bezdomny ex patria

So I finally made it up to the chapter in my Classical Chinese textbook introducing Tang poetry. It seems a little ridiculous that it took me so long. 10 years in China, 10 years studying the language, right from the word “go” I’ve been curious about ancient Chinese literature and philosophy, and ever since the day in Changsha in late 1999 I found a surprisingly good little bookstore, I’ve been collecting various versions of mono-, bi- and trilingual editions of various of the classics. And finally I actually sit down and learn myself something about this poetry that is supposed to represent a high-point in Chinese literature.

Of course, all of my Chinese study has been done in my spare time, which does not help. And I’ve followed the usual process of burst of solid effort and serious improvement – plateau – burst of solid effort and serious improvement – plateau. But a quick glance at my blogroll and an observation of just how sorry a state it is in will show you that probably the biggest factor holding me back has been my own natural laziness and inertia.

Anyways, this summer, as soon as all the semester’s loose ends were tied up, I sat down and studied. I head over to the office at about 10am Monday to Friday, study through till lunch time, and many afternoons I’ve gone back to the office and put in another hour or two. It’s felt good. Why the office? Less distraction, and I’m already there for those odd occasions when a prospective student comes in for an interview, further minimising disruptions. And considering the absurd heat and humidity we’ve had to suffer through this summer – aircon that is not buring through my electricity.

And why Classical Chinese? I discovered quite some time ago, through one of the more useful comments to have been left on this blog, that considering Chinese writers often throw a little Classical flourish into their writing, learning a bit of Classical would help improve my reading ability. Also, see the first paragraph where I wrote “right from the word “go” I’ve been curious about ancient Chinese literature and philosophy”, and throw into the mix that I firmly believe literature is the highest form of art, and poetry the highest form of literature (actually, come to think of it, that rarest of creatures, good literary translation, is probably about equal). My reading level has been good enough for some years now to handle modern literature (I just need to stop wasting so much time online and start picking up the books and reading them), but Classical is a whole other story, and something I need to work on. And to me it makes no sense to learn a language without exploring at least some of the literature, and there’s no point exploring the literature if you’re not going to read the classics as well as the modern stuff. I am very glad that my French education included Racine and Molière as well as Sartre, Duras and Camus. At the very least, that allows me to say, “Well, I’m not such a great fan of Molière, but that may be as much to do with a clash of teaching and learning styles between the lecturer and myself.” That’s a million times better than, “Molière? Yeah, sounds familiar….” Likewise, I’m sick and tired of only being able to say, “Yeah, I’ve heard of Li Bai. He liked his booze, didn’t he?” At least now I have actually read three of his poems in the original and have an idea that I think I do actually like the guy. I’m a long way from being able to tell you anything intelligent about Tang Poetry (or any aspect of Chinese literature), but at least I’ve made a start, and that feels good.

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A few links for those interested…

Via this blog post I found a few things that may be of interest to those studying Chinese.

First up is Microsoft’s Engkoo. I’m still trying to figure it out myself, and the interface isn’t entirely cooperative with my eyes just yet (although I’m sure if I play around a bit, I’ll figure it out). Confused Laowai says that it “pulls examples from the internet!” I think that may be half my confusion. Worth a look, at least, anyways.

Second is Social Mandarin, which it seems Confused Laowai is developing. My first impression is that it’s a great gathering of Mandarin learning experiences, tips, and shared resources. I will definitely be keeping an eye on this one.

Thirdly, in a similar vein to this but without the scholarship, 35 Chinese anti-American propaganda posters.

And finally a note: I have no real excuses for the silence on this blog of late. I’ve had a post on my first experiences with Tang poetry planned for a while, but a series of interruptions combined with my own laziness (as in about 10% interruption, 90% laziness) have prevented it from being written. I’ll get on to it soon.

A few weeks ago a colleague asked me about the 把 construction. Her teacher and her textbook had explained enough for her to know how to use it, but the big question was “WHY?”. Under what circumstances and for what reasons does one use 把 to place the direct object before the verb? Unfortunately, the most I’d ever been told about this particular construction was that sometimes it just sounds better. My grammar book had nothing to add. We checked with another colleague with significant Chinese study experience, and he had nothing to offer, either, beyond that it was somewhat similar to the passive.

