Fun with tone sandhi - The solution!

Okay, I apologise for the long delay, but finally(!), I present you with the solution to the problem set I posted in my last blog post, many months ago (see here).

(Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'.
Or click here for an image you can magnify.) 

The language is Singaporean Teochew, as spoken by an aunt of mine who lives in Singapore. It's part of the Min Nan group of languages, but Singaporean Teochew is said to have undergone dialect leveling with Singaporean Hokkien - the two are much more mutually intelligible than their counterparts still spoken in China today. Also, although most descriptions of Teochew give 8 tones, I've only been able to find 7 contrastive ones - but there might still be an 8th one that I've missed!

I know I was supposed to post this in mid-June, but a lot of stuff came up, including a move to the United States (via Australia). As some of you may already know, I've just started grad school at the University of Oregon, where I am pursuing a PhD in Linguistics. It's a really exciting time for me. I'll be heading back to India at some point during my course, but unfortunately not this year.

Looking forward to posting about all the cool linguistics topics I'll be looking at during the next year!

Fun with tone sandhi

The past few months, I've been learning a language here in Singapore that's been noted for its crazy mind-bending use of tone sandhi. I thought I'd write a little about it in this post, since it's a phenomenon that some linguists may not be familiar with (given the tendency for many to run away at the first 'hearing' of anything tonal). At the end of this post, I'm also going to throw in a little puzzle set that I created, just to give people a chance to see the sorts of data some linguists work with. I'm hoping it'll appeal to all the puzzle solvers out there.


Tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese
Experienced learners of Mandarin will already be familiar with the phenomenon, exemplified by the initially confusing and dreaded rule that specifies that Tone 3 becomes Tone 2 before another Tone 3. This prevents you from saying two Tone 3s, one after the other. For example, the word for 'you' in Mandarin is 你 nǐ (with Tone 3) when said on its own and the word for '(to be) good' is 好 hǎo (also Tone 3). However, when you put them together to get the ubiquitous Mandarin greeting 你好, written as nǐ hǎo in Pinyin, you find that 你 is now pronounced ní with Tone 2. (This makes it homophonous with 泥 ní 'mud', but most speakers can work out from context that you're not talking about the quality of earth.)

Importantly, the rule applies whenever two Tone 3s occur next to each other in the same phrase, regardless of the actual meaning of the words. Using another example, 很 hěn, an intensifier with the meaning of 'very', remains as Tone 3 in phrases like 很多 hěn duō 'a lot' and 很快 hěn kuài 'very fast', since 多 duō has Tone 1 and 快 kuài 'has Tone 4. But if you want to say 很好 hěn hǎo 'very good', you would have to pronounce 很 as hén, with Tone 2.

Ask a native speaker of Mandarin why on God's less-than-green earth they would say 你好 or 很好 this way, and they'll probably just say that 'it sounds nicer'. There's also actually no physiological, or aesthetic, reason preventing you from producing two Tone 3s in a row. The thing is, tone sandhi rules are language-specific: some tone languages do allow sequences of similarly low (and creaky) tones to occur next to each other, while others may disallow sequences of two falling tones, which Mandarin does allow.

Of course, if you're only interested in learning a tone language that does have tone sandhi, it doesn't really help to ask why it happens, or for instance, why Tone 3 becomes Tone 2 and not Tone 4. You just need to accept that it does happen and that it happens the way it does. And then you need to learn how to apply the tone sandhi rules in actual speech so you don't sound completely moronic.


Tone sandhi vs Tone change
On the other hand, if you're in the business of describing tonal languages, tone sandhi is something that pops up again and again. It can sometimes be a little tricky to talk about, since there's still some disagreement as to how to what the term 'tone sandhi', sometimes called 变调 biàndiào in Mandarin, should include. At least, it is generally accepted that 'tone sandhi' differs from 'tone change', or 变音 biànyīn, which describes similar kinds of tone alternations that are restricted to specific words, largely due to historical reasons. For example, 好 when pronounced hào with Tone 4, means 'to be fond of' (example taken from Chen 2000: 31) - here you can see the connection with 好 hǎo '(to be) good', which indicates a likeable quality. However, this correspondence between Tone 3 and Tone 4 is specific to 好, and changing Tone 3 on another word to Tone 4 is not likely to yield a similar change in meaning.

