Which English letter do Chinese pronounce wrong the most?

The answer to the titled question depends on how much the Chinese has already studied English. If he knows almost nothing about the English language, it's likely he pronounces letter "A" as [ɛ] instead of [eɪ], "C" as [sɛ] instead of [si] (or [si:] if you want to emphasize the long vowel), and "K" as [kɛ] instead of [kei]. Let's ignore these people and focus on those that have learned enough English and have probably been living in an English-speaking country for some time and whose level of English as a second language has fossilized.

In my observation, the most commonly mispronounced English letter is "N". Instead of [ɛn], many Chinese pronounce it like a prolonged [n], missing the vowel [ɛ], or the vowel is too short and weak to be heard. This is particularly evident when he/she spells a word on the phone, where a very clear, distinct pronunciation of each letter is expected, e.g., "His name is Wang, W-A-N-G" (['dabulju:], [eɪ], [n], [dʒi:]). Due to the nasal nature of [n], with the initial vowel [ɛ] stripped off, the other side of the telephone would likely ask "W-A-What-G?" Of course giving an example word solves the problem, such as "N like in Nancy".

Note the IPA symbols for the mispronounced letter "W" in the above example sentence. The first vowel I wrote is [a] and the second [u], while the correct pronunciation of "W" is ['dʌbə(l)ju:] (parentheses for the optional phoneme). Too many Chinese pronounce [ʌ] as [a], because [ʌ] does not exist in Chinese. This substitution also occurs for [ɑ], which again does not exist in Chinese. So letter "R" is read like [ar] instead of [ɑr]. Fortunately, [a] alone does not occur in English; it only exists in diphthongs (e.g. [ai]). Mispronunciation by substitution of it for [ʌ] or [ɑ] won't cause misunderstanding, just a distinct foreign accent.

I'm not sure why "N" is read by Chinese as [n]. If you know why, I'd like to hear your comments.

Note: The difference between [ʌ] or [ɑ] and [a] is clearly indicated in the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart. Both vowels not existing in Chinese are pronounced in the back side of the mouth.

Why Chinese choose uncommon English names

A Washington News article Satirical news site attacks China’s weird English names quotes a BBC article, which ultimately quotes a CCTV News article Tips for Chinese choosing an English name. Indeed, some Chinese people choose English names that sound too outlandish, with unnecessary connotations, such as Dragon, a fierce often wicked beast in western culture, or Sugar, a name implying a flirtatious character. Readers of these articles understandably laugh, and then question why Chinese choose English names, and why uncommon names.

Here's why English names are commonly used. Many Chinese characters are hard to pronounce except by people trained in Chinese, one of the most difficult languages in the world. I would estimate that more than half of Chinese names, more than half of which are of three characters, contain at least one phoneme a westerner finds difficult to pronounce. Of all 21 pinyin initials, q, x, zh, r, z, c, and s when followed by i, and j, ch, sh to some extent, pose a challenge. Among the finals, e, yu, yue and probably a few others are often mispronounced. Mispronunciation goes beyond what I list here. Many years ago I had a master car mechanic friend named Ge Xun. One day another buddy of mine and I tried hard to solve a car problem with no success. We decided to call Mr. Ge, even though he warned us not to call him at work unless there was a crisis. When the phone was picked up by a guy in his shop, I realized I had no way to tell him my friend's name as said in Chinese. So I had to spell out each letter. Later my friend told me he had an English name George. It makes perfect sense for those with such Chinese names to have English names just to make everybody's life easier.

Now let's explain why Chinese choose uncommon English names. According to a China Daily article, So Many People, So Few Surnames, "there are about ... 4,000 to 6,000 [Chinese surnames], of which about 1,000 are most frequently used", while Mark Antony Lower's English Surnames: An Essay on Family Nomenclature, Vol. I (p. xii-xiii) claims, even in 1849, that there are about thirty to forty thousand English surnames. In addition to the number difference, Chinese surnames are much more concentrated on the common ones; for example, "In northern China, Wang (王) is the most common surname, being shared by 9.9% of the population" (Wikipedia). English surnames, even as common as "Johnson", would not enjoy a dominant 10% distribution. A much larger number and a greater variety of English than Chinese names make it possible that two people with English surnames can choose a common given name with little concern for the same combination of a common given name and surname. You may have two John's in office. But it's unlikely to have two John Smith's. But if two Chinese are both called John, you may end up with two John Wang's in the cubicles not far from yours. The solution taken by Chinese immigrants to the English speaking countries or Chinese workers in a mostly English speaking environment is to use less common given names. "John" is a bad one. "Nicholas" may be better. Unfortunately, "Dragon" is bad, too, from a different direction.

So what's the best solution? There's no ideal one. Let's focus on given names and forget about surnames for now. It has to start from birth. For new or would-be parents, here's my advice. If you anticipate your child to live or work in a global environment, give your child a Chinese name whose pinyin is easy for non-Chinese to pronounce. That is, avoid names such as Ge, or Xun, or Qiu, or Zhong. (Refer to the list above.) Then the child never needs an English name just for easy pronunciation. He or she may still consider an English name, but for a different purpose: easy for his hundreds of business clients to remember his name, for instance.

P.S. A frequently asked question is, Why don't Japanese or Indians living in the US choose English names? One reason is that Latinized Japanese or Indian names are never difficult to pronounce. Secondly, they never had this tradition. Chinese immigrants, aside from the pronunciation perspective, probably follow the tradition established by early Chinese immigrants, mostly from southern China and Taiwan. But whether the tradition, or lack of, is actually just an effect of the pronunciation difficulty may need more research to find out.

Scholarly translation should be literal

This is an abridged English translation of my article in Chinese 学术翻译：直译或意译？(Scholarly translation: literal or free translation?).

In 1983, Xu Guozhang (许国璋), a well-known Chinese translator and linguist, described his translation of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy as "译文力求醒豁，不按词典译义，而按词的文化史涵义翻译" (The translation strives for clarity. It does not go by the dictionary, but by the sense of the word in its cultural history.) He gave examples of translating "feudal" to "拥据领地（之诸侯）" ((the princes holding) the fiefs) instead of "封建", "anarchy" to "诸侯纷争" (dispute among the princes) instead of "无政府" because "当时无中央政府" (there was no central government back then), "adventure" to either "猎奇于远方" (adventure to places afar) or "探无涯之知" (explore the knowledge domain of no limit) depending on the context instead of "冒险", "antiquity" to "希腊罗马" (Greek and Roman, Greece and Rome) instead of "古代", "fame and beauty" in the context of the Renaissance to "享盛誉于邦国，创文艺之美" (enjoy fame among nations, create beauty of art and literature). He thinks this style of translation achieves the goal that the reader of the translation best understands the text.

No doubt Mr. Xu's translation is aesthetically superb and the sentences flow naturally. But I disagree with him on one point: Scholarly translation should be primarily literal, secondarily free or paraphrasing. Translation strives for fidelity, fluency, and elegance, strictly in that order (see Levels of translation quality proposed by Yan Fu: A small example). But in practice, various factors influence the weight of each of the three standards. Generally, literature demands higher "fluency" and "elegance" and so occasionally lowers the standard for "fidelity". But for a scholarly work, emphasis should be on "fidelity", with "fluency" not below passable readability. As to "elegance", it's something nice to have.

Take "feudal" not being translated as "封建" as an example. Today's consensus among Chinese scholars and dilettantes (or amateurs) is that the mainland China after 1949, actually even a few decades earlier than that, abused and misused the word "封建", which in its true sense only applies to the political and economic system prior to the Qin dynasty (221 to 206 BC), which is close to the feudal system in medieval Europe. So this Chinese word takes two meanings now, the proper one applicable to the pre-Qin China and the medieval Europe, and the misused one "applicable" to almost the entire Chinese history. There seems to be a reason for rejecting the translation of "feudal" to "封建" due to its overwhelming misuse in the past century. However, this "feudal" to "封建" word-mapping has been around for so long that a new invention such as "拥据领地（之诸侯）" would do more harm than good by confusing the reader, who knows exactly the intension and extension of the word "封建" in the context of European history. The same logic goes with translation of "anarchy" to "无政府", "adventure" to "冒险", and others.

Nevertheless, accepting a translation that started out inaccurate but ended with widespread acceptance and correct understanding is limited to ones without blatant errors. When Christopher Columbus arrived in America, he thought it was India and named the people Indians. Several major European languages follow suit, causing confusion between Indians in India and Indians as native Americans. But German is an exception, using two distinct words for these two peoples. So does Chinese ("印度人" and "印第安人", respectively). That's what should be done.

