Chipanglish » Culture Gaps

What’s in a Name? En Español!

Peter — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:47:57 +0000

I came across this article.

Hooray for more paranoia induced ignorant racism!

I suppose this means the next time I visit an tropical island-themed hotel, I should ask Larry to change his name to something more tropical. I mean, it is part of the experience, right?

I, For One, Welcome Our New 魚完美 Overlords

Yvonne — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:29:59 +0000

Have you seen The Onion lately?

A screenshot for posterity’s sake:

Make sure you check out the store too.

Here are the Chinese items from the news ticker:

起來, 各位中華民族的移民子弟! 收回你的命运!
反抗時刻即將到達, 各位在位做好準備.
重要目標已選擇, 時間不久了.

Translation after the jump.

Continue reading I, For One, Welcome Our New 魚完美 Overlords (93 words) »

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Thank Goodness for the Internet

Yvonne — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:51:05 +0000

So I’m setting up a new personal blog. I wanted it to have multilingual capabilities for my non-US family which means that I have to translate all the main navigation headings.

It then occurred to me that I have no idea how to say “blog” in Chinese. And it’s not like my mom (aka Queen Luddite) is going to be any help here.

“Blog” is not in my 英漢漢英字典, which is not all that surprising considering this edition was published in 2005.

Google Translate gives 博客 (bo2 ke4) for “blog” and Mandarin Tools concurs and gives 部落格 (bu4 luo4 ge2) and 網絡日記 (wang3 luo4 ri4 ji4)—literally, “internet diary/daily log”—as alternate translations.

What did people do before they had the internet to look up the latest vernacular?

王大中 vs. Da-zhong Wang vs. DJ Wong

Yvonne — Sat, 16 May 2009 03:27:10 +0000

I wanted to respond to Peter’s post about the Texas voter ID law.

First, a bit of background on how Chinese names usually work.

Most Chinese names have three characters (though some only have two). The surname goes first, and the remaining two characters are your given name.

For example, everyone’s favorite Chinese textbook hero is named 王大中. 王 (wang2) is his surname. 大中 (da4 zhong1) is his given name.

How do you turn that into English? We here at Chipanglish use Hanyu Pinyin for transliterating Chinese words. It’s the international standard (at least as of 1982, and didn’t become the standard in Taiwan until January 1 of this year), but there are plenty of other systems out there.

In Hanyu Pinyin 王大中 becomes Dazhong Wang. Or Da-zhong Wang. Or Da Zhong Wang which becomes Da Z. Wang.

Use a different system (or make up your own) and you might wind up with Da-jong Wong instead. It’s the same name, just transliterated differently. Let’s assume for a minute that he goes with Dajong Wong for first and last names when filling out the immigration paperwork, leaving the middle name blank.

And after living in the US for a while, Dajong gets tired of people butchering his name and decides to go by DJ instead. His immigration papers, passport, and driver’s license still all say Dajong Wong, but his college transcript, his library card, his frequent flyer card, and his voter registration card (which tend to have more lenient ID requirements) all say DJ Wong.

He goes to vote, is asked to show ID, and is denied because the voter rolls say DJ Wong, but his driver’s license says Dajong Wong. He can’t prove it’s the same person.

That’s the issue in a nutshell. And it will rapidly expand beyond voting and into flying, as TSA Secure Flight now requires that the name on your ID, ticket, and frequent flyer information match exactly.

Now, I do think people have a legal responsibility to keep the usage of their legal name straight. It’s one thing to go by DJ socially, but if your legal name is Dajong, that’s what should go on official documents.

But Betty Brown’s suggestion that people could solve the problem by changing their names to something more American is completely asinine for two reasons:

A big part of the problem comes from people trying to do exactly that, albeit not through official legal channels.
This is not a problem limited to Asian names!

Say your name is Annemarie Smith, but you normally just go by Anne. If the voter rolls say Anne Smith and your ID says Annemarie Smith, well…that doesn’t match either.

Or now about a last name? Say your name is Ana Ramirez Delgado. In keeping with Hispanic naming customs, “Ramirez Delgado” is your full last name (no hyphen), but you just use Ramirez for most occasions. But thanks to clerical error, you show up on the voter rolls as Ana R. Delgado. Which does not match your ID.

Stuff happens with hyphenated last names too. Just ask Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.

