Posts Tagged "chinese" from 2020

[Moved to The Rarest Mandarin Syllables.]

Introduction

From September 2019 through October 2020, I catalogued the rarest syllables of Modern Standard Mandarin. Occasional notetaking turned into a systematic search, and I believe this list is close to complete. To the best of my knowledge I am the first to compile much of this information -- but perhaps others have done so, somewhere beyond the reach of my search-fu.

During this investigation, I was specifically concerned with syllables which are rare regardless of which tone they are pronounced in. This meant that even certain uncommon tone-syllable pairings were not rare enough for me; for instance, only two characters are pronounced qiong in fourth tone, but qiong was not eligible for my list because there are many other characters pronounced qiong across the other three tones.

I recently read Finding Them Gone, Red Pine's book combining a contemporary Chinese travelogue with an introduction to ancient Chinese poetry. Through this book, I learned about chang2xiao4 长啸, an ancient Daoist spiritual exercise. It is known in English as "transcendental whistling" -- or, in Red Pine's translation, "droning."

pg 47

I discovered that in the mouths of Daoists, changxiao had a very different meaning, and involved breathing out in a way that could be heard for miles. Such droning was done from the top of a hill or a raised platform. None of the Daoists I've spoken with, however, have been able to tell me how to do it. Either the regimen behind such a skill has died out, or such knowledge is transmitted in secret.

巧克力兮，花生酱
混合二味，皆更香
小圆形兮，超方便
咬后食尽，屑不见

Translation:

Chocolate -- oh, peanut butter
Combine the two and both taste better
Small round shape -- oh, super handy
No crumbs left from one-bite candy

After reading "A Gift from "Endlessly Stupid" to a New Hermit", Chris Stasse responded with a poem of his own, "Hermit Replies to Stupid" 《傻隐回复》.

鸟啼更静躺山夜

生人不约往孤野

车冷人寂思萦纡

离家一日似十月

Rough translation, 2020-11-21:

At night I lie in the mountains. It's quieter when birds sing

Strangers aren't likely to approach this lonely wilderness

My car is cold. I'm lonely. My thoughts twist around

One day away from home is like ten months

Naturally, I wanted to reply in kind. My goal was to show I had grokked Chris's poem by restating its sentiments in different words.

In addition, I challenged myself to work within the constraints of a line-internal rhyme scheme: the 2nd, 4th, and 7th (final) syllables of each line all share an ending sound.

秋风摇树果不应
愿隐士身旁同赏
人生弯曲预无因
他稳似果拟之值

Rough translation (updated 2020-10-13):

Autumn wind shakes the trees, but the fruits don't go along
I wish the hermit was here to appreciate it, too
Life's twists and turns aren't worth guessing at
He is steady, like the fruits, and that's worth imitating

Chris sent me a letter, and I sent one back. Why not preserve them -- pickle the words in blogger's brine?

桃红中坏烈焰
柳绿烧成灰柱
花落腾于热气
鸟啼出窝恐离

Translation:

Red peaches suffer from fierce flames
Green willows burn up into pillars of ash 
Flowers fall, then rise on heated gusts
Birds cry, leaving their nests in fear

My friend Matt and I just discovered that Android's (default) text-messaging app can now send voice messages.

Voice messaging (on WeChat) was everywhere when I lived in China, and I've missed it as an option for texting in the States. I suppose the demand for voice messaging is filled here by Snapchat, whatever Facebook does, and voice iMessages for the Apple ecosystem. I don't use those, so I have been a text-only plebeian -- until now!

I think I'll be using voice messages a lot, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. My words, in my voice, represent me more closely than writing can. I'm glad to find a way to move some of my normal communication away from pure text.

• 嬲 niao3 and 嫐 nao3, both meaning "tease, disturb". The first is a woman 女 between two men 男; the second, a man between two women.
• (2020-09-06, 18:39) 表现日语和汉语之间的区别的例语: 侘寂。日语读音为“wabisabi”，中文呢？可不是那样了。
• 旮旯

Introduction

This page describes Linguary, an application to support two major activities in language analysis: (1) storing source material which has caught the user's interest, and (2) grouping and commenting on source material to attack or defend a hypothesis. This page, like Linguary, is a work in progress.

Linguary was born to serve my own needs in translation, linguistics, and recreational language learning, but I intend to make it useful for others (though there are no plans to make it applicable to non-Chinese languages.) The application was first mentioned on this site under the earlier name "Linguist's Working Environment," in my June letter to h0p3.

Yesterday's good deed: revising and rewriting technical documentation for a cryptocurrency company's open-source project.

I've long had the habit of emailing people I find on the Web to notify them of typos, or dead webpages, but only recently have I realized:

• how little time and energy companies typically devote to writing documentation (relative to resources spent on the systems being documented)
• how many projects have software docs and similar written resources in public version control repos
• how easy it is to fix written documents when they're hosted on version control platforms like GitHub

I hope to continue helping out with FOSS projects' technical-writing needs, especially when there's an opportunity to help Chinese-speaking teams translate material into native English.