Based on the principle that scholarly translation should be primarily literal, secondarily free, I further propose that the ideal of scholarly translation is for the reader to be able to guess the word in the original language in order to minimize misinterpretation of the original text. This ideal is of course not to be completely realized, because a word in language A may map to multiple words in B, and vice versa. Note that it's not for every reader to be able to guess the word in the original language, but only for those that can read the language. Then, what's the point for a reader who doesn't know the language to guess the original word? And why would one already knowing the language read the translation? If the author in the source language used multiple words with almost the same meaning, it's best to use multiple different words in the target language in translation, so the reader, regardless his knowledge of the source language, is at least given a chance to appreciate the author's choice of words with subtle nuances.

Literal and free translations are two extremes. Literary translation is close to free, scholarly translation close to literal, and translation of science and technology cannot but be literal, or serious consequences might follow. Sometimes a literal translation inevitably leads to difficulty in the target language. A translator's note is to be added. This is a compromise between fluency and translator's responsibility.

Russell's History of Western Philosophy may be considered as a scholarly work. In spite of its wide readership and high popularity, the title does not necessarily reflect its content; it's more like a history of western thought. Most readers are not professional scholars, who would read classics and published research articles to write more research articles or books, but are educated general public, who read it to improve knowledge and cultivate critical thinking. Like any major encyclopedia, this book is in the middle between truly scholarly works and easy readings for laymen. Thus, Mr. Xu's free translation of this specific book is not to be blamed. Scholars or students in academic studies reading Chinese translations, however, would be advised to consult this book in English if they decide to cite references to the book without misinterpretation.

Technical translation: word "apply" as a case

You frequently see the Apply button on a computer. For instance, after you make some configuration changes, you can press OK to apply the changes and exit, or press Apply to apply the changes and stay where you are. Surprisingly, there's no perfect Chinese translation for the word "apply" in this sense. Common translation is "应用". But that word in modern Chinese is synonymous with "使用", i.e. "use"; e.g. "应用方法" (use the method). The English word "apply" here actually means "make or commit the changes now". It would be awkward or just plain wrong to say "use the changes".

Here are more examples. When software has a bug, you apply a patch to fix or work around the bug. Chinese translators still use "应用" as the counterpart for "apply", as in "应用补丁", literally, "use the patch", which is semantically different. Colloquial phrase "打补丁" sounds natural, but it is too informal. Data replication software copies data changes from the primary site to the replicated site and applies the changes to synchronize the two sites. In Chinese, it's said "应用数据变化(修改)".

Fortunately, tech savvy Chinese readers have no problems understanding "应用" here. If it takes a while to get used to it, they'll get used to it. But for me, I can't help searching for the perfect word. "实施" (implement)? "使用" (use)? "采用" (adopt)? None is the exact match. I know the set of Chinese characters has been frozen for about a century now (probably even for newly discovered chemical elements), but Chinese words are invented on a yearly, if not monthly, basis. If there's no perfect word in the existing Chinese vocabulary, can a new word be created instead of using an existing word in a slightly different or new sense? One thousand years ago, Chinese translators created a large number of new words in translating Buddhist scriptures, and the words later migrated to Japan. One hundred years ago, Japanese translators created many new Chinese words in translating western technology, and they migrated to China. So, what Japanese translators say about "apply the changes", or some other technical jargon, would be an interesting question.

"we should all be learning Chinese..." thus they say

In a recent Facebook posting, I read

I keep coming across the same opinion, something along the lines of "we should all be learning Chinese, they're going to take over the world, etc etc..."

I, personally, think it's a pile of rubbish,...

To that, I responded (with slight modification here):

Whoever said "we should all be learning Chinese, they're going to take over the world" is very wrong. I'm a native speaker. This kind of claim occasionally appears on Chinese forums, just to create a few hours' laughs and sneers. Seriously, I can think of two reasons to refute this claim, other than a well-known one, i.e. China is still far behind in innovation in everything: the current practice of the Chinese government in promoting the Chinese culture has too many flaws; the Chinese is a difficult language. The first problem may be largely solved when the element of ideology goes away, which will happen eventually, probably sooner than most people have expected. The second problem remains as is. In spite of certain individuals' language talent, there's indisputable statistics to prove that Chinese, Arabic, etc are the hardest among popular languages for an English speaker. See How hard is Chinese?. (I already emailed and asked, Defense Language Institute will not have a web page hosting that frequently referenced content even though it belongs to them.) If a language is difficult for most people of the world, it's unlikely to become a dominant language. The success of English in this regard is not just due to the coincidence of the UK and then the US being advanced in most areas of technology and their mother tongue being English, but also because English takes less time to learn for non-English speakers than do many other languages (largely due to replacement of case systems and gender, the rarely useful features in modern languages, by word order, prepositions etc). People in the 21st century are just too busy to learn a language in order to conduct normal business. Unless the Chinese language magically becomes simple, it won't take over the world.

Off-topic: Joke: Recruiting

A joke found on the Internet. (Two lines omitted from the original.)

某公司招聘，好多人打来电话说保安不让进，希望派人接一下。考官说如果你连保安都对付不了，还是别来了。

最后翻墙进来的成海外市场专员；
讲理进来的成了研发工程师；
软磨硬泡进来的成了客服经理；
硬打进来的，顶替了保安。

做出结果才是价值。同样的困难，你遇到了只是退缩，而别人一直在找方法！

Translation:

A company is recruiting. Lots of people call in saying the security guard stops them at the entrance and they expect somebody to come out to usher them in. The recruiting officer says, if you can't even deal with the security guard, you don't need to come.

In the end, the one climbing over the wall to get in becomes the overseas market specialist.
The one getting in after reasoning with the guard becomes an R&D engineer.
The one who coaxes and pesters to get in becomes a customer service manager.
The one fighting himself in replaces the security guard.

Value lies in the result. In front of the same obstacle, you chicken out, while others look for a way out.

____________
[note] "翻墙" literally means "climb over the wall". But it also refers to the action of circumventing the Great Chinese Firewall to reach the Internet outside of China.

"He" (他) and "she" (她) mix-up for Chinese students

It's a known fact that a Chinese student learning English tends to mix up "he" and "she" in speaking, with "he" said more than "she" by mistake (subconscious male chauvinism?). A reasonable explanation is that "he" and "she" are pronounced exactly the same in Chinese, tā, even though their written forms differ.

Now I find evidence that could support this theory, however self-explanatory it already is. In the Facebook Polyglots group, a Finnish man writes:

"I have wanted to raise my children to be polyglots. But, I have found it challenging to teach them two languages. I've spoken English to all of my three sons from day one. They all speak English, but have trouble remembering basic words and make beginner mistakes. Just today, when I called my eldest son and asked: 'Are you home already? Is your mother there?' My 13-year-old, with whom I've spoken English every day of his life, says: 'He's home. I think he's upstairs.' With unconcealed frustration, I said: 'She, not he.' 'Oh! Sorry, I forgot'."

What a pleasure in finding other people making the same mistake! Seriously, this gentleman's children can speak a little of multiple Romance languages, attesting to their language capabilities. And yet a mistake is made because "he" and "she" are the same word in Finnish, hän, not just the same in pronunciation, but also in spelling, a stronger case than in Chinese we may say. In fact, the same can happen in a few other languages. I remember a polyglot friend of mine told me his Armenian friends sometimes make this mistake too. In Armenian, again, one word, նա, can mean both "he" and "she".

To permanently solve the problem, you have to think in the language you speak, English in this case. If the thinking process is in Chinese, Finnish or Armenian, and speaking is after a translation, possibly a very fast or nearly subconscious one, the risk of making this mistake still exists. But before achieving the level of thinking in English, the best the student can do is speak slowly.

"第几" has no English equivalent: a follow-up

In August, 2012, I blogged that "第几" has no English equivalent. (If you haven't already read it, you may want to take a quick look first, but ignore my explanation based on presence or absence of measure words (量词) in a language.) Now I'd like to expand this topic to include other languages and so posted a discussion at how-to-learn-any-language.com. Based on the responses, I place languages into three groups according to their capability to ask about the ordinal number of an item in a series. (Words in parentheses are the words or phrases equivalent to the Chinese "第几". Hyperlinks point to other people's discussions. Words in brackets are my comments.)

Group 1: a single word serves as the question word

Chinese (第几)
Dutch (Hoeveelste)
Esperanto (Kioma)
Finnish (manieth)
French (combientième, quantième) [The poster says quantième is very formal and rarely used.]
German (wievielte)
Japanese (何番目)
Kazakh (Нешінші)
Marathi (kitva) [The poster specifically says Hindi probably does not have this word.]
Persian (چندمین)

Group2: a phrase is needed

Russian (какой по счету)
Swedish (vilken ... i ordningen)

Group 3: some logic is needed to deduce the ordinal number, or you ask in a different way, or there's not a general interrogative construct

English
Italian
Spanish [? debated]

Joke due to translation: "Oracle bone script" was registered as a software brand by Americans

On Weibo, the Chinese microblogging web site, there's an article titled "甲骨文的呼唤" (the Call of Oracle Bone Script), where I read

我们的甲骨文三字被美国人注册成软件品牌，甲骨文字检索软件竟然也是美国人发明的
Translation: The three characters, 甲骨文 (oracle bone script), of ours, were registered as a software brand by Americans. Even 甲骨文字 (oracle bone script) search software was invented by Americans.

