Debate about dropping English as a mandatory course

The debate in China about keeping or dropping English as a mandatory course in middle school and high school has been going on for at least two decades. The support of keeping English is based on the fact that English is the de facto lingua franca in the world, although, contrary to a common misconception in China, English is not a mandatory course in all countries; among the 41 where it is not are France, Finland, and Poland. The opposing side claim that some college majors such as Chinese philology or research of ancient Chinese archives require no or very little English in future studies or work. Both sides got the basic facts correct and have strong arguments, leading the debate to a deadlock, while the government takes no action in changing the current policy that happens to be what the supporters want.

In fact, the solution is a simple one: attach a weight that varies between 0 and 100% depending on the major, to the English test score on the college entrance exam. For example, since high-impact work on Chinese philology is still mostly written in Chinese, the Ministry of Education or individual universities or colleges can assign a value of 0 or slightly higher to this weight. (If the weight is only 5%, who is willing to take time to study English? Well, imagine a high school student who grew up bilingual or speaks English as the first language.) For the major of ancient Chinese history, how about 20%? For modern Chinese history, 80%? Obviously, for any major other than these or a specific foreign language other than English (say, Spanish), the weight should be 100% or close to that. Assignment of the weight should be exclusively the work of the professionals and practitioners in this field, free of any lobbying influence from the general public and interference from politicians.

There are still lots of debates or disputes in the world that are zero-sum or nearly zero-sum. A relatively good solution is one that seeks compromises among contenders and balances their degree of satisfaction, to achieve an approximate equilibrium in this satisfaction. The advantage of my solution is that both sides are somewhat satisfying with it and complain the least, and the satisfaction and complaint are about the same in intensity on both sides.

Note: By no means am I suggesting categorically dropping English as a mandatory course. That would lead to total ruin of our future generation. It's the undeniable fact that some Chinese students are so incapable of a foreign language in spite of an extraordinary amount of time of study and that English is truly nearly useless in certain fields of study as of 2022 that prompts me to propose this practical and realistic solution for this year and some years in the future.

(The Chinese version of this article is scattered in Weibo 2022-11-06 and 2022-10-07 postings.)

dastardly

安倍晋三遇刺身亡，美国田纳西议员Steve Cohen称刺杀行为是a dastardly act，日本首相岸田文雄对刺杀行为的说法被英译为dastardly and barbaric。英语词dastardly不很常用，它兼有“怯懦”和“邪恶”的意思，似乎没有合适的汉语词同时体现这两个意义，有些词典译为“卑怯”，但这并不很恰当，因为其中的“卑”可能是“自卑”（如茅盾《烟云》“我的自杀是逃避，是卑怯”），但dastardly一定是对他人造成伤害的“卑鄙”、或更准确地说“邪恶”、“坏”。

许多不大常用的词或词组常让人想到历史上的名篇，如作“二十”解的score让人想到林肯的《葛底斯堡演说》（Four score and seven years ago[八十七年前]），ask not让人想到肯尼迪的就职演说（Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country[不要问你的国家能为你做什么——问你能为你的国家做什么]），而dastardly让人想到罗斯福在珍珠港袭击后到国会做的宣战演讲，称日本的袭击是unprovoked and dastardly attack[无端和卑怯的攻击]。今天，田纳西议员选用dastardly大概是巧合，但在他是巧合，在他的读者却产生了有历史意义的联想；英译岸田文雄选用这个词也有同样的效果。词汇本身是无辜的，只是它曾经被某个名人用于某个有名的事件而多生了一层与词义完全无关的阴影、或光环，迫使小心的后人在遣词造句时多一点考虑，如果你不想考虑，读者也许会考虑。