Of course, it’s not passive, definitely active, but in terms of pure structure, the simple placement of the components of the sentence, it does bear some similarities.

And then today I cracked open my HSK Advanced textbook, and what did I see?

一、“把”字句 1, the “ba” sentence

说明 Explanation

1. 某一事物原不存在，后通过某种动作产生出来。表示此意义时，不用“把”字句。

Something that originally didn’t exist, after some action is produced. When expressing this meaning, do not use the “ba” sentence.

The wrong example it gives is “她把女孩生了”, which is wrong because the daughter wasn’t there at first, but was produced by her giving birth. It should be “她生了一个女孩”

2.“把”后的宾语应是确定的，或是说话的双方都已经知道的。

The object following “ba” should be definite, or both interlocutors should already know it.

And here the wrong example is “你把一本小说看一看”, which is wrong because which novel is not specified. “你把这本小说看一看” is correct, because we have one specific novel which both interlocutors know.

3. “把”后的动词必须是动作性动词，而表示关系、心理的动词，像“是、有、像、属于、知道、喜欢”等都不能用于“把”字句。

The verb following “ba” must be an action, while verbs expressing relationship or mentality, such as to be, to have, to be like, to belong to, to know, to like, etc, can not be used in a “ba” sentence.

And here the wrong example is “他把这件事知道了”, which is wrong because to know is not an action. This should be “他知道了这件事”.

4. 因为“把”字句表示的是某种事物由于某个行为而发生了某种变化，受到了某种影响，产生了某种结果，因此“把”字后的动词一般不单独存在于句中，常常带有表示“变化”、“影响”、“结果”的后附成分，至少要在动词后加“了”或后叠动词。

Because the “ba” sentence expresses that something has, through some action, been changed, influenced, or produced some result, the verb after the “ba” generally does not exist alone in the sentence. Usually it carries after it an element expressing “change”, “influence” or “result”, or at least needs a “le” or an additional verb after it.

Am I running into linguistic vocab that my dictionaries don’t know in that last clause? In any case, for “usually”, I think we should read “always”, as the book insists that a verb left hanging alone at the end of the sentence is wrong. Here is it’s wrong example: “他把杯子打”. Wrong because the verb is left hanging there with nothing to tell us the result of his having hit the cup. This time we get two right examples: “他把杯子打了” and “他把杯子打碎了”. The simple addition of “了” in the first right example indicates that something has changed, and the second right example tells that his hand moved, struck the cup, and the cup broke – plenty of changing things there.

5. 助动词、否定词要放在“把”字前，不能放在“把”字后的动词成分前。

Auxilliary verbs and negatives must be placed before the “ba”, and can’t be placed before the verb after the “ba”.

And here we get two wrong and two right examples, one each for auxilliary verbs and negatives. Starting with the auxilliary verbs, our wrong example is “我把感冒药应该吃了”, which should be “我应该把感冒药吃了”, as the auxilliary verb “should” needs to sit in front of the “ba”. And for negatives, our wrong example is “我把作业没做完”, which should be “我没把作业做完”, as the negative “没” – “haven’t”, needs to sit in front of the “ba”.

So there you go. It doesn’t solve the great “So why do we bother with this extra complication to Chinese grammar?” question, still leaving us with my old teacher’s “Because sometimes it just sounds better” as the best answer I have yet come across. But this is the most I have ever seen written on the subject, and it does give a lot more information about the circumstances under which one can or cannot use the “ba” structure. And on where to put your auxilliary verbs and negatives. And don’t forget to leave your verb hanging all lonely at the end of the sentence – it needs at least a 了, if not something a little more detailed, to indicate a change in state. Oh, and make sure the direct object is something specific or that both interlocutors already know about.

Is it bad of me to want to add a “给” in front of many of those main verbs? It’s a desire that’s especially strong with “我应该把感冒药吃了” for some bizarre reason.