In contrast, tone sandhi rules, which can also be the products of historical changes in a language, are more 'general', in the sense that they almost always apply regardless of the meaning of words as long as the necessary sound environment condition is present. However, there are instances when tone sandhi rules are not strictly observed - even native Mandarin speakers may sometimes fail to observe the rule described above when confronted with new compound words consisting of Tone 3 + Tone 3.


A tone sandhi puzzle
In the process of learning this tonal language in Singapore, which I'm calling 'Language X' for the moment, I came up with a little puzzle involving tone sandhi. It's similar to the problem sets we give out to undergraduate linguistic students, except I've simplified it a little so you don't need a lot of linguistic knowledge to solve it. I've used the letters A-G to indicate the tones, as well as some symbols known as Chao tone letters which give a visual representation of the tones. The 'stopped' tones refer to tones on words that end in the consonants k and h.

You can view a draft of the puzzle below. Now this may not be the easiest puzzle to cut your linguistics teeth on, but I hope it gives you a taste of the sorts of data linguists work with, and the kind of analytic skills required to describe languages.

(Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'.
Or click here for an image you can magnify.) 

The solution will come in mid-June!

[I may have to post less frequently than I already do this coming month because I'm busy revising my Masters thesis to get it published.]

Reference

Chen, Matthew Y. 2000. Tone sandhi: Patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The trouble with Chinese language policies in Singapore

Recently, I joined the Facebook group "Heritage languages of Singapore", and was immediately directed to an online petition by a group called 'Creatives For Causes' to reintroduce Chinese dialects on local TV and radio programs in Singapore. Judging by the number of signatures (only 238 at the time of writing), it seems that either it's been poorly publicised, or people just don't agree with the need for these dialects.

[Note: I will be using the term 'dialect' in this post, even though linguists would consider Hokkien and Cantonese to be separate languages from Mandarin. In my experience, the term 'dialect' seems to be preferred in everyday speech because to most people, these languages exist mainly as spoken vernaculars and are not used in written texts.]

This call comes after over 30 years of aggressive Mandarin promotion by the Singapore government, which had earlier designated Mandarin as the 'official' Chinese language to be used as a means of uniting the various Chinese groups in Singapore. The reason why dialects have been banned, and continue to be banned stems from the belief that their use is detrimental to the learning of Mandarin. The people behind the petition argue that this belief is wrong, given linguistic research that shows that young people can in fact grow up multilingual. On a slightly different note, they argue that we need dialects to prevent the elderly Chinese population who may not speak or understand much Mandarin from becoming isolated, as younger generations of Singapore shift towards English and Mandarin.

I fully support the petition, and I urge others to support it as well. But my reasons go beyond what has been mentioned on the petition site. In particular, I would like to talk about the reasons why Mandarin was introduced as the official Chinese language, and then raise some of the issues with Lee Kuan Yew's reasons for stamping out the use of dialects. Some of these are mentioned in an interview published in the Sunday Times, 11 December 2011. You can find a copy of the article below.

"Out with dialects, in with Mandarin" Sunday Times (11/12/11)

Why Mandarin to begin with?

In 1959, "the Hokkien group was the largest, forming just over 40 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population. The Teochew group was next with nearly 23 per cent, the Cantonese third with 18 per cent, and the Hainanese and Hakka groups followed with about 7 per cent each. Mandarin was spoken only by a few educated people, such as schoolteachers, journalists, writers and artists, who had come to Singapore to teach or work."

Although not explicitly stated in this article, the usual narrative is that Mandarin was chosen to unite the various dialect groups, as well as form a link with ancient Chinese culture and values (Wee, 2009). The fact that it was the national language of China would have also contributed to its choice. In more recent times, the reason for promoting Mandarin has become more about gaining access to business, educational and cultural opportunities in China (Teo 2005).