The author 中华古文字研发中心 is evidently annoyed at the cyber-squatting of a very Chinese name by a non-Chinese company. What's going on?

Let's put everything in the historical perspective.

* The word "oracle" dates back to probably 2000 BC according to Wikipedia, referring to "Frenzied women from whose lips the god speaks". The Chinese word for this is "神谕" (literally, god's decree).

* From the 14th to 11th century BC, the first Chinese script, 甲骨文 (literally, shell bone writing) was written on the shells of animals mainly turtles in today's Anyang, Henan Province of China.

* In the late 1800's, these shell bones with characters on them were discovered by Chinese scholars.

* In 1977, "Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL)" according to Wikipedia. "The name Oracle comes from the code name of a CIA project which the founders had all worked on". In 1982, the company was renamed to use "Oracle" in its name.

* Some time after that, the Chinese translation of Oracle Corporation and its database software names came into existence. The Chinese name chosen is "甲骨文".

Since the word "oracle" has at least two meanings when Oracle Database or the company was born, god's decree (神谕) and Chinese turtle or oracle bone script (甲骨文), which one did Larry Ellison and his friends have in mind when they named the software or company as such, or if the name was directly adopted from the CIA project they had worked on, which did the CIA project team initially have in mind? According to an Oracle FAQ page, "The word Oracle means: Prophecy or prediction; answer to a question believed to come from the gods; a statement believed to be infallible and authoritative; a shrine at which these answers are given."

So it's obvious that Mr. Ellison did not consider the second meaning of the word as the name of the company or its flagship software. In fact, it's likely that he was completely unaware of the obscure Chinese oracle bones. The Weibo article cries for Internet domain name squatting of "甲骨文" by Oracle Corporation due to the author's ignorance of the history of these events, an unfortunate Chinese translation of "Oracle" (as company or software) as "甲骨文" (oracle bone script), and possibly his lack of basic English reading skills.

Because "Oracle" (as company or software) took the meaning of god's decree, the correct Chinese name should be "神谕", not "甲骨文". I consider the current Chinese names "甲骨文公司" (Oracle Corporation) and "甲骨文数据库" (Oracle Database) to be incorrect translations. I posted a message to my Weibo and also as a reply to the article, "As an Oracle database administrator, I'd like to remind the author..." Interestingly, my reply was deleted (the author of a Weibo message can delete other people's replies). Some of my Oracle database friends responded to my message saying that "甲骨文" is a beautiful translation, that it is not a mistranslation, and that "神谕" would be terrible. Well, I told them it's a mistranslation from the linguistic or etymological point of view. A similar example is early Taiwanese translation of "Rice University" as "稻米大学", as if "Rice" was the cereal grain in this context, which would definitely disturb Mr. Rice, the founder of the school. This I blogged about before.

Let me end this blog posting with an interesting story, possibly true. The famous Chinese singer, Liu Dehua, Andy Lau by English name, once went to the countryside and saw a restaurant by the name "Liu Dehua Restaurant". Not happy with infringement of his big name, he requested to talk to the owner. An old man came out, saying "I've been called Liu Dehua all my life. Who are you?"

___________________
[Update 2014-04-05] I got to record this funny true story that just came in. My friend, a well known Oracle database expert in China, posted a message on his Weibo today:

今天收到一个妹子电话，问我，你做什么的？我莫名其妙反问，什么事。妹子说，我这里出土两片甲骨，似乎有甲骨文，能帮我鉴定下么？ - 这么多年了兄弟们[泪]，第一次有正宗甲骨文的业务上门啦！
Translation: Today I got a phone call from a lady asking, What do you do? Confused, I asked her, Why? She said, two 甲骨 (shell bones) were excavated here. Looks like there's 甲骨文 (oracle script). Can you help evaluate? - After so many years, my brothers [tears], for the first time we've got the authentic oracle business coming to our door!

That posting was followed by lots of joking replies!

Chinese religious language

A Christian friend of mine introduced me to The Reverend Wang Zhiyong (王志勇)'s translation of The Confession of Faith of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (威斯敏斯德信条). In view of the fact that the English text was written in 1646, I think Wang's translation, built on or having consulted previous translators' work, is remarkably accurate. But choice of certain words in Chinese got me to think in an attempt to understand as well as possibly improve. Take for example "edify their brethren" in Chapter XVI (Of Good Works). The Chinese is "造就弟兄" (literally "build the brothers", where "造就" is normally used in a different phrase, e.g. "时代造就了英雄", "the age or era or times created the heroes"). According to Wiktionary, indeed "edify" can mean "build" and "construct" although rare now; nowadays most people understand this word to mean "instruct or improve morally or intellectually". I brought this point to my friend and asked why it was not translated as, e.g., "教导弟兄" ("educate or instruct the brothers"). Her reply is quite educative to me: The Confession is meant to be read by Christians and the Chinese translation uses words commonly used by the Chinese Christians, "造就弟兄" being a common saying among them.

We know that technical terms usually have their own dictionaries. But it's unlikely that a Chinese dictionary of religion or Christianity has an entry for "造就" for this special meaning unknown to non-religious Chinese readers. These are jargons, but not keywords, and do not deserve a place in a dictionary or even an entry in the index at the end of a book. And these jargons can even be "虚词" ("empty word", "functional word"), such as "因着" ("because", "because of"). A Google search for "因着" shows almost exclusively Christian sources. How this word, which does not exist in 汉典 dictionary, came about and was only handed down to later generations of Chinese Christians would be an interesting research project.

Religious texts may have other unique characteristics in the Chinese language. When Buddhism was introduced into China in the Han (206 BC–220 AD) through Tang (618–907 AD) dynasties, new words were invented in translation. But there's another interesting, albeit perhaps insignificant, change in the language. Normally a four-character phrase, oftentimes a 成语 (idiom), has the semantic or word boundary in the middle; i.e. the first two characters form one word and the latter two the other. But a Buddhist word, if of four characters, may break this rule. In "得大自在" (attain Maheśvara) or "大自在天" (Maheśvara), there's the three-character word ("大自在"), which is quite common in Buddhist terminologies. Here's a more obscure one: "知 见 立知，即 无明 本" from 《楞严经》 (Śūraṅgama Sūtra). I intentionally inserted spaces between characters or words that form semantic units. A possible translation of the 8-character sentence is "(Your own) knowledge and sight establish your knowledge (of the world). That is the root of unwiseness." In reading 文言文 (literary Chinese text), identifying word boundaries is more important than in reading the vernacular Chinese. It helps to keep in mind the presence of many odd-number-character words in Buddhist texts.

"Modern" and "现代" or "近代"

The standard translation of the word "modern" into Chinese is "现代" (literally, "present time or epoch"). But Chinese (and possibly Japanese) historians and textbooks also have the word "近代" (literally "near epoch"), which, surprisingly, is usually translated as "modern" as well. According to Wikipedia, modern history began approximately in the 16th century, which falls into the 近代 (or even earlier, before 近代) in Chinese parlance, definitely not 现代. Since "modern" includes both what Chinese historians call 近代 and 现代, the whole of "modern history" should be properly translated as "近现代". But if the context limits the period to only part of the full span of modern history, "modern" should be translated as only one of the two Chinese words, 近代 or 现代, depending on the context.

An obvious question to ask here is, Where is the division in timeline between 近代 and 现代? The Chinese Wikipedia page for "近代史" is made a counterpart of the English page for "Early modern period".[note] So a natural answer is, Refer to whatever time the English phrase has the modern history divided by. Since early modern period is from 1500 (the end of Middle Ages) to 1800 (the age of Revolution, especially the French Revolution in 1789), that corresponds to 近代, and the period from 1800 on is naturally 现代.

But there are always different opinions. For example, according to the "近代史" Wikipedia page, the People's Republic of China traditionally takes 1640 (English Civil War) as the beginning and 1917 (Russia's October Revolution) as the end. But this tradition may be slowly going away as a result of academic globalization. Another page, for "中国近代史", states that "中国大陆的中国近代史学界基本确立从1840年“鸦片战争”到1949年“中华人民共和国成立”的分期方法" (the Chinese 近代史 scholars of the mainland China generally establish the chronological span of 1840 the "Opium War" to 1949 the "Establishment of the People's Republic of China" [as 近代]). The latter statement seems to be closer to what I remember. In that case, the generally accepted international standard of "early modern history" started way before the (mainland) Chinese historians' 近代, by more than three centuries, and ended about 150 years earlier!