From a policy standpoint, the obvious first step is to have a nation-wide standardized format for names that can handle hyphens and spaces in your names (and also really long names). Middle names should stop being optional—if you have no middle name you should check a box confirming thus. IDs should specify what is first, middle, and last, rather than leaving it up to clerks and bureaucrats of varying degrees of cluelessness to figure out what is what. Second step, be a bit lenient if it’s obvious a hyphen/space got screwed up in data entry, making you Sara Kelly Johnson instead of Sara Kelly-Johnson.

And now to bring it full circle back to Texas. Unlike the federal government and every other state I’ve lived in, Texas does not do hyphens on IDs. My middle name is hyphenated. I could either drop half of my middle name or mash the two parts together sans hyphen. I chose to mash.

And so now I have the absurd situation where the name on my passport (and social security card, and birth certificate) is hyphenated and the name on my driver’s license is not. My primary forms of government-issued ID do not all match exactly.

If I’m ever in a situation where that hyphen actually matters, I’m screwed.

What’s In a Name?

Peter — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:46:42 +0000

Recently, Rep. Betty Brown of Texas made some comments that are causing quite a stir, particularly in the Asian community.

Our resident Texan can correct me if I’m wrong, but Texas is currently reviewing a Voter ID bill. One problem with Voter ID is the matching of names, particularly Asian names. The point the speaker addressing Rep. Brown makes is that Asian names can cause ID problems because a person can fall under multiple “aliases” depending on who did the transliteration of the name and when it was done. Additionally, many people use English names, which may or may not be a legal name. Since the names don’t match, the person cannot vote.

However, Rep. Brown fails to grasp this concept and actually says, “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Not only would this add another name to the mix and defeat the whole purpose, it’s just stupid. But then again, I have always felt a little weird having both a Chinese AND an English name. Perhaps Rep. Brown, you are right. Maybe I do need just one name that I can use for ID purposes that is easier for government officials worldwide to “deal with”.

How about Ethelbert Grzeskiewicz?

English as the Lingua Franca: How Long Will it Last?

Yvonne — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:24:07 +0000

I thought I’d open up a new thread for discussion as a bunch of things I’ve read recently seem to be converging on this topic. We’ve got Elenita’s comment on my foreign language in kindergarten post, Peter’s post on the English as Official Language contract, and this article in The Economist (via Polyglottally Speaking).

European politicians long feared that the use of English in the EU would lead to the dominance of Anglo-Saxon thinking. They were wrong. The example of newspapers is instructive: thanks to English (and the internet), a genuinely pan-European space for political debate is being created. It has never been easier for other Europeans to know what Poles think about the credit crunch, Germans about the Middle East or Danes about nuclear power. English is merely “an instrument”, says Mr Versteegh of NRC Handelsblad, not “a surrender to a dominant culture.”

There is a second reason why Anglophones are not about to dominate European debate: they do not want to. British readers have access to an unprecedented range of news and ideas from Europe in their mother tongue. They show little interest. Only 5% of Spiegel International’s readers are from Britain (though half are from North America). In recent years, British newspapers have withdrawn staff reporters right across Europe, and not only to save money. Britain’s daily newspapers are less and less interested in European politics and policy. Light, sensational stuff is what editors choose for publication, plus tales of British tourists and expatriates in trouble (a genre known as “Brits in the shit”).

Why bother?
Such parochialism may be linked to a fall in language-learning, accelerated since 2003, when foreign languages became voluntary in England and Wales for pupils over 14. That robs them of such benefits as the humility and respect for others that come from learning another language. But given the rise of English, it is rational, says Philippe van Parijs, a Belgian academic.

To which Polyglottally Speaking adds:

This effect parallels language learning in other English-speaking nations around the world, too, since why torture someone’s ears with gringo Spanish when they speak perfectly good English already? (That was a rhetorical question, I already know why!)

This trend will only continue if English continues to be the main language of business and diplomacy. After all, just a few decades ago that language was French (hence: lingua franca).

I know my parents and many members of the Taiwanese ex-pat community have told me to brush up on my Chinese because they think China will become the dominant power in the next century. Even if that’s true, does it necessarily follow that Chinese will succeed English as the lingua franca? Or is it more likely that the Chinese will just learn English?

New Reading Material: Swearing and Subversion!

Yvonne — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:03:34 +0000

Remember when I asked for new reading material? Check out what I found on Danwei:

Meet the Grass Mud Horse (草泥馬), a rare animal that has become phenomenally popular in the past month.

The animal, whose name sounds like a common curse (操你媽), is the most famous of the Ten Legendary Beasts of Baidu, non-existent animals that were inserted into Baidu’s user-editable encyclopedia.

One of the perils of learning Chinese the way I did, where your entire exposure to the language comes from your parents and their friends, is that you don’t really learn how to swear. And now I know, “F__ your mom!”