Looking at a speech by Lee in 1984, we can examine the notion he held that Mandarin is the sole linguistic conduit for the transmission of traditional Chinese values:

"It [Mandarin] reminds us that we are part of an ancient civilization with an unbroken history of over 5000 years. This is a deep and strong psychic force, one that gives confidence to a people to face up to and overcome great changes and challenges. To be able to speak Mandarin and read the Chinese script, is reassuring. To look at Chinese characters, to see them as mysterious hieroglyphics, is to be emotionally disadvantaged. A little effort and the magic of the characters will reveal itself. . .. Parents want . . . their children to retain traditional Chinese values in filial piety, loyalty, benevolence, and love. Through Mandarin, their children can emotionally identify themselves as part of an ancient civilization whose continuity was because it was founded on a tried and tested value system." (Lee, 1984, p. 3) (cited in Teo, 2005)

These statements are problematic, because they are based on the flawed notions that:
(a) Mandarin, as it is spoken today, has been the language of Chinese civilisation for over 5000 years; and
(b) that it is intrinsically linked with the Chinese writing system, to the exclusion of all other Chinese dialects.

Firstly, Middle Chinese (spoken around the Sui and Tang dynasties) did not sound like Mandarin. (And Ancient Chinese would have sounded even less like modern spoken Mandarin since it didn't even have tones.) We know this about Middle Chinese because of sources like the 切韵 / 切韻 Qieyun, a rime dictionary from the Sui Dynasty that described the contemporary pronunciation of Chinese characters by using a system that divided the first sound of a syllable (the initial) from the rest of it (the rime). It also provided rime tables, which grouped pronunciations of Chinese characters together by tone, initial and rime. Most of these groupings would not make sense if we relied on the modern Mandarin pronunciations of these characters. (Note that the name Qieyun itself is written in pinyin and only reflects the current Mandarin pronunciation, not the pronunciation at the time it was written.)

Secondly, it is a mistake to think that dialects like Hokkien and Teochew cannot be written using Chinese characters, and that the only way to access Chinese writing is through Mandarin. In 1883, a Presbyterian missionary named Adele Fielde published a Teochew-English dictionary, based on the dialect spoken in the city of Swatow. In that same year, another missionary, John Macgowan, published a Hokkien-English dictionary, based on the Amoy dialect. In both dictionaries, Chinese characters are used to write Teochew and Hokkien.

Click here for options to download Fielde's (1883) A pronouncing and defining dictionary of the Swatow dialect, arranged according to syllables and tones.
Click here for options to download Macgowan's (1883) English and Chinese dictionary of the Amoy dialect.

Language and Racialisation - the problem of the Singapore Mother Tongue

"Our ideal was that the Chinese would be able to speak English and Mandarin, Malays would be able to speak Malay and English, and Indians would be able to speak Tamil and English. Alas, the situation did not develop as we had hoped."

Underpinning this statement is the belief that Chinese people should have had little trouble learning Mandarin, on account of their Chinese-ness. This is supported by the use of the term 'mother tongue' in the Singapore context, to refer to the language associated with one's race (or designated race) - unlike most other countries in world, 'mother tongue' and 'first language' do not mean the same thing here.

Taking myself as an example, Mandarin was designated as my mother tongue. I have a Chinese surname and thus my race is 'Chinese'  in all official documents here. This ignores the linguistic realities of my home, where both my parents do not speak Mandarin (nor does my maternal grandmother). In fact, my parents are much more fluent in Malay, a language I was not allowed to study as a mother tongue (despite my Peranakan / Straits-born Chinese heritage which was not recognised by the government). Similarly, my forced inclusion into this world of 'Chinese-ness' mirrors the forced exclusion of ethnic Malays and Indians were until very recently were not given the choice to study Mandarin in school.

Certainly, there are some similarities in grammatical structure and pronunciation across Chinese dialects, which would enable say, a native Hokkien speaker to pick up Mandarin faster than a native Malay speaker, but it does not mean that the Hokkien speaker will pick up Mandarin automatically, as a child being born into a Mandarin-speaking environment will. In fact, for many dialect speakers it would have been almost like having to learn two foreign languages in school, since many of them would have almost no exposure to either English or Mandarin outside school. Their real mother tongue (the way the term is used around the world, and by UNESCO) would be their home dialect, not Mandarin.

Removing the familiar and bringing in the unfamiliar

Lee seems to have made a similar realisation, following the 1979 Goh Keng Swee Report, and his controversial conclusion is one that he holds until today.