[note] 2022-12 Update. I noticed that Wikipedia has changed. The English page for the "近代史" page is now Late modern period, which means that "近代" started in 1800, not 1500.

"Thought" and "以为"

The Chinese word "以为" means "thought", as in "I thought it was Tuesday today" (我以为今天是星期二). There's only one little detail some Chinese speakers often overlook: the verb in the subordinate clause should be in the past tense. "I thought it is Tuesday today" is not right.

If you think about it, though, the past tense in the subordinate clause doesn't meaningfully indicate a past behavior; only the verb "thought" in the main clause is clearly in the past. The past tense of "was" in the example sentence is required by the grammatical agreement between the main and subordinate clauses. Probably due to lack of this semantic implication in the subordinate clause, a Chinese student often takes the easier word "is" and forgets the correct one, "was".

Interestingly, I found this sentence in a German learning CD: "Und ich dachte es ist Dienstag." (literally: "And I thought it is Tuesday") That means in German, it's acceptable to use the simple present tense in the subordinate clause even if its main clause uses the past tense. But I'm sure using the past tense is fine too ("Ich dachte, es war Dienstag.").

Translation: a case study, "feminism" and “女权主义"

In a Chinese high school language class, students are taught the concepts of "内涵" (intension, not to be confused with intention in spite of the same pronunciation) and "外延" (extension, not to be confused with action of extending something), two linguistic terms that seem to be less known among American high schoolers. The intension of a word is the concept or idea it evokes, while the extension of it is its referents or what it actually denotes. Therefore, "Venus" has the same extension as does "Morning Star" or "Evening Star" in the culture in which the latter two terms are used because they refer to the same planet, but the three words themselves all have different intensions or meanings.[note1]

A recent discussion among apparently a group of sociologists on Weibo (microblog mainly in China) questions the translation of the word "feminism" to "女权主义". My response is that this translation has been infused with the translator's own understanding, namely, addition of "权" (rights). This semantic expansion of the word during translation creates an intensional asymmetry between the two words in their respective source and target language. On the other hand, according to Wikipedia, feminism "is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women." The Chinese word "女权主义" properly denotes the same referents, or extension of the word; people using "feminism" in English or "女权主义" in Chinese will not have any problem solely due to the translation of this word in either direction, unless the definition is someday changed on the "rights" part. "Feminism" properly or solely based on its intension means a doctrine about femininity or the female gender, not necessarily related to the rights of the said group of people. If one day in the future it no longer denotes movements and ideologies for women's rights, possibly on the day when equal rights are indeed achieved to most or all parties' satisfaction,[note2] and the word continues to refer to some doctrine related to women, the Chinese counterpart "女权主义" will become a mistranslation, and a more direct, intension-mirroring, translation such as "女性主义" will be appropriate.[note3]

It would be interesting to check how other languages translate the word "feminism". As of this writing, Google Translator offers 72 languages, almost all of which, including some adopting a non-Latin alphabet, use a word similar in spelling and pronunciation to "feminism" in English (or rather, its Latin root), suggesting cognation or loan relation. Apart from those languages, the following are the few languages that make up their own terms (literal meanings of the words are in the parentheses):

Chinese: 女权主义 (women-rights-ism)
Arabic: نظرية المساواة بين الجنسين (gender equality theory, 性别平等理论)
Hindi: स्त्रियों के अधिकारों का समर्थन (support of women's rights, 对妇女权利的支持)
Persian: عقیده بهبرابری زن ومرد (belief in equality of men and women, 男女平等之信仰)
Swahili: haki za wanawake (women's rights, 妇女权利)
Vietnames: chủ nghỉa nư quyền (women-rights-ism, 女权主义)
Urdu: تحریک نسواں (women's movement, 妇女运动)
Gajarati: નારીવાદ (theory of women, 妇女理论)
Kannada: >ಸ್ತ್ರೀ ಸ್ವಾತಂತ್ರ್ಯವಾದ (women freedom argument, 妇女自由论争)
and the weirdest of all:
Marathi: स्त्रीयांना पुरूषांबरोबरीचे समान हक्क मिळावे अशा मतप्रणालीची चळवळ (women purusambarobarice same rights strong commitment towards the tribe movement, 妇女??同等权利、对部落作出坚决承诺的运动, where the second word is machine-translated as "men-analogous" -- What's that?)

______________
[note1] This example is taken from Saul Kriptke's "Identity and Necessity", Identity and Individualism, p.141, ultimately attributed to Willard V. O. Quine.
[note2] See e.g. an August 2013 article on Spiegel, "Frauen als Besserverdiener: Mongolische Männer fordern Gleichberechtigung" (Women as better money earners: Mongolian men demand equality), which suggests that the Soviet Union's influence significantly promoted women's status.
[note3] (Update March 2018) I recently posted a message to Weibo. One user's comment makes good sense: "I tend to use “女性主义” in theoretical studies and “女权主义” in political activities, and I believe the two are at best interchangeable as synonyms, and think that “女权主义” is a very good, creative, Chinese translaton." According to Google Ngram, "女权主义" had been more popular than "女性主义" until about 1996. Since then, the usage of the latter kept increasing until 2005 when it became steady. But the usage of "女权主义" almost stopped growing after 1996. Also note that Wikipedia has the 女性主义 page, and a search for "女权主义" is redirected to that page.

Translation of "computer", "calculator", and others

Some English words that were created or became popular after 1950's but before late 1990's are translated differently between mainland China and Taiwan, due to the lack of cultural exchange during that period across the Taiwan Strait. Notable among these words are those related to technology.

For example, "computer" is generally called "计算机" in mainland China and "电脑" in Taiwan. But of course there's no absolute rule. On the web page of National Taiwan University, a search for "計算機", limiting the result to their web site only, returns 20,600 hits; search for "電腦", 96,700. On the mainland side, the 百度百科 (Baidu encyclopedia) page for "计算机" starts with "计算机（Computer）俗称 [commonly known as] 电脑". It appears that "計算機" used in Taiwan more frequently occurs in an academic context while "電腦" is more casual or refers to a personal computer. In the mainland, it used to be almost exclusively "计算机" in both contexts and has shifted more to "电脑" when referring to a personal computer. I think the reason for this shift is twofold: (1) intensive cross-Strait cultural exchange in addition to the big trend of global communication in this Internet age; (2) relative ease in pronouncing "电脑" (diànnǎo) compared to "计算机" (jìsuànjī). The latter becomes evident when you try to say the word increasingly faster; it takes an effort to position the tongue correctly in pronouncing jìsuànjī while diàn and nǎo have the same consonant, n, at the ending and beginning, respectively, of the characters.

Semantically, though, "电脑" is an awkward or absurd translation. It literally means "electric brain", which, had it been adopted decades ago by the pioneers of the computer technology or its users, would be a natural choice. But neither mainland China nor Taiwan is related to the invention of a computer, and so cannot invent a word for it to be backported to the language associated with the invention and expect to be accepted (see my theory of linguistic authority). On the other hand, "计算机" is a perfect literal translation of "computer", although "机", literally "machine", goes beyond the meaning of the suffix "-er" by limiting it to a machine, which in this case is acceptable since a "computer" does not refer to a person that computes but only a machine in the context.

The story does not end here because there's another word to be translated, "calculator". Both "compute" and "calculate" are accurately translated as "计算" in Chinese. But since "计算机" was already taken for "computer", what's left in Chinese for "calculator"? My Taiwanese friend told me while they call "computer" "電腦", they call "calculator", surprisingly, "計算機". Mainlanders, on the other hand, call "computer" "计算机" or "电脑", and "calculator" "计算器", literally the same as "计算机", but with the last character changed (thanks to the rich synonym repository in the Chinese language); it cunningly circumvents the problem created by the semantic equivalence of the two English words. Well, are "compute" and "calculate" really semantically equivalent? Walter W. Skeat's Concise Dictionary of English Etymology says "compute" originated from Latin com- (together) and putare (think), and "calculate" from calculare (reckon by help of small pebbles). It seems that "compute" is for more sophisticated computation while "calculate" is for rudimentary arithmetic, and they correctly match the relative complexity between a computer and a calculator. Unfortunately, there're no two good Chinese words that mean the same apart from this subtle difference in connotation. Maybe "算数" is one for the lower end "calculate". But early Chinese translators didn't happen to choose "算数机" for "calculator". So be it.

Related to this translation discrepancy in computer technology are "程序" and "程式" for "(computer) program", "硬件/软件" and "硬體/軟體" for "hardware/software", etc. Fortunately, these differences are historical in the sense that they're limited and won't expand to new words, as the Chinese people in the mainland and Taiwan are more than ever in contact with each other.