That’s not something I could have learned from instructional text either. While 你媽 is definitely “your mom”, this is what the dictionary has for 操:

hold; grasp
act; do; operate
speak (a language or dialect)

Not nearly as scandalous. If you too want to learn Chinese swears (along with some terms for genitalia and other things not used in polite conversation), head on over to Danwei. They have it set up nicely so if you mouse over the Chinese characters, you’ll get a tooltip with the pinyin pronunciation.

Not that I have any burning desire to cuss someone out in Chinese, but if you think about it, that’s kind of a dividing line between adult speech and child speech, between real fluency and mere book larnin’. If you were in the company of adult native English speakers watching, say, Fight Club, wouldn’t you think something was off if, mid-Tyler Durden rant, someone blinked and asked, all wide-eyed, “what does that mean?” Even adults who never swear themselves would know what it means, y’know?

Back to the 草泥馬 (the Grass Mud Horse, not the thing about your mother). It’s a little-known fact that Chinese people love puns and other plays on words. Virtually every word in Chinese has at least one homophone and there can be dozens. As a point of illustration, if I type “ma” into my Chinese input tool, I get 31 different characters to choose from, including 馬 (horse) and 媽 (mother). The source material for puns is rich and plentiful.

The punning around 草泥馬 didn’t just stop with the name of the subversive creature, someone turned around and made an entire song of it!

Translation and analysis of the political subtext at China Digital Times.

Keeping My Eye on the Prize

Yvonne — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 00:59:48 +0000

Two prizes, actually.

The first prize that I’d win from a successful study of Chinese/Japanese would be increased/improved communication with the non-English-speaking family.

The second prize would be this.

I regularly read James Fallows, a Beijing-based writer for The Atlantic. And while I think his posts on China are very thoughtful and well-informed, I would really love to be able to read this and other Chinese stories straight from the source.

Because not all Western journalists do their due diligence when it comes to translations from Chinese. Remember the Olympic scandal about the lip-synching girl in the red dress? And how the real singer had been banned for being chubby and having crooked teeth?

I couldn’t read any of the stories coming out of China when the story broke, but there was a marked difference in the coverage from people who understood Chinese and people who couldn’t that seemed greater than the cultural differences. Eventually I tracked down a video of the oft-quoted radio interview where music director Chen Qigang revealed the lip-syncing:

I won’t claim to have understood it perfectly, but I got most of it and came to virtually the same conclusion as EastSouthWestNorth: the Western media were playing a game of Bad Translation Telephone and turned a relatively low-level ethical issue into a high-profile child-welfare brouhaha.

My problem is that some western media acted to defend the rights of Yang Peiyi by presenting her as a child who was rejected because of her “uneven/crooked/wonky/buck teeth” and “fat/chubby face.” That would be outrageous — if that were truth! In reviewing the primary evidence, I found that none of the principals (general director Zhang Yimou, music director Chen Qigang, the Lin and Yang families, the unnamed Politburo member now pinned on future topdog Ji Jinping, Sarah Brightman, and so on) said anything of the sort. Therefore, my interest in this case is how a convenient heart-tugging story detail gets fabricated and is made into an inflated urban legend without any accountability to anyone anywhere. That is the real story that I want to present here.

It’s better to cut out the middle man.

學中文加油!

P.S. Lest it sound like I’m unfairly disparaging Western journalism, I watched the coverage of the US Presidential election from Taipei, and the Taiwanese reporting was at least equally problematic. The speed of global news these days works in direct opposition to doing your due diligence, especially when you’re also working across a language barrier.

Place and Manner (of Articulation)

Peter — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:12:01 +0000

In the teachers’ lounge the other day, a kindergarten teacher was sharing stories about her students. One child had proudly gone to the teacher and said, “Ms. ____, Guess what? I can say ‘Hello’ in Chinese!” She expected the child to say: 你好, ni3 hao3. Imagine her surprise when the child uttered the phrase, “Herro!”

Looking at an IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) chart, the terms on the top are given to each sound based on where the sound is produced, starting from the lips and ending at the glottis. The terms on the left indicate how the sound is created.

Nasal: air is pushed into the nasal cavity where it resonates
Plosive: air is fully stopped and released
Fricative: air is mostly stopped, but some passes through
Approximant: air is blocked by the tongue, but is able to escape around it (/r/* and /l/* sounds)
Trill: the tongue rapidly flaps (think Spanish rolled Rs)
Flap: the tongue flaps once (ie. “butter” pronounced as “budder”)

The stereotypical Asian “accent”, with the mixing of the letters r and l, comes from the phonemic inventory on these languages. (Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language.) In English, we have two approximants, an /r/ and an /l/. In Chinese, there is only one. Hence the stereotypical accent in which food service workers ask if you’ve ordered “Polk flied lice.”