"If our students were learning English and Mandarin in school, and also learning dialects at home, they were in reality learning three different tongues. Given that their exposure to dialects at home was longer than their exposure to English or Mandarin, it was not surprising that their command of dialects was stronger than their command of the latter two."

In view of this situation, Lee and Goh's solution was to eradicate the language that these students had had the most exposure to. This involved the ban on the use of dialects in local media. These dialects were viewed as an extra learning burden for speakers, who also had to learn English and Mandarin (Wee, 2009). Unlike the prestige languages English and Mandarin, dialects were seen to have little functional benefit.

Over the past few decades, a lot of work has demonstrated that with well-implemented bilingual programme, students with a good foundation in their home language / mother tongue (not the Singapore sense of the term) can actually progress further in a dominant national or foreign language than students who enter a program taught entirely in that dominant national or foreign language. For more information, you can look at the UNESCO site for Mother Tongue Multilingual Education which includes materials that advocate the promotion of the mother tongue. [EDIT: The main purpose of many of these programs is to bridge the gap between the home language and the national language, not to have students come out of school only fluent in their home language, which alone does not give access to jobs and further education.]

The rationale for this is: children first learn about the world around them through the language used at home. By the time they start going to school, they already know a lot about the physical and cultural world around them. A good primary education program uses what they already know and promotes cognitive development by building up from simple concepts to more complex ones - it guides the child into the unfamiliar by using the familiar. Naturally, such a program uses a language that the child already has some knowledge of, and requires curriculum planning, teaching material development and teacher training.

In a similar analogy to one raised by Lee, I sometimes ask my monolingual English friends in Australia to imagine what it would be like if they only had exposure to English at home, but went to school and discovered everything was taught in Russian - not only would they have to learn the Russian language, but they would also have to learn mathematical (and basic scientific) concepts in Russian at the same time. Some children may do well because their families can afford to give them more exposure to Russian, but these are children who do well in spite of the system. This is similar to the situation faced by many indigenous people around the world, who are forced to go to school where a national language that they may not have access to outside the classroom is used. In many cases, plunged in a completely alien language environment, they either learn to memorise what they need to in class, which they promptly forget when they leave school, or they simply drop out of school - scenarios not unlike what Lee encountered in Singapore in the 1970s.

Like in so many places in the world, spoken vernaculars in Singapore were (and are) seen as the 'burden' as opposed to prestige languages like English or Mandarin, despite the fact that the use of dialects could have been instrumental in easing the burden of learning English and Mandarin. The government may have also needed to compromise on the original expectations that all Chinese people become fluent in both English and Mandarin. Instead, what we have now is a significant section of the population that are viewed as speaking both English and Mandarin poorly.

But rather than lament policies that cannot be turned back, [EDIT: and I think it's too late to overhaul the education system], we should look at things that can be changed. In light of what's been discussed, it's time to realise that dialects are not the main cause for the poor standard of Mandarin here. There is very little reason why dialects should not return to TV and radio, apart from maybe some difficulty in finding energetic young hosts who are fluent in their respective dialect. It has been done in Taiwan, where in the last 10 years, a Hakka channel and even an indigenous channel have appeared on local cable television.

Back to the older generation

This brings me back to the main purpose of this post. I am not criticising the government's policies for the sake of it - I simply wish to point out flaws in the reasoning behind the language policies, because I believe that people are suffering because of them, and that a change to the policy will result in less suffering.

The petition site talks about why we should support this case for the sake of the elderly. However, apart from just providing entertainment and intellectual stimulation, the elderly have a right to information. If we really are a maturing democracy, how can we have citizens who do not have access to information about how their lives are run - citizens who have spent most, if not their entire lives here (and many of whom are actually older than the country itself)? Surely they have a right to know about things like the White Paper, or be kept up to date when the next big outbreak like SARS strikes. 

The sad irony is that the very language viewed as a means for cultural transmission is now the reason for the growing linguistic and cultural gap between many older and younger Chinese Singaporeans. Bringing back dialects would be a small but important step in rehabilitating this relationship.

References

Teo, Peter. (2005). "Mandarising Singapore: A critical analysis of slogans in Singapore’s ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign." Critical Discourse Studies 2(2). pp. 121–142.