This post is written especially for Claire, but also for anybody else struggling with the vagaries of the evil 把 in particular, and Chinese grammar in general.

Update: I almost forgot: The textbook this comes from is 《HSK（高等）速成强化教程》An Intensive Course of HSK (Advanced), edited by 刘超英，龙清涛，金舒牛 and 蔡云凌, Beijing Language and Culture University Press, 2002.

Now that I’ve got that little lunchtime rant out of my system, here’s what I really wanted to blog about once I’d gotten the fuel into my system. Luqiu Luwei has another fascinating post on the subject of language, one that starts with bilingual education in Kashgar, then moves through Hong Kong and Singapore to the preservation of local languages.

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Ugh. This is what happens when you let little people run your country. I’m totally with the philospher quoted in this article. Far too few people realise this, but a humanities degree most certainly does impart skills that are immediately useful to life in the real world. It’s extremely frustrating that anybody should be forced to explain that statement. I understand that many fields of  university study do include some measure of vocational training – medicine, law and engineering spring most immediately to mind. But the idea that the humanities are somehow useless or impractical is utterly absurd and really should be banished from polite society, left to languish alone somewhere on a subantarctic island populated only by seabirds and seals.

But there’s more. Universities are not, and were never meant to be, institutes of vocational training or job factories. They are institutes of academic and scientific inquiry. Their purpose is to expand intellectual horizons and add to the sum of human knowledge and understanding. If it’s vocational training you want, go to a polytech or do an apprenticeship. If an expanded mind is what you want, university is and must always be the place for you.

What’s more (“what’s more”? My wife is affecting my English as well as my Chinese?), sending signals to high school students about which degrees are likely to be most welcomed when they graduate and start the Great Job Hunt won’t actually help anybody find a job. It’s not uncommon for the most popular majors – frequently chosen because of the perceived demand for them in the job market – to have surprisingly low employment rates. The reason is, everybody runs for those majors thinking they’ll step out of their last exam, and after a stop by the local student pub to celebrate, walk straight into some super-duper fancy job with a spectacularly high salary. The result is a major glut of graduates in those majors, driving down job prospects and starting salaries for those graduates. I guess the classic example would be: Just how many gazillion excess lawyers does America have? Enough to get a pretty respectable start in filling in the Marianas Trench?

No. I can understand tying a certain component of polytech funding to graduate employment rates, so long as it is only one on a long list of measures of polytech performance, as the whole point of polytechs is vocational training. But not universities. Universities must be protected as institutes of free and wide-ranging intellectual and scientific inquiry and exploration, and part of the reason is precisely to ensure the job prospects of graduates.

Rant完了.

It’s an odd little article, this, desperately short on detail. When I read this:

The Gold Coast Bulletin reported today that Smeltz had decided it would be impossible for wife Nikki and his two children to settle in Jinan, 400km south of Beijing.

I’m wondering, well, why? What’s the problem? Although I could certainly understand that from the point of view of maintaining good relations, not unnecessarily burning any bridges, and just generally being polite, the Smeltz family would not necessarily want to announce to the world exactly why they decided they couldn’t settle in Jinan.

And then I got to wondering how Chinese media reports would frame this (if they even reported it). First result in a Baidu sports news search was this, which starts out with:

在山东鲁能和新西兰前 锋斯梅尔茨完成签约后，在当地时间7月17日早晨，澳大利亚的《黄金海岸报》惊曝 斯梅尔茨因为不适应在中国的生活，欲取消转会重回老东家黄金海岸。

After completing the signing of the contract between New Zealand striker Smeltz and Shandong Luneng, on the morning of July 17 local time, Australia’s Gold Coast Bulletin suddenly revealed that because Smeltz couldn’t adapt to life in China, he wanted to go back to his old boss Gold Coast.

And later adds this:

报道中称斯梅尔茨的太太尼基和两个孩子对中国的生活条件不太满意，对于未来在济南的生活没有信心，这是促成斯梅尔茨改变决定的根本原因。

The report said that Smeltz’s wife Nikki and two children were not very satisfied with China’s living conditions and had no confidence in their future lives in Jinan. This is the basic reason bringing Smeltz to change his mind.