Incorrect English in a petition to the White House

I just saw Invest and deport Jasmine Sun who was the main suspect of a famous Thallium poison murder case (victim:Zhu Lin) in China, a petition to the White House calling for investigation and deportation of a suspect in the Zhu Ling case. I'm pleased with this volunteer work that aims at bringing this 18-year-long horrendous criminal case to a satisfactory end. However, the author of this petition is seriously lacking in basic English language skills. Lousy errors occur from the title to almost the end: "Invest" for "Investigate", "Zhu Lin" for "Zhu Ling", ..., "petite" for "petition". I'm deeply disappointed with this apparently Miami-based Chinese gentleman that has a warm heart yet inadequate training in English. Let's see if the White House will respond to a petition full of grammatical as well as factual (Zhu Lin for Zhu Ling) errors, if the signature count reaches 100 thousand.

[Update December 2023]

In the wake of the death of Zhu Ling, the victim in the poisoning murder case, I wrote a Weibo posting listing the errors in the petition text.

在中小学语文学习中，改病句或纠正错误用词是一种很好的学习方法，因为它能给我们留下深刻印象。但这种练习在英语学习中较少见到。这里举一例。2013年，有人在奥巴马白宫请愿网站We the People（“我们人民”）上发出请愿[1]
Invest and deport Jasmine Sun who was the main suspect of a famous Thallium poison murder case (victim:Zhu Lin) in China
全文如下：
In 1995, Zhu Ling as a Tsinghua university student was found out to be purposely poisoned twice by lethal chemical: Thallium, which leads to her permanent paralysis. It was indicated that Sun, her roommate, had the motive, and access to the deadly chemical. Jasmine Sun was investigated by police as suspect in 1997. But resources show that the case was mystically closed due to her family's powerful political connections. Resources also show that she changed her name and entered USA by marriage fraud.
To protect the safety of our citizens, we petite that the government investigate and deport her.
For more information on the case, please visit:
...
这里对英语的用词和语法做一些评论，以帮助大家学习英语。
1. Invest（“投资”）应为Investigate（“调查”）。这是一个不可原谅的、低级的错误！
2. main suspect of: 更常见的词组是prime suspect，其后的介词应为in，因为后面是case（“案子”）。
3. a famous Thallium poison murder case: famous宜改为high-profile或well-known，因为famous有褒义。Thallium poison应改作thallium poisoning，金属名首字母不大写，poisoning是动名词，指出这个case是什么样的。
4. Zhu Lin...Tsinghua university: Lin应为Ling；将关键的专有名词写错是不可原谅的、不负责任的错误！另外，Tsinghua university应为Tsinghua University。
5. was found out to be purposely poisoned: out应删去。
6. chemical: Thallium, which leads: chemical后冒号最好改为逗号，Thallium应为thallium，leads应为过去式led。
7. investigated by police as suspect: police前应加the，suspect前应加a（或the，因为她是唯一嫌犯）。很多华裔、印裔在写英语时常常省略不可省的冠词。必须记住这条规则：单数可数名词前需要冠词！
8. the case was mystically closed: mystically不如mysteriously妥当。
9. USA: 前面应有the，华裔、印裔经常犯这个错误。
10. we petite that: petite（“小巧的”）与petition（“请愿”）毫无关系。这是一个不可原谅的、低级的错误！可改为we request that或we petition the White House to...。注意petition如果作动词，它极少紧接that从句（那或许是不规范的用法）。

该请愿在收集到足够签名后，白宫的确作了答复，拒绝介入，因为要避免造成不恰当的影响，毕竟美国司法独立。但这项请愿被拒，它的文字拙劣、人名混乱是否也有一定关系呢？有点难以想象的是，有超过10万的签名，难道当时没有人指出这些严重错误？

[1] https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/invest-and-deport-jasmine-sun-who-was-main-suspect-famous-thallium-poison-murder-case-victimzhu-lin-china/

"主席" (Zhǔxí) was Chairman, is President

Nowadays, the Chinese head of state, "主席" (Zhǔxí, zhu3 xi2), is always translated as "president", not "chairman" as in the Mao Zedong's times, as in "Chairman Mao". But the English word "president" is almost always translated into Chinese as a different word "总统", which goes back into English definitely as "president", and never "chairman".

I'm curious about the time of the change from "chairman" to "president" as the English translation for "主席". According to Wikipedia, "The office [of President of the People's Republic of China] was formerly known as the State Chairman and the Chinese Zhǔxí still literally translates to this. The official translation switched to President after 1982 in conformity with Western terminology, although the Chinese word is still used to translate other offices of 'chairman'". So the change occurred in 1982. What's special about that year? The English page of Wikipedia is not as clear as the Chinese page, which states that “中华人民共和国主席”职务自1954年召开第一届全国人大以后开始设立；1968年开始悬空；1975年通过的《宪法》删除有关“中华人民共和国主席”的条款，取消此一职务；1982年通过的《宪法》恢复了主席和副主席设置。 （The office of "President of the People's Republic of China" was established in 1954 when the first National People's Congress was held. It began to be vacant in 1968. The constitution passed in 1975 removed the clause with regard to "President of the People's Republic of China" and abolished this position. The constitution passed in 1982 re-established the positions of President and Vice-President.)

China in the early 1980's saw a hectic if not tumult transition, politically and economically. One element in these changes was conformity with the standards in the rest of the world. It's no surprise that the English word "chairman" for "主席", as the head of state, is replaced with the more common and less ambiguous "president".

Etymology doesn't play any role in the translation. "主席" literally means "the mat of the host" (or "the primary mat" since "主" has both meanings). "Chairman" is the man or person in the chair, while "president" originally means "sitting in the front" (Latin "Praeses"). Neither is significantly closer in meaning than the other to the Chinese word. But since both "主席" and "chairman" have a noun component in them, could that have been the reason why the 1950's and 1960's Chinese translators chose "chairman" instead of "president" as the English translation?

Having found the time the translation switched, we may conclude that there were two state chairmen in the history of the People's Republic of China, Chairman Mao Zedong and Chairman Liu Shaoqi, the latter in office from 1959 to 1968. After that, all we have are presidents, from President Li Xiannian (1983-1988) to the just elected President Xi Jinping (习近平).

Note that we're talking about head of state in this short article; the "Chairman of the Communist Party of China" and "Chairman of the Central Military Commission" remain to be "chairman". In connection to that, there's one minor special case to be dealt with. Mao Zedong intended to transfer his power to Hua Guofeng, a paramount yet weak leader of China after Mao's death in 1976 for a short time. Because of his insistence on Mao's principles and practices, there was a brief period when the phrase "英明领袖华主席" (wise leader Chairman Hua) became popular. Since he was not the head of state, the title "Chairman" is not equivalent to the latter-day "President", but only "Chairman of the Communist Party" and "Chairman of the Central Military Commission", two titles he did assume. It's possible, however, that the Chinese people back then would care less about this distinction, and unknowingly but incorrectly consider him as a successor to Mao in his full rights, including the state-of-head title of "Chairman", now called "President".

Reposting: Bilingualism and mental health

(Reposting from my other blog)

The January 9 issue of Journal of Neuroscience published an article Lifelong Bilingualism Maintains Neural Efficiency for Cognitive Control in Aging (full article). Although there's no difference in "simple working memory span" between mono- and bi-linguals, "older adult bilinguals switched between perceptual tasks significantly faster than their monolingual peers." And "older adult bilinguals showed a pattern of fMRI results similar to the younger adult groups: they outperformed monolingual older adults while requiring less activation in several frontal brain regions linked with effortful processing." "[T]he bilingual requirement to switch between languages on a daily basis serves to tune the efficiency of language-switching regions..., and that over time the increased efficiency of these regions comes to benefit even nonlinguistic, perceptual switching".

It's no more news that multi-language efficiency or simply studying a foreign language postpones Alzheimer's onset. (In a leisure-reading article I wrote, I almost gave up on finding a reasonable excuse for my study of foreign languages and reluctantly settled on possible prevention of Alzheimer.) But it's easy to lose sight of news that hints at the negative side of bilingualism. For example, in Cognitive and Linguistic Processing in the Bilingual Mind (full article), published in February 2010 of Current Directions in Psychological Science, we read "bilinguals typically have lower formal language proficiency than monolinguals do; for example, they have smaller vocabularies and weaker access to lexical items."

Lastly, if bilingualism has the same effect as more education on delay of the onset of Alzheimer, be aware that research shows that in spite of delayed onset, faster progression of the disease after onset is associated with more education.