Wee, Lionel. (2010). "‘Burdens’ and ‘handicaps’ in Singapore’s language policy: on the limits of language management." Lang Policy 9:97–114.

[Here's a related post I write back in 2010 when I started this blog: Diverse Languages, One Identity
My next post The persistence of Singapore English and Mandarin also discusses other language issues in Singapore.]

Expressing the agent in Chinese

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, since I saw this advertisement at my uncle's clinic here in Singapore. It's an ad for some type of hair loss treatment.

In English, the ad reads: "Male pattern hair loss can be treated".

In contrast, the Chinese (Mandarin) ad reads: 医生可以治疗你的脱发问题。yīshēng kěyǐ zhìliáo nǐ de tuōfà wèntí which can be roughly translated as 'The doctor can treat your hair loss problem.'

For now, let's just ignore the fact that English version obligatorily requires some sort of article with doctor and that doctor must be specified as being singular or plural, while the Chinese one does not. (Given the ad's location in a clinic where it was in full view of waiting patients, I interpreted it as referring to the doctor working in the clinic that day, whom the waiting patient was going to see.) Also ignore the fact that the English one specifies this as a male problem, while the Chinese one assumes that the reader is male.

What's important to note is that the Mandarin version actually specifies the agent, the person who will be undertaking the action, 医生 yīshēng 'doctor'. On the other hand, the English version uses a passive construction where the agent no longer needs to be mentioned, though it could be if we wanted to, by simply adding the phrase by the doctor. By using the passive voice in English, one can omit the agent / doer of the action and still construct a grammatical sentence. This is one common use of the passive voice in English, and a fairly important one, so please ignore 'blanket rules' that state to 'avoid the passive voice' at all costs - it does have its uses!

With the current buzz on language and its potential effects on thought and behaviour, and given that only the Mandarin one expressly mentions an agent, the 'doctor', I would be tempted to ask this question: If the treatment fails, would a Mandarin speaker who has read the advertisement in Mandarin be more likely to blame the doctor than an English speaker who has read it in English?

The obvious hypothesis would be that a Mandarin speaker would be more likely to assign blame to the doctor if the treatment fails than an English speaker would. Why? Because in the Chinese version, 医生 'doctor' is explicitly mentioned.

Now, if this hypothesis were proven correct, could one then conclude that it was due to some fundamental difference in the way that Mandarin and English are structured or view the world?

I would definitely say, no.

The problem is, the English version could easily have read: A doctor can treat your hair loss problem, using the active voice which means that the agent has to be mentioned / one must mention the agent. Mandarin also has a way of marking the equivalent of the passive using 被 bèi (see here for more info), although writing 脱发问题,可以治疗 would be acceptable, and would be closer to 'Hair loss problem can be treated', with 脱发问题 'hair loss problem' placed at the front as a topic.

You might then say that it is more common in Mandarin Chinese to mention the agent here - a Google search for 脱发问题可以被治疗 'hair can be treated' (using 被 bèi)  doesn't come up with identical results, while most results mention some sort of force / process, e.g. 头发移植 'hair transplants', 锌 'zinc' and 中草药 'Chinese herbal medicine' that might cure hair loss problems.

The problem is, there are numerous reasons why 医生 'doctor' was mentioned explicitly in the Chinese version, and not the English one. One reason might be a cultural expectation among Mandarin speakers (or in the case of Singapore, older Hokkien and Teochew speakers who also know Mandarin) that it is up to the doctor to help them. Older Chinese speakers, who are less likely to know English, are more likely from a generation that held doctors in the highest esteem and would not question their actions. By mentioning 医生 'doctor', the copywriter / translator of the advertisement in Chinese could simply be tapping into the revered status accorded doctors, since this would likely promote sales. Another reason might be that the copywriter simply felt the need to be more explicit in directing Chinese speaking patients to the doctor for help.

Clearly, it would be impossible to simply compare two versions of a sentence in two different languages and start making hypotheses about the effects of language on thought and behaviour. However, I thought it would be a nice way to illustrate some of the problems faced by researchers in this field, especially if we start considering a feature (like an agent) that could be omitted in a language, but are often not. Is such a tendency the result of the structure of a language affecting thought, or is it thought and cultural expectations that result in this particular use of language / stylistic choice?

