a few links
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study on August 8, 2010
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.
the evil ba
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study on July 19, 2010
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.
bilingualism, dialects
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study on July 17, 2010
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.
a little lunchtime rant
Posted by wangbo in news, ranting, tilting at windmills on July 17, 2010
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.
Smeltz leaving Shandong
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.
mystery tea
Posted by wangbo in cha, Chinese study on July 15, 2010
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”?
time to study
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study, news, tilting at windmills on July 15, 2010
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.
not just heat
Posted by wangbo in Environment, life in Beijing on July 7, 2010
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.
more
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study on June 16, 2010
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.
local languages
Posted by wangbo in Chinese study, tilting at windmills on June 14, 2010
There’s an interesting post at Luqiu Luwei’s blog that starts with a puzzling scene: She’s at a gathering of friends and relatives in Shanghai, they’re chatting, but something just feels odd:
…仔细一想,原来我们这些地地道道上海出生长大的人,在用普通话聊天…
…thinking it over, it was because these typical Shanghainese born and raised were using Mandarin to chat…
Pick all the holes in that translation you want, but I think the point is clear enough. And so why was this group of Shanghainese speaking Mandarin? There is nothing in the anecdote to suggest anybody from outside Shanghai was present. For the sake of the kids, it turns out, with whom they communicate in Mandarin.
Sidenote: Luqiu Luwei seems to use 普通话 and 国语 interchangeably.
So why are these Shanghainese parents only speaking to their kids in Mandarin? Ms Luqiu can’t seem to figure it out herself, but does offer two possible reasons. One is that the parents and teachers may be concerned that if they speak Shanghainese, the kids won’t get a solid enough grasp of Mandarin. Another is that it may somehow affect their ability to learn a foreign language. But this makes no sense, she says, when compared with the situation in Hong Kong, where the goal is for students to grasp two written and three spoken languages. Written Chinese and English, and spoken Cantonese, Mandarin and English, just in case anybody feels the need to ask.
She also points out the importance of language to culture, and local languages to local cultures, and ends her piece with this:
不敢想像,有一天,香港的所有电视台,电台,电影,还有所有的香港人,都开始不说粤语了,虽然我知道,我身边就有不少人希望有这样的一天,因为他们拒绝学 习粤语,甚至觉得,正是这种语言的隔阂,让他们觉得无法融入这个城市,做一个香港人.而他们把这些,归咎于这个城市透过语言来制造这样的疏离感.
I don’t dare imagine that one day all of Hong Kong’s TV stations, radio stations, films, and all the Hong Kong people, will all stop speaking Cantonese, although I know that there’s no shortage of people around me who hope for such a day, because they refuse to learn Cantonese, even feeling that this language is a barrier that makes them feel they have no way to integrate into the city and be a Hong Konger. And this they blame on the city for creating this sense of alienation through language.
我倒觉得,如果他们的思维能够掉转一下,先把自己当成香港人,把这个城市真正当成自己的家,那么,他们自然而然的会接受这种对他们来说陌生的语言,因为这 是这个城市的一部分,也是香港人这个身分的一部分.这样的道理,在其他的城市,甚至国家,都是一样.
Instead I think that if they can turn their thinking around, first think of themselves as Hong Kongers, truly think of Hong Kong as their home, they will naturally accept this language they find strange, because it’s a part of the city and a part of Hong Kongers’ identity. This principle is the same in other cities, even countries.
Y’know, I’m inclined to agree, especially with that last paragraph. I would add that it applies to expats, too. I’ve met too many here who simply refuse to learn even standard Mandarin. I’ve heard excuse after excuse after excuse. I’ve only met one expat in all this decade I’ve spent in China whose reason for not learning the language I respect (although I suspect there are others in similar positions)- his job meant he simply spent far too much time on the road at too irregular intervals for too irregular periods of time for him to sign up for lessons. But that’s a topic for another rant….
Like Ms Luqiu, I am puzzled as to why Shanghainese parents in Shanghai would not teach their kids Shanghainese. I can understand the two possible reasons she puts forward, considering just how much sheer ignorance about language there is out there – it’s one of the few resources to rival human stupidity in its abundance – but I agree that neither possible reason is valid. I like her comparison with Hong Kong, but I would say that it seems fair to me to assume that most people in this world grow up at least bilingual. I mean, look at the sheer number of countries around the world with multiple languages.
Which reminds me: When I was a student at Otago University, I had several friends from Singapore and Malaysia who expressed amazement that I was studying three foreign languages. I could not understand why they were so amazed, since they’d all been raised polyglots (English/Singlish/Mandarin/Hokkien seemed to be a common combination, although at the time I knew almost nothing about the Chinese language(s), so I can’t be certain).
I have also been known to point out to my students that many of them are at least trilingual, speaking their hometown’s dialect, Mandarin, and English.
I also totally agree with her points about the importance of language to culture and identity. New Zealand English has incorporated a lot of Maori words because many Maori cultural concepts have no possible English word to match them. Words like ‘mana’ and ‘tapu’ simply have too many implications to be translated neatly into one English word. New English words have been coined in New Zealand to fit concepts developing in New Zealand culture. Local cultural concepts need local words to express them. The same applies to every other dialect of every other language.
My wife speaks Yanqing dialect when talking to her family and standard Mandarin when talking to me and everybody else – well, English when talking to foreigners who don’t speak Chinese, and a mixture of standard Mandarin and English when talking to foreigners with a limited command of Chinese. I once had a colleague from New York who would speak with a mild New York accent most of the time. You could tell when she’d just been on the phone with her family, because her accent would suddenly be so strong you’d need a chainsaw to cut through it. Not long ago I met a Chinese man who lives in New Zealand who asked if we could please speak Chinese, as it felt too weird speaking English in his home country. Fair enough. Put any two people from the same place together and allow them to chat freely, and before long they’ll revert to their hometown’s dialect, regardless of what language the conversation began in. Why? Every aspect of language – accent, grammar, dialect, idiom, choice of writing system, even spelling – expresses something of the speaker’s (or writer’s) identity, both in relation to themselves and in relation to those they are communicating with.
What is a Shanghainese who can not speak Shanghainese? What is a Hong Konger who can not speak Cantonese? Or, in other words:
Why on earth would Shanghainese parents not teach their children Shanghainese?
and:
When you move to a new place, why would you not learn the local language?