Nevertheless, there're far more benefits reported in research than possible harm in bilingualism to mental health. There may even be more, although possibly diminishing, benefit in trilingualism than bilingualism, but no research has been conducted to my knowledge. In a nutshell, cerebral stimulus as in language study is highly recommended in our natural aging and should be followed throughout the life, not to be terminated when you no longer need to take exams or when you retire.

2013 New Year's Wish: Less new usage of 被 (bei)

被 (bèi) is the character denoting passive voice of a Chinese sentence and optionally serves as the preposition "by" in front of the acting agent, as in "树被吹倒了" (The tree is blown down) or "树被风吹倒了" (The tree is blown down by the wind). But in recent years, Chinese netizens have been using this character in a new sense: a prefix to an intransitive verb or even a noun or adjective, as in 被自杀 ("bei-suicide", or literally "be suicided"), 被精神病 ("bei-psychopath", or "be psychopath'ed"). This intentionally ungrammatical new usage of 被, where 被 is roughly equivalent to "forced to (acknowledge)", reflects Chinese Internet users' discontent about the much to be desired legal and political system. Hopefully, the new leaders of the government will usher in an era of an improved system and as a side effect, bring this new sense of 被 to the end of its short, ugly, "un-harmonious" linguistic period, naturally not 被-ended. That's my 2013 New Year's Wish.

[2018-08-24 Update] Sighting of a figuratively passive voice usage of an intransitive verb: Jstor Daily article The Stolen Children of Argentina, "Between 1976-1982 some 30,000 Argentines were “disappeared,” their children seized by the junta. The Abuelas—the Grandmothers—of the Plaza refuse to forget."

Not to introduce a sentence topic with "For"

It's not uncommon to hear Chinese speaking English say "For" to introduce a sentence-level topic, e.g.

The two programs, A and B, work together. Program A is easy and we already talked about it. For Program B, I don't know if we can work on it now.

Obviously, the word "For" should be "As for", "As to", "Regarding", "As regards", "Concerning", "As far as ... is concerned", or "When it comes to". But for some reason, many Chinese use the single word "For".

A Chinese sentence can be preceded by a standalone topic noun phrase for emphasis or other reason, as in

程序B，我不知道我们现在是否可以做。

(Program B, I don't know if we can work on it now.)

while the literal English translation in the parentheses is less common. This is technically called fronting (in the Chinese sentence) and left-dislocation (in the literal English translation). But I don't think that can explain why so many Chinese artificially introduce the noun phrase with "For".

A joke about Chinese calligraphy in inscription

It's common practice in China to have a well-known calligrapher or a government official to write the name of a famous building, bridge, or tower, in Chinese paint brush, to be used as inscription on the entrance or facade of the architecture. The ideal person is an official and calligrapher two in one. The less ideal is one of two, which one preferred depending on who you talk to. If the calligraphy is beautifully carried out and the name or title of the architecture is easily recognized, the inscription definitely enhances the beauty and value overall. But the two criteria may not match all the time.

One particular case is the inscription "山东博物馆 " (shan1dong1 bo2wu4guan3, Shandong Museum). On October 9, 2011, somebody first suggested a possible alternative reading of the cursive writing, "心系情妇那" (xin1 xi4 qing2fu4 na4, heart tied to mistress there). On October 21, more possible readings "山东情妇馆" (shan1dong1 qing2fu4 guan3, Shandong Mistress House) and "心系情妇波" (xin1 xi4 qing2fu4 bo1, heart tied to mistress wave or bosom), and it starts to evolve into a short story. A day later, "山东情妇报" (shan1dong1 qing2fu4 bao4, Shandong Mistress Newspaper) was suggested, and the full story was completed:

十一期间一对儿情侣在山东博物馆游玩，小伙子凝视着博物馆上面的字说：“书法写的不错啊，心系情妇那！” 女孩说：“你傻B啊！明明是山东情妇馆！贪官的情妇都关这里面了！” 这时，一个路人经过，听到两人的对话，心里暗暗想：两个2货！不认识字还在这装有学问！明明是心系情妇波！！

(During the October 1 national day holiday, a couple were touring around Shandong Museum. The guy stared at the inscription on the museum building and said, "Calligraphy not bad, 心系情妇那!" The girl said, "You stupid! It's obviously 山东情妇馆. The corrupt officials' mistresses are locked in there!" A passer-by heard their talk, and thought to himself: two idiots pretend to be educated not knowing how to read, it's clearly 心系情妇波!)

You judge the reading. Here's the image:

If the above image is not shown, this smaller image is from the official web site:
http://www.sdmuseum.com/hy/001.jpg

"谢谢叔叔!" "Thank you Uncle" said not to a family relative

In a crowded bus in China, a middle aged man sees a young kid standing by him. He stands up and yields his seat to the kid, who says to him "谢谢叔叔!", literally "Thank you Uncle!" Can a non-family-relative be called uncle, aunt, grandma or grandpa? I posted a question to a language discussion forum, because I read, in a German language textbook, "Kinder, das ist Onkel Schmitt aus Amerika" ("Children, this is Uncle Schmitt from America"), which prompted me to think that a non-relative can be called uncle in Germany.

The discussion was quite active, with most responses providing cases where a non-relative can be called uncle in different parts of the world in different languages, even in the US. But there're some nuances in usage: in most cases, if the name follows the title, it becomes more acceptable (just "Uncle" may be rare but "Uncle George" is acceptable in many situations); this addressing is more popular in a rural area; and it was used more than it is now.

Keeping those minor differences in mind, I would summarize three types.

(A) Even a stranger on a bus may be called aunt, uncle, grandpa, grandma, older brother/sister, not followed by a name. Countries having this usage: Japan, China, possibly many other Oriental countries.
(B) A good friend may be called aunt, .... Countries: UK, Turkey, Germany,...
(C) Only family members or relatives are addressed like this. Countries: US,...

The above distinction is definitely changing in time and varies from place to place even inside one country or culture zone. I've been in the US for only 20 years and never lived in a rural area. I won't be surprised if a neighbor is called Uncle George by all kids on the street. But that's probably very special, only for specific persons deserving this dearly respect in a small area, not generally applicable. So I don't consider it to be type (B).

An example in type (A) is at the beginning of this posting. Here's another one. A Chinese greets his male same-age friend at the door. If the friend is a Chinese (or Chinese American), the father would like his child to say to his friend "叔叔好！" (literally "Hello Uncle"). But if the friend is not a Chinese, this greeting ("Hello Uncle") would be awkward and confusing to say the least.

The three types do not include cases that are too informal, or if the title applies to only a very specific person in a specific group (imagine a well respected old man in a church where everyone dearly calls him "Grandpa"). The reason for these exclusions is that in these cases, these family relative names can be used across all cultures, not culturally sensitive or interesting.

Needless to say, there's nothing absolute, especially the distinction between (B) and (C). It's more like a continuing spectrum. At one extreme, a stranger on the bus can be called "uncle" if he yields his seat to a little kid, who would say "Thank you, Uncle!". At the other extreme, the man has to have fairly close relationship with the child or his parents to be addressed that way. It's the degree of the closeness, maybe among other factors, that maps into the continuing spectrum.

Translation: "Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set"

Francis Bacon's Of Beauty has "Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set". What is exactly "best plain set"? According to leonAzul on this page, it means, best if placed against or in front of a plain setting or background. Hence my translation:

品德犹如宝石，于平实的衬底前最优

水天同, perhaps the best Chinese translator of Francis Bacon's works, has the same understanding, with this translation:

才德有如宝石，最好是用素净的东西镶嵌

compared to others'

德行犹如宝石，朴素最美  <-- Not right
善犹如宝石，以镶嵌自然为美  <-- Correct
美德好比宝石，在幽暗背景的衬托下反而更显名贵  <-- Over-"translated"; where's 幽暗?

(The above Chinese translations are collected at fang's BLOG.)

"NBA" as an entry in Chinese dictionary

In the August 28, 2012 issue of "北京晚报", it is reported that more than a hundred Chinese scholars signed a letter sent to the Chinese government claiming that the de facto official Chinese dictionary 《现代汉语词典》 is illegal to include 239 words which begin with a letter of a western language, violating certain laws that govern the correct usage of the Chinese language. "NBA" is among the words. This news was followed by intense debate on the Internet ([1], [2], [3], [4], to name the first few). The scholars worry that gradual introduction of 字母词 or letter-words will eventually cause harm to the Chinese language, calling it "the most serious damage since the Chinese character Latinization (Romanization) initiated a hundred years ago". The pro-letter-word side of the argument claims that the Chinese language has been evolving all the time for thousands of years, and that introducing "NBA", "PM2.5", and other letter-words into the most popular dictionary helps the general public easily understand these terms which are already widely used. When CCTV changed "NBA" to "美职篮" (literally "US professional basketball"), the Chinese NBA viewers simply ignore the term and continue to say "NBA" in conversation. CCTV changed back to "NBA" as soon as the Chinese dictionary was published, semi-officially approving "NBA" as an acceptable word in the Chinese language, and more than raising the eyebrows of a handful of die-hard Chinese language scholars.