Use International Phonetic Alphabet to help improve pronunciation

In my last posting, I said "成年后学外语，口音几乎不可能完全消除，略带外国口音不是坏事，但如果华人希望更好地与人交流、或从政、或跻身公司高层，减少口音即使不是必须的，也是有益的。它需要仔细听、模仿、学习，和长时间不懈的努力" (It is almost impossible to completely avoid having an accent if you learn a foreign language as an adult. A slight foreign accent is not a bad thing, but if you as a Chinese want to better communicate with people, take on a career in politics, or climb the corporate ladder, reducing the accent is beneficial, if not necessary. It requires careful listening, imitation, learning, and long hours of unremitting effort.) Honestly though, careful listening and imitation may not bring you forward as much as you want. But as an adult, if you're moderatly interested in linguistics, carefully studying International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA may benefit more. IPA has the ambition of recording with distinct symbols all sounds of all human languages in the world. But for us, we only need to focus on the sounds and symbols used in the English language for the purpose of improving English pronunciation. For example, if you have a hard time pronouncing bug as /bʌɡ/ and always, like many Chinese learners do, mispronounce it like /baɡ/ (where /a/ is the same sound as the vowel in Chinese character 爸), you can check vowel chart of IPA, and find where /a/ and /ʌ/ are. You can see that to move from /a/ to /ʌ/, all you need to do is move the location where the sound is produced back (toward the throat) and up a little. But a better description of this method is recently described in three online articles, which I highly recommend

Improve Your Accent with the International Phonetic Alphabet (Part 1)
(Part 2)
(Part 3)

IPA is not widely used in American education. Chinese learners may know some symbols to the extent of pronouncing the words by the symbols correctly most of the time. But the vowel and consonant charts are not part of the curriculum and so subtle differences between similar sounds are not fully grasped. The three articles above will hopefully make up for this deficiency.

Words often mispronounced by Chinese learners

以前讲过中国学生或华人最容易读错的英语字母N，应读/ɛn/，但中国人读作/n/，或/ɛ/变得很弱。这里讲几个容易读错的词：

* southern：它的第一音节元音是/ʌ/（即cut的元音），不是/aʊ/，虽然south中的元音是/aʊ/。的确有词典说加拿大或苏格兰方言有读southern为/ˈsaʊðɚn/的，但这绝不是主流，反而是在移民中才经常听到。

* clothes：知乎上查到说这个词“英音[kləʊ(ð)z] 美音[kloðz] 结尾是THZ不是S”。这个说法基本正确，但在美国，其中的元音应为/oʊ/，不是/o/。其实在英语里单独成为音节的/o/音（不是双元音的一部分）并不常见。

* town：读为/taʊn/，但很多华人读为/taŋ/（汉字“唐”音）。其实发/aʊn/音不难，可先发/aʊ/再紧接/n/即可。类似的词还有down、downtown、gown、renown等。

* bowl：读为/boʊɫ/，但很多华人会省掉/ɫ/，结果与bow发音相同。如果你能正确念people（注意不可念作/'pi：pəʊ/），为什么不能念bowl呢？

* idea：应读为/aɪˈdiə/，但很多中国人会在末尾加上儿话音，好比是在念一个写为idear的词。至少在idea单独用时（如I have no idea)，加儿话音是不对的。

还有一些词念错是因为幼年时生活的方言区缺少这个音而成年后又不曾努力纠正：一位原籍四川的朋友来美30年始终不分life与knife、light与night，一位在北京出生长大的朋友多年念/v/为/w/。但更多的人有口音是因为不注意区分相近的音，如读cut为/kat/而不是/kʌt/（所有语言都有/a/音，因此很容易用作替代），或忍不住在单独存在的辅音后添加元音，如读big为/'bɪɡə/或/'biɡə/（汉语中没有单独存在的辅音）。

成年后学外语，口音几乎不可能完全消除，略带外国口音不是坏事，但如果华人希望更好地与人交流、或从政、或跻身公司高层，减少口音即使不是必须的，也是有益的。它需要仔细听、模仿、学习，和长时间不懈的努力。

Chinese-English coincidence of words

Apart from onomatopoeias, borrowed or transliterated words, or cognates [note], what are some English and Chinese words that happen to have the same meaning and similar pronunciations? I can think of two, Chinese "石头" and English stone, Chinese "苦力" and English coolie (note: coolie is from Hindi and Urdu, not Chinese). When I posted this message to Weibo, one user contributed Chinese "费" and English fee, another "屎" and shit, and "好诶" and hooray (which partially meets the requirement). For these linguistic coincidences and surprises, there is even a Facebook group dedicated to these amusing findings.

