Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Language correction as decoy

Those who think the sole purpose of language is communication are destined for disappointment and confusion. It’s not that language can’t serve that purpose, it’s just that it’s equally well suited to obfuscating, mollifying, incensing, distracting, humiliating… well, all those human activities so near to our hearts.

You’d hope this universal law of human behavior gets suspended when you’re speaking a second language. It’s hard enough to get your point across without worrying about ulterior motives of the person you’re speaking to.

You’d also hope that your affairs will prosper and your friends will be true. Read the rest of this entry »

Our thoughts are with those many who have lost loved ones and continue to struggle. Please follow Danwei for ways to help and donate. Much thanks to all of you who have inquired: the extended Beijing Sounds family is fine.

Introducing a new blog on Manchu

For those of us in the “slightly obsessive about Beijing Dialect” category, it’s always a bit of a head-scratcher to think that Mandarin was not the exclusive language of the ruling class here during a good chunk of the last 400 years.

The Manchu, with their mǎnyǔ (满语 = Manchu language) were, of course, the folks that ruled Beijing during the majority of that time up until 1912 or so — the Qing Dynasty. And it is not a language you can really mistake for Běijīnghuà. It’s in the Tungusic family and bears a lot more similarity to agglutinative languages (read: lots of endings pasted onto words) like Korean and Japanese than to Mandarin.

Given the state of mǎnyǔ in Beijing today — virtually nonexistent — it seems reasonable to think its speakers either took a liking to Běijīnghuà or simply migrated back out to the ancestral homelands towards the northeast from which they had come. But is that really the case? And is it really possible, as some popular belief has it, that the Manchu language left virtually no trace of an influence on the local language except for a few borrowed words? Read the rest of this entry »

On learning from elders — the core principles

The currency at Beijing Sounds is recordings of course. Youtube, Youku — they’re equally negotiable (and better than the sad sack USD these days). Or leave the recorder running and get candids on your friends, your relatives, your shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Money!

The truly gold-backed currency, though, is no mere sound file. It’s the special issue, hard-to-find back room recording. What makes the back room recording the gold standard is the observation that what people actually do is different from what they say they do, or what they believe they do, or what somebody remembers that they do, because these “reporting” activities are prone to egregious errors, willful misstatements and utter misapprehensions. So while it might seem easy enough to get a recording of real language, in fact it gets very hard to observe what people actually do in context because the contexts are behind the closed doors of the home, or in meetings at the workplace, or between close friends — places that are hard to get your ears into unless you have an inside track. Read the rest of this entry »