A tiny little bit more detail, but nothing we couldn’t have inferred from the Stuff article I linked to first. So what does the original Gold Coast Bulletin article say? Baidu can’t find it and Google is behaving suspiciously again, and neither Stuff nor Netease seems to have the courtesy to link to the original,  so I’ll have to try some other way to find it…. Yahoo! Australia, perhaps…. Ah, here we are:

The New Zealand international decided after just five days in China that it would be impossible for wife Nikki and his two children to settle in Jinan, a sprawling metropolis 400km south of Beijing.

And that’s it. Rather sparse compared to Netease’s extra (although still rather vague) detail.

In any case, it seems there’s nothing Shandong Luneng can do about it, as although a contract had been signed and money had changed hands, a certain piece of paperwork had not been filed, and so the transfer had not been completed.

And the next question, of course, is: Five days?! Is that all? Is Jinan that rough? Or perhaps more likely: Was the shock that big? Oh well, as a person I knew way back in Taiyuan put it: China’s not for everybody. The Smeltz family are hardly the only foreigners who have been unable to adapt to life in China.

And it’s not all bad for Shandong Luneng. Netease adds in its report that they’ve also signed the South African defender Matthew Booth. Let’s hope for their sake that transfer goes a little more smoothly.

Apparently Smeltz’s time at Shandong Luneng could be the shortest transfer in football history. But I’m wondering, if the paperwork was not completed, does it count? Did the transfer ever occur?

It’s also interesting that Netease adds that Smeltz, who set an A-League record of 19 goals last season, received many offers, but mostly from clubs in lesser leagues in Asia and Europe. That detail seems to be missing from the Stuff and Gold Coast Bulletin reports.

It would seem that this is the first time ever I’ve written anything about football. I don’t normally pay too much attention to sport, but I do generally watch as much of the football World Cup as possible. That’s the only way I recognised the name Smeltz in the headline.

I was given a container of tea the other day. Inside the container the leaves were sealed inside a plastic packet, so I couldn’t see or smell them. The container and the packet contain no indication of what kind of tea this was. Indeed, the container simply bears the words “中国茗茶” and a poem in a form of calligraphy I find hard to decipher (maybe there’s a clue hidden in the poem, which I should examine more closely?), while the packet is even simpler, bearing the character “茶” and the English words “China tea”. So it’s tea from China. Very informative. And the friend who gave me this tea was no more helpful, as she had been given the tea by somebody who didn’t bother to tell her what kind of tea it was.

So I brought this tea home, and opened the packet to have a look. Dark green leaves, long and tightly twisted. A problem in our kitchen that I am trying to get fixed made it difficult to get a handle on the aroma. So I brewed a cup, and tasted it. A strong, mellow, dark, slightly smoky flavour took me back to Dunedin, where I had tried a tea with an unusual but vaguely Chinese-y looking name, a tea I had never seen in China in part because I had no idea if it really was Chinese, and if so, what its name would be in Mandarin. So today I googled it. Could I have been given a container of this? The leaves in the picture are very similar to the leaves in the mystery container in my tea cupboard, and the flavour is similar to what I remember drinking in Dunedin. Of course, it’s been 11 years (almost exactly to the day) since I last set foot in Dunedin… I really need a tea expert to help me with this, and I don’t have anything other than the internet and one unfortunately small and not at all comprehensive book handy. I can’t upload tea leaves for people to examine.

Anyways, from a Chinese study point of view, I now have something approaching an explanation for the odd-looking name “lapsang souchong”, as well as Mandarin names, which will also be useful from a tea buying point of view. Although, I would like to know why Wikipedia states “拉普山小種/正山小种” in Fukianese means “”smoky sub-variety.” I can’t see “smoky” in those characters. And the name “Fukianese”?

Following a link, as one does on lazy mornings when the internet is a series of unrelated tangents and the occasional rabbit hole, I came across this interesting little article. At the bottom is a small note attributing the original text to Skykiwi, but with no obvious link, so give me a minute to see if I can find the original…. Ah, after struggling with their super-slow loading and not overly cooperative search function, here it is.

