Lots of fun things to recognize here: 10 things the Chinese do far better than [the Canadians] do (article archived). I actually encountered the anti-theft slip-covers yesterday at my birthday dinner, but didn't recognize them for what they were until I read this article.
[ Archived ]
Through the Oriental List mailing list, today I found out about two other mailing lists that may interest China watchers around the world.
The China Planning Network is a mature list organized out of MIT that caters to folks interested in Chinese Development and Planning Issues
. I'll be signing up for this one; urban planning is something I caught a whiff of living among the politically active residents of a growing Ann Arbor. It's really an interesting project, organizing and running an urban/rural community.
The second is a mailing list devoted to "Chinese Urban Preservation Issues"; I can bet you you'll see plenty of lively discussion of Beijing's s on this one! This e-mail list is just being founded, which is a great time to get in on a mailing list; during my time in Tianjin I spent a lot of time reading and contributing to the nascent css-discuss, a list that played a big part in the resurgent popularity of cascading style sheets in professional web design. So get yourself signed up, if this remotely interests you!
[ Archived ]
I got a kick out of an article in the Wall Street Journal today: Oakland Discovers A Burgeoning Talent In Chinese Opera:
Just outside City Hall, the Chinese-immigrant crowd rose to its feet. "He's so clear," effused Shu Hui Lui, an English teacher. Henrique Ham, a contractor who immigrated from China 34 years ago, started crying. "It's very special," he said.
The object of their praise is a 9-year-old African-American fourth-grader.
I wonder if he sings in Cantonese, in which case it would be 越剧, and not 京剧. Props to the article for identifying it as Chinese opera. This would be a good point to also publicly question Quentin Tarantino's decision to make a kung-fu movie in Mandarin; Mandarin??? Maybe that sounds authentic to clueless Hollywood execs. I expected more from Tarantino... though maybe not from the current Tarantino.
[ Archived ]
Food pictures from a Taiwanese night market, by Cindy. Nice! Those duck heads remind me of the ones I see every day at the 石门一路 metro station.
[ Archived ]
This news is a little old, but it looks like Blogger now has a Chinese interface. (via Isaac Mao meta)
[ Archived ]
Naus shares the knowledge on Shanghai dialect (SHH) in John's thread on the word hunting in Mandarin:
Naus said dalie sounds retarded to Shanghainese speakers... veyr interesting. Why/how does it sound retarded.
Because the term in Mandarin is usually learned along with the writing, it underscores the point that hunting is two morphemes "da" and "lie" in Chinese, weird in that it sounds like a phrase rather than a word. In Shanghainese because the term is often learned before writing, it registers as ONE WORD to native Shanghainese speakers, the second character has no independent meaning in Shanghainese.
You also said that to this day you have trouble connecting connecting the Mandarin term to the concept. That's also very interesting. Could you explain/expand? Is this true all words or just words that you don't usually say in Mandarin?
Yes, it ususally applies to words that are not commonly spoken or heard in Mandarin, but were learned in Shanghainese at an early age.
Mandarin vocabulary must be associated, I suppose, with different realms from Shanghainese vocabulary. So are there any words in Shanghainese that sound retarded because they are more natural in Mandarin?
There are of course. Like 恋爱 (lian'ai, love) would sound quite awkward if pronounced in Shanghainese (hence this word is almost ALWAYS pronounced in Mandarin in a Shanghainese conversation). But that is only because the term 恋爱 doesn't really exist in Shanghainese.
Mandarin has a way to make every word sound "Mandarin" even if it's completely new or gibberish. Shanghainese is much harder because it has more tone sandhi, there is more tendency in Shanghainese for words rather than characters to register as single units. Like "stoplight" ("honglvdeng" doesn't register in Shanghainese at all as red-green-light but simply "stoplight", the tones in Shanghainese are different between red-green-light and stoplight). This means nearly all newly coined Mandarin words do not easily develop a Shanghainese equivalent, while Mandarin is able to create all kinds of vocabulary simply by artificial construction. But some of those constructions are a little too detached (like dalie) and becomes a vague phrase to Shanghainese ears.
To summarize, Shanghainese functions in an aural way with little thought to the individual characters (more like Western languages), while Mandarin is more literary and tends to revolve around characters and their compounds.
I had heard similar things about the oral nature of Cantonese. I recommend reading the entire conversation, there are more comments worth reading.
Tonight I'm considering attending a performance of Shanghainese opera, 沪剧.
[ Archived ]
The Muslim Quarter in Kunming, China made the Project for Public Space's list of their "favorite neighborhoods abroad", published in November of 2004. Funny, seeing as how most of the buildings in the Muslim Quarter were either torn down or spraypainted with large "拆" characters ("take apart, dismantle" according to Wenlin) when I visited this summer.
There's nothing outstanding about Chabuduo's most recent post (unlike, say, Ape Rifles's latest), but the first line made me smile in recognition because it pretty much describes, oh, about 90% of my life these days:
I was sitting on the number 38 bus today, I actually scored a seat for once.
Yup, pretty much.
[ Archived ]
Micah Sittig's Chinese improves and worsens with the phases of the moon. He enjoys non-fiction books, bicycling, foreign languages and ethnic restaurants. He is an inveterate globetrotter, but can always be found at micah@earthling.net