To be fair, a dictionary of a spelling language (language whose writing system is alphabet-based) never lists a Chinese word as is. An English dictionary never has a non-Latin spelling entry, thus excluding not just Chinese, but any Oriental language, Hindi, Arabic, any Slavic language, and many others as well. To incorporate "饺子" into an English dictionary, the spelling "jiaozi" is used. Now, if we need to have this "symmetry", we must add to the Chinese dictionary a Chinese-character-transliterated word such as "摁逼诶" in place of "NBA". It looks funny though. Why? I guess it's because the users of the word "NBA" in China are used to it and appreciate its simplicity. (How long do your eyes stay on "摁逼诶" for your brain to process the same info as "NBA", even if your native language is Chinese?) If this had happened a century ago, "摁逼诶" would most likely have been accepted in preference to "NBA". But nowadays the Chinese audience of "NBA" are at least able to pronounce English letters. The beauty of simplicity rules. Considering the law of survival of the fittest almost equally applicable to linguistics, I don't see a bright future for "摁逼诶" or any other transliteration.

Hence the dilemma between two rules: the established rule of dictionary compilation, and the situational usage of a word in the population. Because a Chinese character is intrinsically more difficult than a Latin-based word, incorporating "jiaozi" instead of "饺子" in a dictionary of Latin-based language is natural. But on the Chinese language side, the two rules are having a tug of war. Leaving "NBA" or any letter-word out of the Chinese dictionary retains its purity but increases inconvenience of a general reader -- he has to consult another dictionary. The awkward "摁逼诶" in the dictionary would be useless because nobody and no media would likely adopt that spelling.

My take on this: The Chinese dictionary can have an appendix listing the commonly used letter-words, without not yet accepted Chinese transliterations ("麦当劳" is OK but "摁逼诶" is not). It avoids the dilemma by explicitly stating that these words are not Chinese and yet they frequently occur in Chinese text. Inclusion of them is merely for the convenience of readers.

P.S. With the ubiquity of the Internet, this debate may become irrelevant and eventually forgotten, as the Chinese readers that care about "NBA" or any letter-word have easier access to the web for the meaning of the word than the paper-based dictionary. Although this particular dictionary, with no online version, serves as a prescriptive guide in mainland China, its definition of the letter-words may not be as authoritative as the scholars wish it would be.

"第几" has no English equivalent

It's a frequently asked question in English study forums in China (recently here). How do you say "第几" in English? When A asks B, "这是你第几次来纽约?" (literally, "This is which time you come to New York?"), B may answer "第二次" ("The second time"). A more natural English question may be, "How many times have you come to New York?", "Twice", or "How many times did you come to New York before?", "Only once (before)".

The awkward "which time" is a literal equivalent of "第几次" as in "Which time is it you come to New York?" The English "time" is one word for both the time you use a clock to keep track of and the ordinal count of repetition of you doing something, which is a measure word. Other languages may use two words for these meanings (时间, Zeit, tiempo, temps, tempo vs. 次, Mal, vez, fois, volta, respectively). The reason "which time" sounds unnatural may be related to this particular polysemy (one word having multiple meanings) of English "time".

Here are more challenging ones, "第几个", "第几件", and "第几本", as in "老师要我们读John Smith的ABC系列的所有三本书，你在读第几本?" ("The teacher wants us to read John Smith's all three books in the ABC series. Which book are you reading now?") But "Which book are you reading?" is not a good translation because the answer may well be "I'm reading his Book Title". The question in Chinese actually demands the answer "I'm reading his first|second|third book". English "which" properly matches "哪一(本)". It does not specifically ask the ordinal number as the Chinese "第几(本)". The fact that these Chinese question words are more challenging is probably because "个" and "本" have no measure word equivalents in English, and although "件" may be "piece", "Which piece ...?" does not specifically demand an answer of the ordinal number in the series.

A little follow-up. A Chinese reader says "So English is deficient?" My answer is that every language may have stronger expressive power than another in one case, but less in another. In this case, Chinese wins. In the case of subjunctive mood, Chinese loses (you have to guess whether "如果我有1000块钱" is the counter-factual "if I had 1000 dollars", although "如果我是你" is definitely "if I were you"). In the textbook case of ambiguous English sentence "He hit the man with a stick", Chinese wins because you can't make up an ambiguous sentence in Chinese. And the list goes on.

(This posting has a follow-up.)

eCollegeFinder's ESL article

eCollegeFinder has a new article on English as a Second Language, How to Educate ESL Students. It discusses two methods of education, "bilingual" (students only use their native language when they study subjects such as math and science) and "immersion" (English all the time; further divided into two methods depending on whether the students study English exclusively for a period at the beginning), then the pros and cons of each method are properly and clearly evaluated.

Here are my thoughts. Firstly, the bilingual method should be preferred if English is taught in a non-English-speaking country; it would be counter-productive if immersion were enforced, unless of course the students are outnumbered by English speaking natives in a small enclosed environment such as an American or British international school. My friend, president of a language school in China, reported that her students used to demand native English speakers who speak no Chinese as teachers many years ago, and slowly changed to bilingual teachers, as they found the latter to be more efficient for their learning. On the other hand, if the students are in an English-speaking country and surrounded by English all the time, the immersion method will definitely win. It's interesting that Texas, where I am now, is among the few that practice this "least popular" method. Some bilingual parents complain about the segregation in school and regret that they report in the school registration form before their kids go to elementary school that they speak xyz (a language other than English) at home. Unlike adults, young school children learn a foreign language better in immersion and should not be artificially isolated.

Secondly, the education science or pedagogy should learn from medical science. Strict control study should be a standard. Whether bilingual or immersion is better, and better under what condition, can be argued verbally based on personal experience and common sense, as I'm doing here. But nothing beats a well controlled study, perhaps followed for four to ten years, with statistical analysis. It may be impractical to implement a single- or double-blind study. Nevertheless, statistical numbers are more scientific than experiential observation.

Off-topic: ESL blog award

I was entered into eCollegeFinder ESL (English for Second Language) Blogs Award, and apparently got to the 39th place in the finals. Not bad, considering late entry into the nomination phase and no promotion by me or anybody. Actually, I'm not sure if my blog is for ESL. It probably was a long time ago. But now it "degenerates" into a general, English and Chinese and sometimes any language, blog.

Linguistic authority

A recent update on "Ni Hao Ma" (你好吗） is not a native Chinese greeting prompted me to blog about what I have thought of for some time, let me call it, linguistic authority. It is the established convention for a language by its native speakers in a certain geographic region where a significant proportion of the population speaks that language. For example, there's a linguistic authority for the Chinese language in China but no such one in the US in spite of a Chinese diaspora. The effect of this authority is such that the Chinese speakers in China have the right to invent new Chinese words which will be accepted, although not necessarily used, by whoever learns Chinese. Similarly, Americans can invent new English words which will be accepted by people learning English. If an English word were invented by Chinese, it would be laughed at and rejected (at least initially; some of these words may be proved to be good ones later, such as shero I suppose); such words are called Chinese Pidgin English (洋泾浜英语).

A linguistic authority exists where the majority of the regional population speaks that language. Therefore, mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, and to some extent Hong Kong, each have their own linguistic authority. The word "共识" (consensus) was initially used in Taiwan and readily accepted by the mainland China. Just because Chinese mainlanders don't say "镭射" (laser) and Taiwanese don't say "激光" doesn't mean they can call the other side wrong. But the improper use of "chocolate" as a verb in an advertisement I saw a few years ago at the Shanghai subway stations, "I chocolate you!", is unpleasantly Chinglish, because the inventor of this phrase, probably a Chinese, does not own the authority in creative usage of the English language. But imagine someday English native speakers start to use "chocolate" as a verb. This usage in non-English-language areas of the world will be accepted, like it or not. (Whether its usage among the native speakers will survive is a different matter.)

Interjection (叹词)

Interjections (叹词) are another type of "虚词" or empty words. At least one interjection seems to be common to many if not all languages, i.e., Ah （啊). Some are only slightly different in pronunciation among different languages, e.g. Chinese "哦" pronounced [o:] (IPA symbol) compared to "Oh" in English (or Spanish or French). Some are pronounced about the same but carry different meanings, such as Chinese "欸" which suggests slight surprise and confusion ("欸,他怎么又走了?", "Huh, how come he left again?"), where "Huh" (or "Huh?" or "What?") is an acceptable translation. But English "Eh" indicates hesitation in speech ("His name is, eh, John Smith, I think").