Two minor linguistic points:

It did take me a while to figure out “约翰基” was John Key, New Zealand’s prime minister. Yes, I feel silly.

The Chinese rendering of “New Zealand” as “纽西兰”, apparently common in Hong Kong and Taiwan, has always bugged me for some reason. Totally irrational, I know, and it is closer to the sound of “New Zealand” than is “新西兰”, but pet peeves are never rational. I suppose it’s because all my Chinese has been learned on the mainland, and so “新西兰” just sounds “correct”, while “纽西兰” just doesn’t.

Anyways, the article states John Key is encouraging young New Zealanders to learn Chinese. His reasoning is that it would make doing business in China easier. He’s right, of course, and I have heard complaints that New Zealand’s business community pays far too little attention to language and culture when they attempt to do business here, meaning they’re much less successful than they could or should be. I would add there are many other reasons to learn Chinese, but hey, John Key’s a businessman, and on this point he’s absolutely right. And on the subject of teaching Chinese, he points out one serious problem:

他说，纽西兰现有的 2500个学校中只有89个开设中文课程，这实在有些少了。

He said that of New Zealand’s 2500 schools, only 89 had opened Chinese classes, which is really far too few.

And on the subject of New Zealand’s traditional bad attitude to the study of foreign languages:

纽西兰商人已经在中国经商20多年。他一再强调，纽西兰人的确应该换换思路了。以前因语言相通，纽西兰人非常愿意和澳洲、英国人做生意，但现在必须明 白，纽西兰的未来在中国，在亚洲。

New Zealand’s business people have been doing business in China for 20 years. He continually emphasised that New Zealand really should change its thinking. Before, because of the common language, New Zealanders really wanted to do business with Australia, the UK and the USA, but now they must understand, New Zealand’s future is in China, in Asia.

I would say there’s a slight overstatement there in that I don’t think New Zealand’s entire future lies in China, or even in Asia. There’s plenty of possibility on the other side of the Pacific, in Latin America, too, and no reason why Africa should be ignored, and plenty of reasons to continue to trade with our traditional trading partners and the Pacific. But yes, New Zealand desperately needs a major change in its thinking, a thought transplant, perhaps, towards the study of foreign languages. We do need more people studying Chinese, and other Asian languages, and other global languages, and we do need our business leaders to start valuing linguistic and cultural skills much more highly than they traditionally have. Otherwise we might as well become Australia’s newest and weakest state, and give Tasmania somebody to look down on.

But it’s not all bad news: He goes on to point out that last year the number of people studying Chinese surpassed the number studying Latin for the first time. I should bloody well hope so! I see nothing wrong, and indeed much value in studying Latin, but I do think more people should be studying living languages than dead languages. We need a nation with good international communication skills, not a nation of linguists and classicists. I would also add that when I started my university studies, only two high schools in the entire country taught Russian. 89 schools teaching Chinese is far too few, but the trend seems to be heading in the right direction.

The article ends with EuroAsia director Kenneth Leong:

他认为，在中国早已经兴起了英语热，中国的商界精英很多都熟谙英文，但纽西兰人中懂中文的非常非常少，这明显会将Kiwi放在不 利的地位上。因此，无论从哪个角度出发，都是时候好好学学中文了。

He thinks the English craze broke out very early in China, and many of China’s business elite are good at English, but very, very few New Zealanders understand Chinese, which will clearly put Kiwis in a disadvantageous position. Therefore, regardless of which angle you start from, it’s time to start seriously studying Chinese.

Actually, in that last sentence, I’m not really sure how to work the “好好” or the repitition of the verb “学” into English. Any better suggestions than what I wrote? Anyways, many people will read that and say, “If they’re all learning English, why should we learn Chinese?” I guess the most obvious answer is that if you’re monolingual, you are completely at the mercy of your business partners and translators, you have no way of knowing what is being said or written in Chinese, you have no way of judging the quality or accuracy of the translations, you are totally denying yourself any chance to read all those little cultural subtleties you can read in your own people and therefore denying yourself a major chance for intelligence gathering (I mean, legitimate gathering of information for purposes of legitimate business, of course), you are opening yourself up to being cheated, exploited, and thoroughly ripped off. Whereas if you do learn Chinese, you are, as John Key stated, giving yourself a huge leg-up in understanding the market and the people you are doing business with, and also in safeguarding your own interests, and the more you learn, the bigger the advantage you give yourself.

