their mother tongue, Cantonese.

"The protesters were very united. We all had just one aim: to protect our own language," said Michelle, one of the self-proclaimed "cultural defenders" at the rally who asked her full name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Protests against cornerstones of government policy are rare

in a country where the ruling Communist Party values stability above all and comes down hard on dissent.

"Cantonese people speak Cantonese!" many yelled, in a surprisingly venomous retort to authorities, and a passionate defense of culture that caught officials -- more accustomed to simmering unrest over issues like land grabs, corruption and pollution -- off guard.

A subsequent protest, organized via an online campaign and buzzing chatrooms was soon smothered by police and Internet censors in a sign of unease by the Party at any challenge to its rule.

Still, the government did back down slightly, promising that Cantonese broadcasting would continue in Guangzhou, making it one of the few places in China where state-run radio and television make wide use of the vernacular.

POWERFUL POLICY LEVER

Only about half of China's 1.3 billion people speak Mandarin, according to government surveys. Visit the vast and poor countryside and the chances of hearing pure Mandarin spoken as an everyday language are practically nil.

Throughout China's long and turbulent history, the nation's emperors and rulers have been driven by a desire to unite the country and to standardize speech as a powerful policy lever.

Read more at REUTERS

Mandarin's Great Leap Forward

ON A small street in Singapore’s Chinatown Fu Xianling, the founder of a language-education company called New Concept Mandarin, searches for additional office space. Mr Fu wants to expand his business with the lofty ambition of competing with the industry leader, Rosetta Stone. Demand for his product has increased by 20% over the past two years.

As the Chinese economy surges, so does interest in Mandarin. The Chinese government estimates some 40m people study Mandarin outside the country, up from 30m in 2005. A tight job market in the West is partly responsible. According to a survey in September by Rosetta Stone, 58% of Americans believe the lack of foreign-language skills among native workers will lead to foreigners taking high-paying jobs. “The recession has focused people on where growth is going to come from,” says Tom Adams, the firm’s chief executive. Among existing corporate customers logging into the company’s multi-language programme, the number learning Mandarin increased by 1,800% between 2008 and 2010.

Fred Rao, the founder of eChinese Learning, which offers one-on-one Mandarin instruction through Skype, predicts fierce competition. Taking a page from Mr Rao’s playbook, Rosetta Stone recently launched a new way for its Mandarin students to connect via video links to instructors in China.

Read more at The Economist

Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard

by David Moser
University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies

From Schriftfestschrift: Essays on Writing and Language in Honor of John DeFrancis on His Eightieth Birthday (Sino-Platonic Papers No. 27, August 1991), edited by Victor H. Mair

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"? Since I know at the outset that the whole tone of this document is going to involve a lot of whining and complaining, I may as well come right out and say exactly what I mean. I mean hard for me, a native English speaker trying to learn Chinese as an adult, going through the whole process with the textbooks, the tapes, the conversation partners, etc., the whole torturous rigmarole. I mean hard for me -- and, of course, for the many other Westerners who have spent years of their lives bashing their heads against the Great Wall of Chinese.

If this were as far as I went, my statement would be a pretty empty one. Of course Chinese is hard for me. After all, any foreign language is hard for a non-native, right? Well, sort of. Not all foreign languages are equally difficult for any learner. It depends on which language you're coming from. A French person can usually learn Italian faster than an American, and an average American could probably master German a lot faster than an average Japanese, and so on. So part of what I'm contending is that Chinese is hard compared to ... well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle. What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for them, for Chinese people.1

If you don't believe this, just ask a Chinese person. Most Chinese people will cheerfully acknowledge that their language is hard, maybe the hardest on earth. (Many are even proud of this, in the same way some New Yorkers are actually proud of living in the most unlivable city in America.) Maybe all Chinese people deserve a medal just for being born Chinese. At any rate, they generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes.

Everyone's heard the supposed fact that if you take the English idiom "It's Greek to me" and search for equivalent idioms in all the world's languages to arrive at a consensus as to which language is the hardest, the results of such a linguistic survey is that Chinese easily wins as the canonical incomprehensible language. (For example, the French have the expression "C'est du chinois", "It's Chinese", i.e., "It's incomprehensible". Other languages have similar sayings.) So then the question arises: What do the Chinese themselves consider to be an impossibly hard language? You then look for the corresponding phrase in Chinese, and you find Gēn tiānshū yíyàng 跟天书一样 meaning "It's like heavenly script."

Read more at 1 Month Chinese

Ethnic minorities' bilingual life in modern China

BEIJING, Sept. 17 (Xinhua) -- Jiang Meiying, a woman from the Drung ethnic group in her 40's living in a far-flung village in southwest China's Yunnan Province, can speak languages of the Drung and Lisu ethnic groups, as well as Mandarin.

Born at Dulongjiang village in Yunan province, she speaks the language of the Drung ethnic group, one of the smallest ethnic groups of China, with around 8,000 people.

In her own words, she is lucky compared with her peers, as she had the opportunity to attend junior middle school where she learned Mandarin.

After marrying her husband, who is from the Lisu ethnic group, she moved to Puladi village along the Nujiang River, also in Yunnan Province. Since then, she has learned to speak the language of the Lisu ethnic group.

As her village became more open to the outside world since the "West Development" campaign started 10 years ago, an increasing number of tourists have visited her village and Jiang talked to them in Mandarin to solicit business for her mini-van.

"Though my Mandarin is not very standard, speaking it is a much easier way to communicate with the outside world," Jiang said.

"My two children, who study in cities, can speak more fluent Mandarin than I, but at home, we still speak Lisu language," she added.

Jiang believes that speaking Mandarin is a necessity for her and her children to adapt to the more commercialized and modern society, while the Lisu language carries on her family tradition.

Feng Yonghua, a 21-year-old girl of the Lisu ethnic group living in the same village as Jiang, shared Jiang's view.

Feng speaks very fluent Mandarin. She once worked in Guangzhou City, south China's Guangdong Province, where she ran a small shop. "Without speaking Mandarin, it's very hard to find a job in other provinces," Feng said.

Yunnan Province alone has 25 ethnic minorities, each with a population of more than 5,000. About 15 million people in the province are ethnic minorities. The complex geographic situation has added difficulties in promoting Mandarin in the province.

Read more at Xinhuanet