h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As I write this, I am being filmed by the third television crew in four days- this must be a record. A bit distracting, I must say. Disconcerting, too. While I was being interviewed for the second time (three days ago), a funny thing happened. Just as I was beginning to talk about the ahem, "limitations" of computing in China, the t.v. camera suddenly went dead.

"Oh, I understand", I said, and then laughed. "No, no, it's not that-no problem." The interviewer explained that it was merely a dead battery- nothing to worry about. Maybe. But the subject didn't come up again once the battery was changed.

Anyone interested in seeing who I am (and what I look like) should watch either Beijing Television (Bei3Jing1 Dian4shi Tai2) or China Television (Zhong1 Yang1 Dian4shi Tai2). Does anyone out there have sattelite t.v.? Does anyone actually watch Chinese television (other than Chinese?)

Also worth noting: I just picked up an English-Chinese computing dictionary, published by the Qing1Hua2 University Press. (I was mistaken about Qing1Hua2's tones in the last journal entry- sorry!) This dictionary is highly technical, but it seems to have a decent selection of general-use terms. Should anybody need help with this kind of terminology, please feel free to ask- I am only too happy to help!

That's all for now.

I'm not all that politicized, I'm afraid. I used to be a lot more so when I lived abroad, because there is nothing like outside perspective to open one's eyes to childhood assumptions! But Florida is a wayback machine in full operation, and I was gradually but inexorably discouraged from having strong opinions in public. Women don't, you know!!! And now I'm out of practise.

But I digress before I even begin.

What I'm curious to know is what the etymology of technical terms is in Chinese. In English we agglomerate Latin and Greek fragments to make new words for special purposes; in German they make fabulous compounds of non-technical words (or borrow English ones). What do they do in Chinese?

I also want to introduce you to a researcher-friend of mine who is intelligent, modest, and has some experience with the Chinese language. You'll find Hypoman at
http://www.h2g2.com/U49276 .

Dear Lil:

Don't ever shy away from voicing your opinions- especially in public! I, for one, love them, and it seems that I am far from alone on that count. I do admit that the invective gets heavy with the Colonel, but I love that too! (I will maintain that we are in basic agreement on all the important points.)

Anyway, you are an absolute gem- on many counts. First of all, thanks for the link to Hypoman- he looks like another interesting researcher, quite impressive. I will be in touch right away.

On another count- technical terms in Chinese, bless your heart! This is definitely subject matter for a Guide entry; in fact I just got done reading a *very* heavy tome on the subject. Happily, this should be easy to explain.

Essentially, Classical Chinese is raided just like Latin and Greek. Classical Chinese was an isolating language par excelence- one morpheme=one word.

(And morphemes were/are also coterminous with written characters; one character=one morpheme= one word. Moreover, Chinese is uninflected- grammatical relationships and modality are expressed by word order and particles.)

So in order to coin new, modern technical terms, the ancient larder gets raided, and (typically) two characters are put together to create a new word. Here are two examples:

Telephone = Dian4 ("lightning, electricity")+ Hua4 ("speech")

(Computer) Mouse= Shu3 ("mouse") + Biao3 ("indication, indicator")

Ok, "telephone" is made in the same way that New Greek was used to form the English word, that's clear. "Dian4" and "Hua4" are both commonly used in everyday speech.

But (computer) mouse is a bit different- in Chinese one says "Lao3Shu3" (literally, "old mouse"). Only in Classical times did people ever say "shu3" on its own to mean "mouse". The same is true of the modern word for soccer (foot + ball), where "foot" is the Classical form, "Zu2". (The modern form is "Jiao3".)

Now the fun part. Many, many modern terms in common use- often surprising ones such as "culture" and "revolution" were actually intorduced from Japanese! Since the Japanese use Chinese characters, especially during the Meiji Restoration (c. 1860-1912), new terms were coined at a furious rate as Japan modernized- and they tended to use Classical Chinese forms. (Though many words were absorbed directly into Japanese.)