I’ve certainly found that learning Chinese has made my job much easier, and the more I learn, the easier it gets.

It’s not just heat that’s been on the way up recently, but water use, too. According to 北京晚报/Beijing Evening News, Beijing has set a new record for water supplied to the city. Twice. Well, a record for “so far this year”, followed by a “most ever”. But first, a clarification: This article is dated July 6, so where it says “yesterday”, it means July 5. It only showed up in my Kaixin001 feed this morning. Anyway, here’s the record setting:

市自来水集团介绍，在7月4日城区日供水量达268万立方米创出今年新高后，昨天市区日供水量达286万立方米，超过去年夏季278万立方米的历史最高日 供水量，也创出北京百年供水史上最高水平，已接近市区的日供水能力。统计数据显示，昨天高时供水量出现在9时到10时，1小时供水量达16.48万立方 米。

The municipal water supply group said that after the amount of water supplied to the urban area reached 2.68 million cubic metres on July 4, setting a new record for this year, yesterday the amount of water supplied to the city area reached 2.86 million cubic metres, breaking the historic record set last summer of 2.78 million cubic metres of water supplied in one day, setting the record for the largest amount supplied in Beijing’s 100-year history of mains water supply, approaching the maximum amount that can be supplied to the city. Statistics show that yesterday’s peak water use was betwen 9 and 10, with 164,800 cubic metres supplied in one hour.

[Yes, as always, I have played it a bit fast and loose with aspects of the translation. Corrections and improvements are welcome]

Apparently demand for water is so high that the water supply group is considering limiting water supply to certain industries for the duration.

Now, I’ve said it a million times before, and I’ll probably repeat it several million more times, but one of the things that worries me most about Beijing’s future is water:

北京连续十年干旱，虽然今年降水多于往年，但是密云水库的蓄水量反而低于往年。今天上午，密云水库的蓄水量为9.4亿立方米，比去年同期减少2.4亿立方 米。此前不久，来自河北三座水库的2亿立方米水，经过南水北调京石段工程持续进入北京。河北水抵达北京团城湖后，经过管道进入市自来水厂，加工过滤后进入 千家万户。市自来水集团称：“目前北京自来水管网中三分之一的水是河北用水。管道中的每一滴自来水都非常珍贵，希望市民要珍惜使用。”

After Beijing’s 10 years of continuous drought, although precipitation has been higher this year, the amount of water stored in the Miyun Reservoir is actually lower than in previous years. This morning, Miyun Reservoir held 940 million cubic metres of water, 240 million cubic metres less than at the same time last year. Not long ago, 200 million cubic metres of water from three reservoirs in Hebei entered Beijing via the Beijing-Shijiazhuang section of the South-North Water Diversion Project. After Hebei water reaches Beijing’s Tuancheng Hu, it is piped into a municipal water treatment plant, and then after treatment and filtering enters the city’s households. The municipal water supply group said, “Currently a third of the water in the city’s pipe network is from Hebei. Every drop of water in the pipes is very precious. We hope the citizens will cherish it.”

I certainly do not like the look of those numbers.

Anyways, that’s enough breakfast-time blogging and dodgy as hell translation. I do still have exam papers awaiting grades.

Two more pieces not entirely relevant, but still distantly related to my last post: First is a post on Sinoglot about Teochow – a language I am most unfamiliar with. The second, via the comments on that Sinoglot post, is an article in the NYTimes about the changing language dominance in New York’s Chinatowns. I particularly like the final quotation:

“And now I speak Mandarin better than Cantonese,” he added with a chuckle. “So, Chinatown — it’s always changing.”

True enough, I guess. Still, it would be nice to see local communities changing with rather than being run over by the times. Still, I guess that’s the way history unfolds.