___________________
[note] A pair of cognates are two words that are in two different languages but descend from the same word in their common parent language. Since English or any Indo-European language and Chinese are not even in the same language family, it's difficult to say there exist any true cognates, while borrowings or loan words are abundant. An interesting case is the very old borrowing, for which cognation may be justified if the term is loosely used, is the Chinese word "蜜" ("honey") and this word in a Romance language, such as French or Spanish miel. "蜜" is said to be a loanword from Tocharian, a branch of the Indo-European language family. (The latest research may be the 2017 article The Word for ‘Honey’ in Chinese, Tocharian and Sino-Vietnamese, by K. Meier, M. Peyrot.)

Chinese translation of a history professor's summary poem

At the end of Dr. James C Davis's The Human Story, a great overview of world history, he wrote a four-line poem that summarizes his positive view of the human history:

The world's still cruel,
That's understood.
But once was worse,
So far so good.

Here's a Chinese translation:

世界依然残酷，
世人无不了悟。
但它曾经更恶，
到如今还不错。

(My translation was first posted on weibo. My review of the book is on Goodreads.)

Mutual intelligibility to distinguish between language and dialect: case of Chinese and Cantonese

Sometimes it is debatable to say that two language varieties are two different languages, or that they are two dialects of one single language. It comes down to the concepts of "language" and "dialect". Among various criteria to distinguish between a language and a dialect, mutual intelligibility may be the most popular one, and appears to be easy to follow. But is it really easy?

1. First of all, we have to absolutely refrain from any political and nationalist influences if we are determined to adopt the mutual intelligibility criterion. They are not conducive to a technical or linguistic study. Although non-linguistically based definitions serve other, pragmatic purposes, they are not part of the following discussion.

2. Mutual intelligibility requires mutual understanding of the speaker or author. One-way or uni-directional understanding may only serve as an intermediate step in measuring the degree of understanding.

3. Mutual intelligibility itself does not stipulate the modality of the source language production. It is generally interpreted as understanding of speech. But that's only because the majority of world languages use the alphabetic writing system so that speech and written text are generally consistent. (There is the concept of orthographic depth, which measures this consistency.) But in case of the character-based writing system, strictly applying the mutual intelligibility criterion requires separate analyses with regard to modality, one for speech, the other for writing. In the case of Chinese and Cantonese, it is generally agreed that a person speaking a variety of Chinese (typically Mandarin) with no ability in Cantonese and a person speaking Cantonese with no ability in the Chinese variety that the other person speaks cannot verbally communicate. Therefore Chinese and Cantonese are said to be different languages in terms of oral mutual intelligibility. From this point to the end of this blog posting, let's discuss written mutual intelligibility only.

4. To test whether two language varieties are languages or dialects of one language, we must not fall for the fallacy of contrived test materials cherry-picked to prove a pre-supposed conclusion. This practice is particularly widespread when people, not just language amateurs but also professional linguists, argue for the two-language-verdict of Chinese and Cantonese. The correct test should be based on a very large language corpus. In giving materials to volunteers in a test, the sentences must be randomly selected from a comprehensive corpus, ideally the whole Internet content, probably supplemented by some text commonly produced but rarely uploaded to the Internet. Notably, in case of Cantonese, if the test materials contain a higher ratio of Cantonese-specific characters and words than average, the test is biased and becomes invalid.

5. To check for percentage of understanding of the materials given in the tested language, the multiple choice questions should have a relatively high number of choices (at least 4), to avoid random-guess correctness.

So far I have outlined an experiment to check whether Chinese and Cantonese are languages or dialects by strictly applying the mutual intelligibility criterion. We can see that the result is not a Yes or No, but a percentage, unless you arbitrarily declare that above a certain cut-off value they are dialects and below that they are languages.

I personally only know Chinese, specifically its Mandarin and Sichuanese dialects, and don't know Cantonese at all. In terms of written mutual intelligibility, I don't know how much percentage of an absolutely randomly selected Cantonese document I can read and understand. If I may hazard a guess, I would say at least 70%, i.e. I can answer 7 or more out of 10 reading comprehension questions correctly. But without such an experiment, it's only a guess.

