Jul. 21st, 2003 10:33 am
Recent adventures in linguistics
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monshu, I won't be going off this Chinese language kick any time soon. Today, I brought my copy of Pulleyblank's Middle Chinese on the train so I could read about the evolution of the retroflex series during the Tang dynasty. (It's a dense book. I've been going through bouts of picking it up, reading a bit, and then having a little liedown for years now.) Yesterday, I was looking through his Classical Chinese grammar on the bus, preparing to delve into some ancient Taoist and Buddhist texts when I got home.
Like I said, blamemonshu. I wrote that little ditty for him since he spent the morning fiddling around with the Heart Sutra. Obsessively? Let's just say that he (1) didn't do laundry, (2) didn't do finances, and (3) forgot to call his mother. He recently bought some really swell new fonts and was trying to convert the Chinese text into small seal script. Perversely enough, this works best if we start with GB encoding, which is used for Commie simplified Chinese, rather than Big5, which is preferred for traditional characters.
No matter what we did, though, three characters simply would not convert. After an hour of futzing around with variant characters, encoding converters and such, we managed to convert one and find a work-around for another. (It was the last character in a transliteration of bodhisattva. In modern Chinese, this four-character word is usually abbreviated to two by dropping the second and fourth elements. Voilà, problem solved!) Then, dim sum called. When we got back, he put me to work again on the last stubborn character. Delving into the context, I found that it was the first element in a two-part compound. Since Chinese has so many homophones, it's a common practice to take two near-synonyms and stick them together to create an unanbiguous term. (Descriptions of Chinese as consisting mainly of monosyllabic words or with each character representing a single word are obsolete.) I suggested dumping the first element and letting the second stand alone (and then checked Pulleyblank to make sure the syntax allowed this).
Jokingly, I called our finished product the "Shingetsu Monshu recension" of the Heart Sutra. He insisted on crediting me, but I replied that who ever heard of the ministers who created Han'gul? No, it's the person who commissions a project like this who gets to attach their name to it.
He also has a couple of loose pieces of calligraphy he'd like to get mounted, but it's no easy thing to track down someone who knows traditional Chinese scroll mounting. We tried, but all we got is a reference to a place that doesn't exist any more. (The shop owner we spoke to says it's moved, but he doesn't know where. He gave me the name in characters, since he doesn't know the English name.) At least we had a nice chat, complete with a rambling excursus on Chinese social customs.
But it hasn't all been Shuowen radicals and grass hand. Last Friday, I was crossing the terrace ato_nut's wedding when an elegant older woman grabbed me and said, "Are you the one who knows Schwäbisch? It was o_nut's mother, flouting every stereotype about Swabian stand-offishness and German reserve. I'd totally forgotten that he daughter had forwarded her some of my LJ comments from way back when. I tried to explain that what I'd been exposed to was Badisch, not proper Schwäbisch, but it dented her enthusiasm not a whit. We drifted between English and German (with various degrees of dialectal colouring) for the next half-hour and when she said that we really should get together sometime, I hoped that she meant it. At the very least, she has a dialect poem to deliver to me and I promised to return the favour with some macaronic German-American verse.
monshu, I won't be going off this Chinese language kick any time soon. Today, I brought my copy of Pulleyblank's Middle Chinese on the train so I could read about the evolution of the retroflex series during the Tang dynasty. (It's a dense book. I've been going through bouts of picking it up, reading a bit, and then having a little liedown for years now.) Yesterday, I was looking through his Classical Chinese grammar on the bus, preparing to delve into some ancient Taoist and Buddhist texts when I got home.Like I said, blame
monshu. I wrote that little ditty for him since he spent the morning fiddling around with the Heart Sutra. Obsessively? Let's just say that he (1) didn't do laundry, (2) didn't do finances, and (3) forgot to call his mother. He recently bought some really swell new fonts and was trying to convert the Chinese text into small seal script. Perversely enough, this works best if we start with GB encoding, which is used for Commie simplified Chinese, rather than Big5, which is preferred for traditional characters.No matter what we did, though, three characters simply would not convert. After an hour of futzing around with variant characters, encoding converters and such, we managed to convert one and find a work-around for another. (It was the last character in a transliteration of bodhisattva. In modern Chinese, this four-character word is usually abbreviated to two by dropping the second and fourth elements. Voilà, problem solved!) Then, dim sum called. When we got back, he put me to work again on the last stubborn character. Delving into the context, I found that it was the first element in a two-part compound. Since Chinese has so many homophones, it's a common practice to take two near-synonyms and stick them together to create an unanbiguous term. (Descriptions of Chinese as consisting mainly of monosyllabic words or with each character representing a single word are obsolete.) I suggested dumping the first element and letting the second stand alone (and then checked Pulleyblank to make sure the syntax allowed this).
Jokingly, I called our finished product the "Shingetsu Monshu recension" of the Heart Sutra. He insisted on crediting me, but I replied that who ever heard of the ministers who created Han'gul? No, it's the person who commissions a project like this who gets to attach their name to it.
He also has a couple of loose pieces of calligraphy he'd like to get mounted, but it's no easy thing to track down someone who knows traditional Chinese scroll mounting. We tried, but all we got is a reference to a place that doesn't exist any more. (The shop owner we spoke to says it's moved, but he doesn't know where. He gave me the name in characters, since he doesn't know the English name.) At least we had a nice chat, complete with a rambling excursus on Chinese social customs.
But it hasn't all been Shuowen radicals and grass hand. Last Friday, I was crossing the terrace at
o_nut's wedding when an elegant older woman grabbed me and said, "Are you the one who knows Schwäbisch? It was o_nut's mother, flouting every stereotype about Swabian stand-offishness and German reserve. I'd totally forgotten that he daughter had forwarded her some of my LJ comments from way back when. I tried to explain that what I'd been exposed to was Badisch, not proper Schwäbisch, but it dented her enthusiasm not a whit. We drifted between English and German (with various degrees of dialectal colouring) for the next half-hour and when she said that we really should get together sometime, I hoped that she meant it. At the very least, she has a dialect poem to deliver to me and I promised to return the favour with some macaronic German-American verse.Tags:
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Please excuse me trying to use you as a dictionary, but my Chinese is extremely basic - to the point that I have not been able to pick out the characters for this name from Chinese texts that I know contain them.
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My attempts to find larger characters displayed graphically weren't exactly crowned with success. If you enlarge the fourth picture in the top row of this Temple to Guanyin in Singapore, you'll be looking at the name of the temple in Chinese. The characters run right-to-left: guan1 yin1 tang2. (Tang2 means "hall", especially a meeting place or temple.)
The pronunciation is very simple: Both syllables have high even tone ("first tone" in Mandarin). All you need to do is say the name naturally and without emphasis, as if it were part of a longer sentence. Don't let the pitch fall at the end, as it normally does when English words are spoken in isolation. (High falling is Mandarin fourth tone and yin4 means "seal, stamp".) Don't let it lilt upwards as if asking a question. (Mid-rising is Mandarin second tone, and yin2 has various meanings, including "silver", "chant", and "seduce".) It should sound like you were about to say something immediately after "Guanyin" but drifted off without completing the sentence.
There might be some links from the Zhongwen.com site to sites with WAV files of Chinese pronunciation. I'm no longer sure.
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