Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On cooking your own shrimp YU style; free dinners in exchange for linguistic data; idiolects and other non-languages

If you could map a man’s acquired vocabulary to a human body, there is no doubt that in the case of your correspondent, for Mandarin, the representative human body would be that of a three-week-old infant, with the freakishly large head representing words associated with the kitchen. Grotesquely disproportionate to all other body parts, this head would have vocabulary for describing food that is salty, sweet, savory, rich, oily… meat that is overcooked, gamey, tender, lean, fatty… vegetables that are crisp, tough, boiled, steamed… And oh! the words of praise this precocious head would be able to conjure up for the cook at the stove.

Alas, the acquisition of this shelf-buckling vocabulary has been in no way proportional to an advance in the cooking ability of its owner. Read the rest of this entry »

The following is a guest post by Randy Alexander, who more frequently (but not with any great frequency) posts at Echoes of Manchu. This is part 1 of 2 (go to part 2).

We’ve been seeing the word “Chinglish” all over the place lately, especially in reference to Beijing cleaning up English signs to prepare for the Olympics. But there’s another kind of Chinglish that is unseen: that which is uttered daily by the estimated over 300,000,000 English speakers (well, learners mostly) in China. Here we’re talking about spoken Chinglish, which has almost nothing to do with translation, little to do with incorrect word choice, but everything to do with pronunciation.

The mistranslated signs that we’ve been seeing are funny, sure, but they don’t pack the world-changing doom that Chinglish pronunciation does. Consider the fact that the number of English speakers/students in China is greater than the whole population of the US (and not everyone speaks English in the US). Add to that the US’s slow economic growth rate (63% from 1990-2006) versus China’s fast rate (327% in the same period). Can you see what’s coming? Don’t try to turn away! Denying it will get you nowhere. It’s happening whether you like it or not:

CHINGLISH IS GOING TO BE THE WORLD’S NEXT GLOBAL “LANGUAGE”!

OK, now let’s fast-forward and just say we’ve already passed through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief about this and have finally accepted our fate. What does it really mean? Read the rest of this entry »

The following is part 2 of 2 (go back to part 1) of a guest post by Randy Alexander.

More than simple Chinese domestic piracy is at work here, because there’s more to this story. Read the rest of this entry »

On the ineffable act of naming, the Beijing-R dissected by the white coats, and the ultimate Beijinger

Sometimes convergence happens.

Not the dream where you’re listening to God Save the Queen belted out by a punk cover band in your company’s cafeteria, talking to Grandma Gertrude about Suzie (who you liked in high school) who’s supposed to show up later in the evening, when suddenly Grandma confides in you that she’s been studying Mandarin (she began tutoring after her 92nd birthday). Excited, the two of you begin a Zhonglish conversation about the finer points of Beijing smog control during the Olympics. You discover that, yes, Grandma did read Imagethief’s smog recipe and laughed until her defibrillator went off. Then your wife comes in and you realize she was actually Suzie only somehow her name and ethnicity changed… But then: you’re awakening; the convergence begins to shimmer and fade away; the puzzle that was coming together turns out to be a box full of corner pieces.

No, this time it’s real convergence. Truly. The evidence is laid out, irrefutable, in three books that happen to be on my desk connecting me back to an e-mail discussion on -ngr from several months ago. The converging ideas from
- Osho on Buddha
- Bohm on meaning
- Pinker on naming
… all line up to illuminate and preserve the mysteries of the er-ized /ng/, i.e. the -ngr, the sound that differentiates tāng and tāngr, like this:


(which comes from this post)

It’s not the kind of convergence that gives you mourning clothes and doom buttons, but it’s convergence all the same, and no one can take that away from you. Unless, that is, you start to doubt yourself… Read the rest of this entry »

On Beizzhing v. Bay-Jing oddsmaking and how English speakers are finally going to pronounce the name of this city anyway

By this time you’ve heard from their mothers and their aunts. You might as well admit it: you’re addicted. You’ve been watching the human interest pieces, lapping up the sappy music, the soft lighting, the black-and-white photos… You feel like you know both competitors intimately. Maybe you’ve even put aside your initial biases and followed the example of Beijing Sounds, which months ago declared a likely winner but in the same breath declared editorial disinterest. Read the rest of this entry »