In order to exclude the possibility of the latter, we go to Roman Jakobson's quote “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”. It would therefore be more fruitful to look at features of English that must be mentioned, like the use of either an indefinite or definitie article with singular nouns in English or the marking of all countable nouns as either singular or plural - all features that Chinese does not oblige its speakers to mention.

[On a related note, here's a link to Lena Boroditsky's article in the Wall Street Journal on her work with English, Japanese and Spanish speakers and the perception of blame (23/07/2010): Lost in Translation
Here's a Language Log post that critically examines this study (26/07/2010): Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame]

Learn Chinese in Nepal

As I mentioned in my last post, I've noticed a proliferation of Chinese signs in Nepal since my last visit here 2 years ago.

I've also noticed a number of Nepalis speaking Chinese. And there are a number of options to learn Chinese here - though from what I've been told it's usually taught by Nepalis who've worked and lived in China. Just look at this photo below:

 

While I do believe it's necessary to develop an identity in another language that you're learning (especially if you're trying to join a language community), I find it odd for a language school to say they'll give you an identity (assuming "Get your Identity by being touch with Us." means just that).

The Chinese could be translated as such:
"Hurry up!
Chinese classes have started.
Don't miss out on this chance.
Hurry up and join us."

Looking at the Chinese writing, one thing that suggests to me that it wasn't written by a native Chinese speaker is that the first character in the third line should be 别 ('don't), but the person has written the left hand side part of the character as 男, not 另.

Back in Nepal

It's been 2 years, but I'm back in Nepal! It also means I'm back to updating the blog.

This time I'm back at the height of the monsoon. It's been raining pretty much everyday since I arrived. I just spent the last 3 days with some friends in Pokhora, which I'm told is in a particularly rainy part of the country. Although we didn't manage to go paragliding, at the suggestion of some other friends, we did rent a rowboat and go on the lake for a swim.

One thing I've noticed in Nepal is the higher frequency of signs in Chinese, compared even to two years ago. Here are two signs I noticed on the main shopping street in Lakeside, Pokhora (where most tourists hang out).

The thing to note here, is that the Chinese reads, "我爱尼泊尔" which means "I love Nepal".
 

And this sign reads "我爱博卡拉" which means "I love Pokhora". As random as the quote in English right below it.
 

I come from a land down under

One of the first things I learn to say in a foreign language is how to say, "I'm from..." or "I come from...", mainly because one of the first things people ask me is where I'm from. It's also a reasonable useful phrase for any language learner.

However, I find the phrase tricky to learn for 2 reasons. The first one is probably more specific to the geographically displaced person that I am. I usually say "I come from Singapore but live in Australia", even if my friends in Nepal and India will typically introduce me as their friend from Australia. It just seems less troublesome when I'm travelling in Asia and Europe, especially since I don't look like what many people expect an Australian to look like i.e. white, nor do I sound particularly Australian (although I did meet an American lady who insisted I had an Australian accent, which I found rather puzzling).

But discounting any potential geographic confusion of one's origins, the phrase is potentially problematic if you're asking for a literal translation in another language. I've found a few times that when I ask people how to say "I come from...", they often give me a sentence that is better translated as 'I am coming from...' or 'I have come from...', which tells the hearer the last place I visited, as opposed to my country / land of origin.

I suspect it's translating the verb 'come' that throws my tutors off - they're trying to convey the meaning of motion, when the English doesn't actually convey this.

Using the verb venir 'to come' works fine in French, although it's possible to just use the verb 'to be' and a preposition:
Je viens de Singapour 'I come from Singapore.'
Je suis de Singapour. 'I am from Singapore.'

But in Russian, what I'd say is:
Я из Сингапура ya iz Singapur-a 'I am from Singapore.' (lit. 'I from Singapore' with a preposition and no verb meaning 'to be')
I can't even think of a verb corresponding to 'come' that would be appropriate here. If I did use one here, I'd feel like I was talking about recently arriving from Singapore.

Similarly, in (Lower) Assamese I was first taught:
[would love to put the Assamese text here at some point]
Moy Singapur-pora ahisu.
(forgive the transliteration, this was based on my own transcriptions, and I have a LOT of trouble with the back vowels)

And in Sumi:
Niye Singapur lono ighi va.