6. To make this discussion complete, we have to prevent one trivial trap in applying the mutual intelligibility criterion, which we must consider to be a necessary but not sufficient condition. We cannot conclude that language varieties A and B are dialects as long as they meet the mutual intelligibility requirement. The missing condition that must also be met is that A and B are under one genus as defined by Dryer and Haspelmath. As other scholars have done, we add this condition to preclude the obviously incorrect but otherwise possible conclusion that, for example, Chinese and Japanese become two dialects of one language because a Chinese and a Japanese can communicate by writing. We avoid this specious claim by realizing that Chinese and Japanese are not closely related, or specifically, not of one genus in language classification. (When using Dryer and Haspelmath's Genealogical Language List, we should, for the purpose of strictly applying the mutual intelligibility criterion to distinguish languages from dialects, disregard the fact that they list Cantonese under the heading of Chinese.)

Summary It is possible to strictly apply the mutual intelligibility criterion to determine whether Chinese and Cantonese are two languages or dialects. Due to the unique writing system, this criterion must be separated into oral and written intelligibility. Thus, in terms of oral mutual intelligibility, Chinese and Cantonese can be said to be two languages. In written mutual intelligibility, the decision can only be made after an actual experiment and after setting a cut-off value for intelligibility.

2021: The Year of "牛"

Of the twelve Chinese zodiac animals, some are translated into English as various names, such as 羊 as "sheep", "goat" or "ram", 鸡 as "rooster" or "hen", and when a year falls on such a zodiac animal, there is invariably a debate as to which English word is the best fit. Other animals are much less debated. For instance, nowadays 牛 is almost always translated as "ox".

So another question arises, Why is "ox" preferred to, say, "bull", "cow", "buffalo", or "cattle"? In fact, such translations did exist, but they gradually died out over the past decades, specifically since 1960's or 1970's according to Google Ngram. The reason for "ox" to eventually come to the top is not easy to explain, as is the case with many things in human languages. Let's break up the question a little bit. To be precise, an ox is a castrated male cattle, a bull is an uncastrated one, and a cow is a female. I think the reason why the word "cow" is not chosen, in spite of its higher usage frequency, is that in the western zodiac, there is the Taurus, which is male, and that word and its referent probably had some influence on the early choice of word for the Chinese zodiac animal 牛. Next, let's analyze the choice between "ox" and "bull". According to an Internet user who answered the question I posted to a Facebook group, an ox is a bovine trained as a draft animal, as stated on Wikipedia. Similarly, a 牛 in the mainstream traditional Chinese culture is also a draft animal, not one as the source for food (beef, milk, etc.). In this sense, English "ox" is the more appropriate translation than "bull".

Back in 2015, I blogged about the English word for 羊 as the Chinese zodiac animal, and I proposed the idea that to eliminate the ambiguity in the Chinese word or character, we simply find the biological name at the lowest level in taxonomy under which the species the various English names refer to are. For example, a sheep belongs to the genus ovis, which belongs to the subfamily caprinae, and a goat belong to genus capra, which belongs to subfamily caprinae. Therefore, the best word to translate 羊 is caprinae. Well, it is best only if we can ignore the ignorance of the general public. But generally that's not a very good idea. Fortunately, in the case of 牛, the word "cattle" seems to cover both "ox", "bull", "cow" or even "buffalo", and "cattle" happens to be a common word that even an ignorant John Doe knows the meaning of. So I think "cattle" is the best translation for 牛. But it's too late to promote this because the English-speaking people have already been saying "ox" for Chinese 牛 for 50+ years.

English teacher's accent (英语老师的口音)

Facebook一语言学习群有人说他在法国一所小学教英语。学校招了一名印度裔英语老师（英语是她的母语），他是这名新老师的领导。学校其他老师向他抱怨说新老师的口音对小孩是个问题，特别是发r这个音时。他认为这些老师不对，因为他认为习惯不同口音是非常好的一件事。（他说“i dont want to be angry. I want to make them understand the wonderful benefit of learning from different accents. Do you have any suggestions?”）

这个讨论目前已有近百条评论，绝大多数都赞成这位领导的观点：接受多种口音是对的，印度英语也是英语，而那些抱怨的老师有错，有些评论甚至称那些老师是种族主义者。极个别的评论指出小学生口音尚未固定，这个阶段学会英国或美国英语的口音有必要，年龄稍大一点再接触其他口音不迟。但这些极少数的评论基本没有点赞，或被其他人指责。