Some interjections are completely inscrutable without translation. The Chinese "哎呀", pronounced [aija] in IPA or "aiya" in pinyin which can take different tones, is uttered for a big surprise. Conversely, English "Uh-huh" ("yes") or "Uh-uh" ("no") is completely unintelligible to a Chinese with no knowledge of English.[note] This fact may not be immediately appreciated by the speaker, causing confusion in a conversation. There's no problem if I say "uh-huh" to a Chinese having lived in the US for some time, in an all-Chinese conversation. I may be lightly laughed at but well understood if I say it to a Chinese that has learned English for some time. But if I say it to my parents who know no English at all, they assume I didn't catch the part of the conversation right before this point.

Thus, we see that interjections, unlike words of other classes, are special in that the speaker unconsciously uses one unique to a specific language in the environment this language is spoken, even when he converses in another language, often his mother tongue. It is not conspicuous to his mind that interjections may be just as language-specific as are other types of words.

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[note] These yes-no words may not be considered by some as interjections.

虚词"虽然":empty word "although"

The Chinese empty word (虚词) "虽然" or "尽管" corresponds to "although", "though", or one sense of "while" in English. "In spite of" or "despite of" can also use "虽然" as its Chinese equivalent, but "虽然" must be followed by a sentence or at least a verb followed by an object or an adverbial modifier as in "虽然下雨" ("in spite of the rain") or "虽然做完了" ("although [the work] has been completed"), where "下" or "做" is a verb and cannot be omitted.

A basic grammatical difference between Chinese "虽然" and English "although" is that "虽然" strongly calls for "但是" to start the main sentence as in "虽然下雨,但他还是去了" ("Although it rained [In spite of the rain], he went"), while "although" must not have "but"; if you have the urge for it, a "yet" is acceptable.

"但是" here may be considered as a conjunction, but not in the sense that it connects two full independent sentences. In English, two full sentences (with only one period at the very end) must be connected with a conjunction, or a semicolon if the second sentence serves as a further explanation. The Chinese (as well as French) does not have this requirement; the two sentences may be separated by just a comma. Probably due to lack of the requirement for a conjunction between two full sentences in Chinese, the conjunction "但是" in the "虽然...但是..." construct may be omitted, e.g. "虽然下雨,他还是去了".

Because English prohibits "but" at the beginning of the main sentence that has a clause of "although", people bilingual between Chinese and English subconsciously omit "但是" in the "虽然...但是..." construct; to these bilingual speakers, there's no such strong calling for it, or rather, there's a strong calling for not having it.

虚词"当然":empty word "of course"

The Chinese empty word (虚词) "当然" is generally translated as "of course" or "certainly". It makes perfect sense in this example, "你会游泳?", "[我]当然[会] ("You can swim?", "Of course [I can]"). But "当然" is also commonly used in a different context, as in "明天每个人都必须到办公室，当然你事先请假了可以不来"("Everybody must come to office tomorrow. But of course you don't have to come if you asked for leave earlier"). In this case, "当然" is said in a much weaker tone and more resembles "but", "nevertheless", "however" in meaning than the more common "of course". The German "natürlich" ("naturally") or "allerdings" ("though") may be closer to this sense. English does have this meaning, as Wiktionary says "Acknowledges the validity of the associated phrase", e.g. "Of course, there will be a few problems along the way". But this sense is used more often in Chinese.

虚词"很":empty word "very"

The Chinese empty word (虚词) "很" means "very". This translation is straightforward and universally accepted. But there's one little subtlety in its actual usage: "很" is used more often in Chinese than "very" in English. This causes some descriptions using an adjective in Chinese not really "very" much so (if everything is very good, nothing is really that good). For instance, "He's good", "He's good at playing cards" may be translated as "他很好", "他很会打牌"， although they can also be "他不错", "他牌打得[很]好". The sentence "他很好" is not likely to be changed to "他好", which sounds odd, and "他很会打牌" may be misunderstood if shortened to "他会打牌" ("He knows how to play cards"). The apparently superfluous "很" serves no purpose other than making the sentence sound more native. But translators may not realize this and tend to literally translate "很" to "very". This practice seems to be particularly widespread among the translators living in China. I believe the correct way to deal with "很" is to review the context and ignore it if it does not really carry the meaning of "very".

Chinese "empty word" 虚词

The term "empty word", or "虚词", in Chinese, refers to "a word or morpheme that has no lexical meaning and that functions as a grammatical link or marker, rather than as a contentive" according to Dictionary.com. Specifically, they include prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary words or "Chinese particles", onomatopoeias, interjections, and adverbs[note1]. But in spite of its long history (back to 1890 to 1895, perhaps invented by a missionary or sinologist), the translation "empty word" has the connotation that the words, whoever utters, are not to be trusted, while "虚词" in Chinese is a purely technical, grammatical, term. This makes "empty word" a poor translation for "虚词", although no better one has been proposed. Incidentally, "hollow word", if it were used as a translation, may be closer literally ("hollow" for "虚"), but also has unwanted connotations.

Wikipedia considers the word "expletive" as the equivalent of "虚词". We need to think beyond the more common meaning of "expletive" here (words of profanity), and only consider syntactic expletive and expletive attributive. Because of its common usage of the word, neither is perfect in my opinion. In addition, be aware that an expletive in English is not quite equivalent to a "虚词" in Chinese. The latter is purely based on word class, while grammatical expletives in English are more context-sensitive. That is, all adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, "Chinese particles", onomatopoeias, and interjections in Chinese are "虚词", with no exception, but there's no such simple rule in English.

Probably because of Wikipedia's English rendering of "虚词" as "expletive", pages of other languages use incorrect or not quite correct words, such as explétif in French, Kraftausdruck in German (words to express strong feelings, swears, expletives), where Formwörter^[note2] or mot-particule^[note3] may be a better term. But the Japanese page uses the Kanji 虚辞.

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[note1] This footnote is needed to avoid simplistic equivalence: English adverbs include almost all words of the construct adjective-ly, but Chinese adverbs are more or less limited to "very", "little", "all", "also", "probably", etc.
[note2] This word may have been coined by German sinologists about a century ago, as in Vergleich der wichtigsten formwörter der chinesischen umgangssprache und der schriftsprache
[note3]> as in Le mot-particule 之 tchē

Off-topic: Learn English to Know China

I read this on weibo.com, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook: "We used to learn English to know the world. We now learn English to know China" (当初我们学英语是为了了解世界，如今我们学英语是为了了解中国). (The earliest occurrence of this quote as of now is on Twitter authored by huqiwen.) The apparent oxymoron in the second sentence is one of the best remarks on the national censorship. Although any web site deemed sufficiently government-unfriendly is blocked, those in English are generally in much better shape than those in Chinese. If this were not so, learning English to know China would be just as ineffective as reading Chinese materials.

Follow-up to "Why the Chinese language should not adopt phonetic writing"

In October 5, 2011, I posted Why the Chinese language should not adopt phonetic writing?, where I brought up Sun Yat-sen's statement that romanization of the written Chinese would contribute to disintegration of China due to markedly diverse pronunciations of the Chinese dialects. Two points I want to make today. First, Sun was unlikely the first to observe that. According to 李玉刚's 《狂士怪杰：辜鸿铭别传》 p.74 (Li Yugang, Alternative Biography of Ku Hung-Ming, 1999, Beijing), 马建忠 very closely alluded to the idea when he explained why the ancient Greek, Roman, and Indian, but not the Chinese, civilizations, withered, at a private "lecture" to Ku: "正是这种方块汉字，才使我们每个中国人，能够不分地域和方言地聚合在一起。因为，在这世界上，怕只有我们中国人，可以因地域不同有着各式各样发音的方言，但大家所使用的文字，都是这同一种方块字。"(It is these square-shaped Chinese characters that enable us the Chinese to come together, without regard to region and dialect. Because, in this world, I'm afraid, only we Chinese have dialects of all kinds of pronunciations due to disparity in region and yet everybody writes the same square-shaped characters.) Based on the context, Ma's lecture was probably made in 1879, most definitely earlier than Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People.

Secondly, if the mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects are the reason for not romanizing the Chinese writing system, one may naturally follow up with a question, What is the effect of the Putonghua movement? This is an excellent question. It's possible that in one or two more generations, the mainland Chinese will almost all be able to understand and even speak Putonghua. While everybody cheers for that achievement, should we bring up the topic of Chinese romanization again, since the socio-linguistic condition used by Ma and Sun as an excuse one hundred years ago ceases to exist? There's still a very strong technical reason against romanization though: too many homophones, i.e. too many different characters pronounced the same. But at least there's one less reason left. People, including me, who cherish the beauty and elegance of Chinese characters, together with the culture intertwined with them, will have to fight harder against romanization, if the topic will be brought up again.