Elswhere posting

To those who occasionaly cruise into this blog, may I draw your attention to another blog, on which I have an entry on which I would love your feedback?

http://mis-dakdek.blogspot.com/2005/11/re-chinese-language-fact-and-fantasy.html

As you can tell, it deals with the Chinese language, and starts off by quoting from the introduction to 'The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy' by John DeFrancis (published by University of Hawaii Press).


Those of you who know me from elsewhere will not be surprised by the subject matter.


Now, from the biosketch of the author on the backflap of the book, for those who are interested: "John DeFrancis ( ) began his career immediately after graduating from Yale in 1933 by spending three years studying and traveling in China. ---[cut]--- He is the author of scores of articles and two dozen books, including the widely used 12 - volume set of materials for teaching spoken and written Chinese."

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Words and terms used in the elsewhere post, explained in the order that they appear.


Singlish = The mixture of Chinese and English, in this case the (hypothetical) written mixture, rather than the spoken mixture used in Singapore, Penang, and on Dupont Street.

Toyo Bunko Library = East Pacific Literature Bureau Library; a famous library in Japan. Note that 'bunko' is the Japanese pronunciation of 'wen kuan', meaning not only 'literature bureau', but also cultural office, writings building, repository of the eveidence of civilization.

Kana scripts = The two syllabic scripts developed in Japan centuries ago for casual writing, often used by well-bred ladies in lieu of the more scholarly Sino-Japanese.

Kanji = Chinese style characters. Not always characters that existed in China - some are abbreviates, others coinages. But most are validly Chinese, though often used in ways no Chinese could dream of, and many stand in for words of similar meaning or pronunciation dropped from the official list of characters (Toyo Kanji).

Toyo Kanji = The officially accepted list of Chinese characters that a reasonably well-educated Japanese person is expected to know. There are 1850 characters in common use, but many people know a few more than that because of inscriptions and names.

Zhongyuan = The Central Plain in North China, the Chinese heartland, which must be protected at all costs from the hairy savages of the wastelands.... I mean, that area where Chinese civilization first arose, between the Yellow river and the Great river, bordered by mountains in the west and south, and arid grasslands and desert to the north.

Li Po = One of the most famous of T'ang dynasty (618 - 906 CE) poets, whose name is often mentioned in the same breath as Tu Fu, with whom he frequently got wasted. A drinker, a romancer, a swordsman, and a wild character, with an ear for the well-turned phrase, and a wicked tongue. He usually wrote in language that even us modern sub-literates can read, but once in a blue moon, for effect, he used words that serve no other purpose but to show off what a smart-aleck he was.

Agglutes = My own kitchen-coinage: add-ons to a rootword, such as the Germanic languages and Ural-Altaic languages have in abundance. An example would be antidisestablishmentarianism - try to imagine a language where that is both normal, and quite short.

Elision = The gliding over of consonants, or sometimes vowels, yielding a word more poetic or simply shorter than the original.

Intermediary consonants = Those consonants which can be elided over, or become vowels over time, or even give a tonal quality when elided.

Sino-Vietnamese = A writing system based on Chinese, but using either characters created specifically to for the Vietnamese language, or Chinese words with unstandard meanings. Often written in a sentence pattern suited to Vietnamese instead of Chinese, making the text nearly impossible to figure out, even if you could read all those unusual characters.

Classical Chinese = A form of literary Chinese with a vocabulary and a grammar which differs in some respects considerably from the modern language. It tends towards condensation, using single characters where the modern language uses two-character words, and omits much that reflects a conversational aspect. Texts written in classical Chinese are marvelously brief; their translations into the modern language, even if veering towards a literary usage, can be three times longer. And a four line poem may require an entire page of annotation, in English - which is why it is worth your while to at least wrestle with Chinese characters, instead of relying on translators.

Characters which are half of a bisyllabic word = Chinese knows many words of two syllables, written using characters which do not lead independent lives away from the mate they are always paired with.

Regionalects = More than mere dialect. In the case of Chinese, while we often identify Cantonese, Shanghainese, and others, as dialects, they are as different from each other as Dutch and English, and must be considered separate languages, albeit languages with more cognate vocabulary and similarities of expression than European languages which are related to each other.

Ywet, Yueh = Literary and dialect name for the two Kwangs (Kwang Chou, Kwang Si), being that geographic area south of the passes where the Cantonese regionalect is dominant. There are several dialects, and while most speakers, of whatever dialect, understand the metropolitan version (aka Cantonese, as spoken in Canton and Hong Kong), the country dialects are often not quite intelligible.
[I suppose I speak the equivalent of a country dialect - having learned it primarily from Hong Kong gangster movies (Lau Tak Wa, Chou Yuen Fat, Wo Ping, and others, in over the top gun operas about honour, revenge, loyalty, and a sense of bugger it all angst. Lovely). In any case, I have the devil of a time understanding Toishanese and Meishanese, lets not talk even of some of the dialects from deeper in the interior or up the Pearl and East rivers.]

Minnanhwa = The language spoken south of the Min river; southern Fujianese. There are several dialects, of varying mutual intelligibility.

Mandarin = Common term for the dominant version of Chinese, which originated north of the Great river. The term Mandarin, of Portugese origin, mirrors the old usage 'kuan hwa' (official language).

Japanese manga = Adventure comics, sometimes of exceptional artistic and narrative quality, sometimes of surprisingly lurid vulgarity.

Chinese poetry = The paradigm for Chinese poetry is the regulated verse of the T'ang dynasty, though a Confucian scholar would opine that the 'Book of Songs' fills that role instead. But he would be wrong. Very very wrong. "Kwan kwan go the ospreys", ha!