Some words have made the leap from European languages, such as the transliteration for "mouse", and the word for "Martini" (which I absolutely love- it is "Ma3ti2ni3", literally "horse kicks you"!)

But these words are decidedly in the minority- they tend to be far too long; Modern Chinese is becoming more and more bi-syllabic, but it is definitely not polysylabic. One exception for this is- you guessed it- computer terminology. Right now, I am using the "Yin1te4Wang3"- internet.

I tried to keep this short- I really did! But I love, love, love words, etymology, linguistics, and related matters. *Sigh* Thanks for asking such spot-on questions! (Did I say that right?)
There's much more to say on this subject, but I want you to keep coming back, so I don't dare frighten you off with more "dissertations"!

Bye now,
Miao

Me too! I adore etymology and the philosophy of language. When I was at university in England, in the 70's, transformational syntax was a brand new idea ... actually, now that I think of it, the Linguistics Department was brand-new too, and they were given one of the offices in the philosophy department (this was Birmingham, England). Anyway, one of my tutors was a specialist in language logic, a sunbeams-to-cucumbers sort of discipline now that I look back on it.

Beyond the logic, though, and the Chomsky and Bach, there were some philosophers trying to grapple with what you'd have to call the "psychology of the philosophy of language". The struggle goes way way back, of course, but I was chiefly knocked back by Wittgentstein, who had started out trying to reduce all of knowledge to a list o f axioms and later got a lot more humble. What's a word and how does it map to the world, and why? It isn't just concrete fact exchange because there is a whole aesthetic of 'finding the right word' which Wittgenstein likened to riffling through a palette for exactly the right hue to paint a leaf. Then I discovered John Searle, a plain talker (his first book was called How To Do Things With Words) who explored the notion of illocutionary force, how we use words and sentences to mean something more than the literal meaning of the word or sentence ("Fire!" "Your dinner is on the table."), which I think has now blossomed into semiotics.

This is all by way of describing how I got hooked at an early age on languages and psycholinguistics. When you know how a people put their words together and how they choose which words they decide to put together, then you know so much more about what they are trying to say than if you just read the telegram.

I had heard that the Japanese borrowed ideograms wholesale from the Chinese (and that the same logograph is pronounced quite differently) and that leads me to wonder whether the Japanese will coin new words with ideographical fragments as the Chinese do, or whether their neologisms are formed a whole different way.

Dear Lil:

Thank you for such a wonderful and though-provoking message! I had to think about this a bit before responding, but I am very very intrigued by what you write. John Searle, you say? Do tell.
I am really only a hobbyist when it comes to linguistics- I took a couple of courses and was hooked right away. (This might develop into something bigger in the future.) So please keep throwing your wisdom my way! I am eager to learn more!

As for the way that Japanese fashion neologisms, things seem to have changed from the days of the Meiji Restoration. Nowadays, it seems that the bulk of loanwords are simply transiterated into Katakana and that's the end of it.

But in previous times, Chinese characters (Kanji) were used- it was a prestige form of the language, after all. Interestingly, there seems to be closer affinity between Classical Chinese and Japanese in grammatical terms- and this probably facilitated new-word formation.
Syntactially speaking, these new terms make sense-usually.

So the result was often new terms that used characters that were last in common use in the Tang dynasty. So ironically, it helps to have studied Classical Chinese in order to understand these modern terms!

There were/ are many different routes for these words; the one I have been describing is a Japanese neo-logism. Though there are many cases of "round-trip loans", terms used long ago in Chinese, but later lost currency, only to be re-introduced by the Japanese. The classical fragments come from many times and places, too.

By the way, the Japanese typically have at least two pronunciations of a Chinese character. Many of the pronunciations are based on the dialect spoken in a given area of China. Some of these pronunciations are used by historical linguists in their reconstructions. Just thought I'd toss that in.

Bye now,
Miao