我对此没有评论，只是建议这名法国老师到语言学群再去问一下，那里大部分群员是语言学家或语言教育专家，可能会给出更全面和专业的回应，通常还附带相关论文题目或链接。不过，我私下还是有自己的想法：假如是为我自己的小孩，如果有选择，比如五个英语班，老师分别来自美、英、苏格兰、澳、印，其他方面相当，那我会选前两个班之一。这不是歧视澳大利亚、印度或苏格兰英语，更不是贬低那三个地区的文化和人民，而仅仅是希望孩子今后的口音能被世界上最大多数人最容易地接受，以方便交流，而与此同时，我们仍然可以培养儿童对各种族裔和文化的包容甚至喜好，而将选择学习的口音与对多种文化的包容对立起来才是片面和狭隘的。其实，假如我们做统计，或平均看，学英语后需要用到英美口音的时候一定多于用到印度口音的时候，而且印度人能完全听懂英美人，但反过来却不是，这就足够成为为自己的孩子选择英美口音的理由了。

（又见微博讨论，如有网友问“如果学中文请东北河南天津河北陕西这些地方的老师授课，真的不介意？”）

First floor vs ground floor 楼层的称谓

美国英语称底楼为first floor，往上依次是second floor、third floor等，英国英语称底楼为ground floor，往上是first floor、second floor，至今仍然如此。欧洲各国遵循英国惯例，世界很多地区也是如此。但在拉丁美洲，楼层的编号采用英、美两种惯例的都有，决定于哪个国家，似乎看不出规律，可参见维基Storey条，但维基关于墨西哥是错的，他们用美国惯例。（注：说英国或美国惯例只是方便称谓，并不表明某地区的惯例的来源是美国或英国。）

历史变迁
一位澳大利亚网友说，大约5至10年前，新建的房子开始用美国的称谓，所以他们经常搞混。瑞典网友说他们那里规则不统一，是一片混乱。而从前作为英国殖民地的新加坡先前采用英国惯例，1980年代改为美国惯例，以便与其他亚洲国家协调。

“一国两制”
越南北部采用美国惯例，南部用英国惯例，但越南人之间交流并不会混淆，原因是北越人说Tầng即“层”而南越人说Lầu即“楼”，他们从用字就可以判断说话人用的是哪种惯例。

亚洲
印尼、菲律宾采用美国惯例。印度受英国殖民影响无疑用英国惯例，香港也是。新加坡、越南见上述。其他如日本、韩国等都用美国惯例。

中国
汉语似乎从来就说：底楼、底层或一楼，往上是二楼、三楼等等，即跟美国惯例相同，这应该是汉语本身的惯例而不是受了美国的影响。古代当然没有居住或办公的高楼，但有供眺望观景的高塔（也叫做楼），或佛塔，中国古籍中指塔的某层时大概都说“层”而不说“楼”，“层”当然是从一而不是零数起了。现代汉语“层”、“楼”两字可互换通用，“楼”无疑是被当作“层”的同义词使用，那么就碰巧跟美国而不是英国惯例相同了。

评价
如果我们咬文嚼字，英国惯例其实是不合逻辑的，底层叫ground floor（直译：“地楼层”），上一层叫first floor（“第一楼层”），既然底层用了floor这个词，就认可了它也是众多floors之一，但为什么它在floors集合中没有序数呢？如果你有三个儿子，老大可以叫大儿子，后面两个当然叫二儿子、三儿子而不可能叫第一儿子、第二儿子，无论老大多么特殊。所以，将“地楼层”与“第一楼层”分开是强词夺理的。这个惯例的起源暂不清楚，但英国殖民者来到北美后采用了我们熟悉的美国惯例无疑是更合理的。由于英国在历史上的影响，世界上采用英国惯例的国家更多，但以人口数量论，由于中国的惯例与美国相同，世界上用英国惯例的人即便包括印度人在内也可能更少。

参考：
https://facebook.com/groups/generallinguistics/permalink/10158626955249346/
https://facebook.com/groups/839957606051774/permalink/3308810692499774
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storey#Numbering