Ubasute (姥捨て, "abandoning an old woman", also called obasute and sometimes oyasute 親捨て "abandoning a parent") is the rare, old[1] practice of senicide in Japan, whereby an infirm or elderly relative was carried to a mountain, or some other remote, desolate place, and left there to die.[2] According to the Kodansha Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japan, ubasute "is the subject of legend, but… does not seem ever to have been a common custom".[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubasute

Ha. I notice that "姥捨て" begins with kanji whch, when read in Mandarin, are homophonous to 老舍. The meaning is not similar in the first character ("lao" in the author's name means "forever, always, eternally") but it could be (as "lao" can, in sufficiently compressed contexts, directly indicate an old person). As for the second character, 捨, it's a variant of 舍; they have the same meaning of "giving up, relinquishing".

This is a translation of an image, seen on Twitter, about the current state of the Three Gorges Dam. I've done my best to preserve the news voice, and to ensure the accuracy of all technical terms related to flood control.

Translation

On July 18th, Xinhua News reported that, as a result of heavy rainfall, on the 17th the "second 2020 Yangtze flood" began in the upper reaches of the Yangtze.

A parody mash-up/crossover for the ages: combine the American cartoon King of the Hill with Yan Lianke's tragic novel Dream of Ding Village.

I'm attending two events today: one professional, one personal.

In the afternoon is "Digital Sources for Chinese Studies" (or "Chinese History" -- sources conflict), put on by UCI's Long US-China Institute and Yale University's Council on East Asian Studies.

In the evening is another week of Homebrew Website Club West Coast.

When I come across an unfamiliar phrase, especially one that's metaphorical, it's useful to be able to search text documents, on the web or elsewhere, for regular expressions matching that phrase.

Introduction

Paper Republic (PR) is a charitable organization which promotes Chinese literature in translation. PR's founder, a well-known translator named Eric Abrahamsen, doubles as the organization's sole technical staff member. He recently recruited me to assist with creating new platform functionality permitting PR website users to add to a database of Chinese literature. I'll provisionally refer to this new feature as "Book Lookup."

As currently designed, Book Lookup will ask the user to type in an ISBN. After being validated, the ISBN will be submitted to internal or external lookup services, through which Book Lookup can automatically populate the PR database with verified information.

Decision: Standardize on gei3-type citations for source material. Can use scripts in the build process to automate find-replace for publishing. I don't care about academic or legal standards right now, and any Chinese linguistics writing I do will probably not be for laymen.

Here is the case for using gei3 instead of standard Pinyin gěi.

Pro:

• only need ASCII to search (except for lü, but that can be typed lv), which is helpful for build-process mechanisms and scripts like spell check, as well as fewer edge cases for implementation of projects such as full-text search
• if I ever switch to doing it the other way, I can more easily replace text like gei3 into gěi than the other way around (and the procedure for determining which letter takes the tone accent mark is a straightforward algorithm).

After a few months of intermittent work, my translation of Lao She's short story "Iron Bull and Sick Duck" is ready to share. So far as I know, nobody has ever before translated this story into English.

Introduction

This is my translation of a social media narrative posted by someone living through the COVID-2019 outbreak in China. The original author is "Qian Wan" (a pseudonym.)

I originally translated this thinking it could become part of a group project, but logistical difficulties prevented them from using it, so I'm publishing it here. Anything I'm unsure of is marked like this.

Translation

This is an account of daily life in a rural county seat in Jiangxi Province, China, under the shadow of the COVID-2019 outbreak. No cases have been confirmed, but the popular sentiment is one of anxiety. It is in such moments that we most want to maintain empathy, for in the face of this crisis all people are feeling a shock to their spirits. No single element can exist separately from the whole.

I recently joined the unCoVer initiative [homepage / Facebook / Instagram], a group of volunteers translating Chinese accounts of ordinary people's experiences while living in areas affected by the nCoV-19 epidemic. I've done line editing, copy editing, and proofreading of translations, and may later be doing translations myself. If you're interested in a new perspective on this global event which is affecting so many lives, I urge you to read and subscribe to unCoVer's social media pages.

Besides its verbal use, 给, with the reading gei3, is also (roughly speaking) "near-obligatory case marker for indirect object". But 给 has at least one other use, as the example 把什么东西给烧了 demonstrates. The function of 给 here seems similar to the usage of 弄 and 搞 with complements like 对 and 好, e.g. 弄好/搞好 "improve; put right".

I think there may be other nuances related to animate nouns, too -- so what's up? I'll keep an eye out. (While translating "Iron Bull and Sick Duck", I found some examples of this phenomenon to copy into here.)

2020-05-14: Aha! The AllSet Chinese Grammar wiki contends that this is a passive construction. It all makes sense now. (Be warned that AllSet occasionally offers quite poor English translations, like these.)

Surname list with well over 250 entries, including two-character ones: https://www.diyifanwen.com/tool/baijiaxing/

Surname candidate syllables: [zhang zheng zhong zhai zhan jing]. Candidate characters:

• 暲 zhang1 sunrise; bright
• 荆 jing1
• 峥 zheng1 lofty, noble; steep, high, perilous 峥嵘
• 晸 zhen3,zheng3 appearance of the sun
• 绛 jiang4 purple-red

"M"-initial candidate syllables: [ma man mang mai mu mi miao miu mao men meng mei]. Candidate characters:

• 狇 mu4 no meaning listed (NML)
• 莯 mu4 NML