However, both literally mean, 'I have come from Singapore.' (or to match the word order, 'I Singapore from have come'). The form of the verb 'to come' ahisu in (Lower) Assamese and the use of va with the verb ighi 'to come' in Sumi are used in sentences that one would typically translate as being in the perfect aspect in English. I suspect that both sentences suggest that I have recently arrived from Singapore, which is not the intended meaning.

Rather, in order to convey the meaning of origin, it might be necessary in languages to say something like 'I am Singaporean.' In Chinese, I would probably say:
我是新加坡人。
wo shi xinjiapo ren
(where 人 ren means 'person'.)

In Sumi, the equivalent of this would be:
Niye Singapur-mi.
with the suffix -mi meaning 'person' and no verb meaning 'to be'.

Alternatively, what I've learn to say in Nepali, is:
मेरो देश सिंगापुर हो, तर म ऑस्ट्रेलियामा बास्छु।
mero des Singaapur ho, tara ma Australiya-maa baaschhu
which literally means 'My country (des) is Singapore, but I live in Australia.'

Similarly, in Assamese, I can say:
mor dex Singapore, kintu moi bortoman Australiat thaku
'My country is Singapore, but nowadays I live in Australia.'

Of course, this often assumes that your country of origin is the same as your current nationality, which is not always the case. However, things are never that simple - some people I know who read this blog certainly have more complicated geographical origins!

I'd therefore be interested to hear of other ways to introduce where you come from in these and other languages. I'd also be interested to know why people choose to introduce themselves in this particular way.

Eventually, I suppose I will start introducing myself as being 'Australian'. Although I'm more likely to give a nod to Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton and say, "I am Australian", instead of "I come from a land down under."

Tea vs Chai, the Tekka Centre and my last name (II)

In yesterday's post I talked about the correspondence between Hokkien 't' and Mandarin 'zh' (a retroflex sound produced with the tongue slightly further back than the sound represented by 'ch' in 'chunk' and without the puff of air). Both sounds are descended from an earlier 'tr' cluster in Early Middle Chinese, as reconstructed by historical linguists.

What does this have to do with the word for 'tea'?

People who know Hindi, may laugh surreptitiously when they hear people order a 'chai tea', since चय chay means 'tea' in Hindi, so the order is basically for a 'tea tea'. In English though, 'chai tea' is perfectly acceptable because the word 'chai' has been borrowed to designate what one would call मसाला चय masaalaa chai 'spiced tea' in India.

The Hindi word for tea is चय chay is much closer to the Mandarin cha (the 'ch' sound here is pronounced like the retoflex 'zh', the only difference is that it is accompanied by a puff of air). Other Indo-Aryan languages like Nepali have चिया chiyā. Within Indo-European, we also have Russian чай chay. The Japanese also use cha. In contrast, English has tea, French thé and Malay teh. Hebrew too uses תה te (I was taught that תה נענע te nana is '(spear)mint tea' in Hebrew). These languages all have a word for 'tea' that's closer to the Hokkien / Minnan word te (tone not given).

The reason for this difference is that languages like English borrowed (whether directly or indirectly) the word from one of the Minnan dialects / languages, while languages like Russian and Hindi borrowed the word from other Chinese languages like Mandarin or Cantonese. The Wikipedia article explains this in greater detail and gives more examples from other languages.

Etymologically though, Mandarin cha and Hokkien te share the same origin. Pulleyblank (1991) gives the reconstructed forms draɨ /drɛ (Early Middle Chinese) and trɦa: (Late Middle Chinese). Again, we see the correspondence between the Mandarin retroflex sounds (written in pinyin as 'zh' and 'ch') and Minnan 't',

So voilà, it took me two posts to do it, but there you have it - the common thread linking my last name, the name of the Tekka Centre and the name of one of the most consumed beverages on the planet.

[This post was inspired by 3 separate conversations I've had in the last month about each of these topics. Tomorrow I'm off to the great tea-growing state of Assam in NE India. The word in Assamese চাহ (transliterated as chah) is clearly related to the non-Minnan form of the word, but is now pronounced 'sah' in Assamese. Something for me to get used to saying again!]