*Linguistic convention writes phonemes as such. So the b sound in “baby” would be written as /b/.

My Favorite Food in the World

Yvonne — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 07:59:00 +0000

I could eat Chinese dumplings every day for the rest of my life. I like them all ways, but especially love pan-fried pork-filled dumplings dipped in a mix of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and a small dollop of Chinese chili paste. If I’m feeling festive, I’ll throw in some minced garlic and minced scallions.

You would not believe how hungry I got reading this article in the Wall Street Journal [1]. It’s been five or six years since I last made dumplings from scratch (subsisting on large quantities of frozen dumplings in the meantime, as un-Chinese as that may be)—the process is as labor-intensive as it sounds—but the article gave me a definite hankering to do so.

It also gave me a hankering to look up the Chinese characters for dumplings because I did not actually know what they were! So here we go:

餃子 (jiao3 zi3)
The generic phrase for dumplings.

水餃 (shui2 jiao3)
Can be used as a generic phrase for dumpling, but more specifically refers to a steamed or boiled dumpling. 水 means “water”. [2]

鍋貼 (guo1 tie1)
Literally, “potsticker”. 鍋 means “pot”, 貼 means “to stick”. A phrase for the fried dumplings that, well, stick to the pot when you fry them, making lovely golden-brown delicious bits. A phrase for amazing bite-sized morsels just waiting to be dipped into the perfect sauce. A phrase for the thing I am craving RIGHT NOW!

Apparently the article’s photos and the accompanying video were shot in the kitchen of a childhood friend who now lives in Hong Kong. Amy Ma, the article’s author, is not said childhood friend.
Eagle-eyed grammar Nazis (and I consider myself one of them) may have noticed that I punctuate quotation marks the British way, instead of the American way. What can I say? I think the British way is more logical, and I get to make the rules around here.

About Me, About the Blog

Yvonne — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:43:48 +0000

The first complete English sentence I could speak was, “I am big, you are small.” The perils of letting your child learn the language of your adopted country via Sesame Street.

In the nearly three decades that have passed since I first proudly uttered those words, English has become, by far, my dominant language. The switch took place when I was around seven years old, much to my parents’ chagrin.

I remember being a small child on the playground, struggling to find an English retort to some bullies. Now I can sling English wisecracks like any native speaker, but my repertoire of Mandarin insults is sadly limited to pig, turtle, and various types of bad eggs. 笨蛋!—ben4 dan4!—stupid egg.

This blog is about my journey to re-claim my Mandarin proficiency and hopefully achieve native fluency. My spoken fluency is intermediate, I’d guess either 2+ or 3 on the ILR scale, but with native pronunciation. I can recognize several dozen Chinese characters and write even fewer, making me functionally illiterate.

This blog is also about my journey to learn Japanese. I married into a Japanese family and would like to communicate with my in-laws, beyond こんにちわ (konnichiwa—hello), ありがとうございます (arigato gozaimasu—thank you very much), 結婚式 (kekkonshiki—wedding), and 編み物 (amimono—knitting).

I’d like to take this moment to thank the computer for auto-converting romaji to hiragana to kanji and making me look way more advanced than I actually am (unless it did it wrong, in which case I’d like to thank it for helping me to get over the hump of the first Unintentional Multilingual Self-Humiliation). I can write/sound-out hiragana and katakana, but it’s pretty slow and painstaking.

And if I have time, I’ll even dust off my rusty ol’ Spanish! I’m better at speaking Spanish than speaking Japanese and reading Spanish than reading Chinese, which is to say that after six years of coursework and more years to forget, my Spanish is really, really lousy.

I hope that eventually I’ll be able to write entire non-English posts and mostly make sense. Hope you’ll come along for the ride!

Happy New Year!

Yvonne — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:48:13 +0000

Getting my first post in while it’s still Chinese New Year in my time zone for an auspicious blog beginning.

新年快樂!

Or as an impudent child (like me) might say, 恭喜發財, 紅包拿來!

Chipanglish » Culture Gaps

What’s in a Name? En Español!

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I, For One, Welcome Our New 魚完美 Overlords

Thank Goodness for the Internet

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王大中 vs. Da-zhong Wang vs. DJ Wong

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What’s In a Name?

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Keeping My Eye on the Prize

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