Tea vs Chai, the Tekka Centre and my last name (I)

This post is about three things: (1) the name of a very popular beverage that the vast majority of readers would be familiar with; (2) the name of a building complex near Little India that most Singaporeans would be familiar with; and (3) my family name, which only my friends would be familiar with (but which is actually a pretty common Chinese name around the world).

And yes, there's a linguistic point to all of this.

Let's start with what's least familiar: my last name, which happens to be Teo (I pronounce it as [t^hjo]). It is a Hokkine / Minnan name that has its origins in southern China. While it may not look familiar to most people outside SE Asia, it's actually etymologically related to one of the most common Chinese surnames around the world. The Chinese character used to write it is 张 (simplified) or 張 (traditional). The standard Mandarin equivalent is transliterated as Zhang in pinyin and pronounced as /tʂaŋ/ (tone not given) - it's like saying 'chunk', but (a) you don't have a final 'k' sound and (b) when you pronounce 'ch' sound, your tongue curls back a bit (this is what is called a 'retroflex' sound) and you shouldn't have a strong puff of air. The Cantonese equivalents I believe are transliterated as Cheung, Cheong or Chong, depending on the transliteration system.

Most of you will probably have started to recognise these names and probably even know people with one of these names. But you've also probably noticed that while the Mandarin and Cantonese forms look quite similar, the Minnan name Teo doesn't look (or sound) anything like the others. So how is it related?

Before I get to that point, let's look at the name of a famous building complex located in Little India, Singapore: the Tekka Centre. (I was just there a week ago with a friend from Australia.)

The Wikipedia article gives the original (Hokkien) name of the market as Tek Kia Kha, meaning 'foot of the small bamboos' which was eventually shortened to Tekka. For those who can read Chinese, you'll notice on the right the Chinese characters 竹 'bamboo' and 脚 'leg / foot'. The standard Mandarin reading of 竹 is zhu in pinyin and pronounced /tʂu/, while in Hokkien 竹 is transliterated as tek and pronounced something like /tɛk/.

Now I remember going on a school trip to Little India in the 1990s and being utterly confused because the centre had been renamed the 'Zhujiao Centre' to match the Mandarin reading of 竹脚. In reality, almost everyone still referred to it as the 'Tekka Market'. The building has since been renamed the 'Tekka Centre' to avoid confusion (which Wikipedia tells me happened in 2000).

The point was, I could see no resemblance between Mandarin zhu and Hokkien tek. Since then, I've also learnt a lot more about historical sound changes, and noticed other examples of Mandarin 'zh' (a retroflex sound) corresponding to Hokkien 't', like with my last name. Simply put, they are both said to have descended from a sequence of 't' and 'r' early in the history of Chinese. In the Minnan languages / dialects, including Hokkien, the 'r' sound was lost, while in other varieties, including standard Mandarin, the combination of 'tr' became a retroflex sound, as represented in pinyin by the letters zh. Pulleyblank (1991) reconstructs the pronunciation of 竹 as truwk in Early Middle Chinese and triwk in Late Middle Chinese. Guillaume Jacques here also gives 'tr' as an initial in Early Middle Chinese, with the pronunciation of 张 reconstructed as 'trjang'. We still see the 'tr' combination in the Vietnamese surname Trương / Truong. (Vietnamese is not Sinitic, but it was heavily influenced by it for centuries.)

Of course, this only explains how the first sounds in Teo and tek in Hokkien correspond to Zhang and zhu in Mandarin. To explain the rest would require more than a humble blog post.

So what does this have to do with all the tea in China (and all the chai in India)? Check out tomorrow's post.

Yuan

This is not a Nepal-related post, but just a little comment about this page from Johnson, featuring puns on the name of the Chinese currency, the yuan 元.

It has surprised me that even people on BBC World News (no link available unfortunately) pronounce it as 'you-ahn', rhyming with 'one', like all the puns suggest. In fact, it should be pronounced closer to 'U-N', but as a single syllable, i.e. /ɥɛn/ or /yɛn/. It's surprising because the BBC employ people trained in phonetics to research these things, so that they pronounce names as close to the native language as possible if there is no standard English pronunciation.

And it's even more frustrating for me to hear yuan being mispronounced - it's in my Chinese name.