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).

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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 persistence of Singapore English and Mandarin

In my previous post, I looked at what the government had hoped to accomplish through its language policies, as summarised here in this quote from Lee Kuan Yew:

"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."

In this post, I consider the seeming perpetual need for English and Mandarin campaigns in Singapore. After all, English was meant to be the language of wider communication, and the 'mother tongues' were to be the language of each respective race. But even after decades of policy that has institutionalised and privileged languages like English and Mandarin (and involved the vilification of Chinese dialects), why do we still need the Speak Good English Movement (SGEM) and the Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC)?

[Note that despite falling use across all three 'mother tongues' in households, the decline of Malay and Tamil has never warranted similar campaigns for these languages.]

Singlish and Singdarin

The villains in this story are typically Singlish and Singdarin (sadly not an Elvish language). The local variety of English Singlish (colloquial Singaporean English) is often viewed as 'broken English', as opposed to correct 'Standard English' and has been described by the government as a 'handicap' which prevents one from accessing better job and educational opportunities (Wee 2010). Similarly, a local variety of Singapore Mandarin also called Singdarin, viewed as 'broken Chinese' has also emerged. This has become another cause of concern, especially if 'Mandarin' speakers from Singapore find it difficult to understand and to make themselves understood by Mandarin speakers in China and Taiwan.

The continuing existence of these varieties seems to be why we perpetually need to have such language campaigns. But why do these 'substandard' varieties still persist? After all, they're not exactly prestige forms and even speakers of Singlish sometimes describe it as sounding 'uneducated' and 'immature'. Some speakers, who are able to codeswitch between the colloquial variety and the variety closer to what is understood as 'standard English', cringe at the use of Singlish by other Singaporeans, especially in the presence of non-Singaporeans.

One common answer I get to this question is that in most schools, English teachers and Chinese (Mandarin) teachers themselves cannot speak 'good English' and 'good Mandarin'. Therefore, the students learn 'bad English' or 'bad Mandarin' and continue the cycle when they leave school. The media has also been blamed in the past - hence the banning of Singlish on TV shows like Phua Chu Kang back in 1999.

This is still a rather simplistic answer to the question. Language is used in numerous domains outside the classroom and the media. The use of Singlish and Singdarin in schools (and previously in the media) is not enough reason to explain their persistance. The prescribed solution is equally simplistic. Modelling 'proper English' and 'proper Mandarin' for speakers to follow in schools and in the media, does not immediately, or eventually, result in the faithful reproduction of these models of 'good English' and 'good Mandarin'.

Instead, we need to re-examine the associations made between language and identity, and move beyond the official racial categories and the 'mother tongues' that have been assigned to them. We need to start considering what goes on in day-to-day interactions among speakers of Singlish and Singdarin.

Language in the moment

When talking about language and identity, much attention is paid to the correlation between what language you speak and your identity (defined in racial terms here). In contrast, little attention is paid to how speakers actually use the languages they know, and in what context they use these languages.

I am reminded of John Gumperz, a famous sociolinguist who passed away week ago, and his work on conversation analysis and interactional sociolinguistics. [You can read the story of how he helped identify a source of intercultural miscommunication at Heathrow Airport in the 1970s in the article.] He was interested, amongst other things, in how people make conversation. This sounds simple enough, but to maintain a conversation, speakers have to process a huge amount of verbal information (e.g. choice of words and topics) and non-verbal information (e.g. intonation, gesture, clothing & appearance) within a particular context (e.g. at the workplace between an employer and an employee). The actual processing is mostly unconsciously done, but being able to read these cues has consequences for how we speak, what we can talk about, and what attitudes we think we can share regarding these topics.

Most people are aware that the way we speak to our boss is usually different from the way we speak to our friends (and even if our boss was our friend, there may be differences when we are speaking in the workplace and when we are outside). However, what they may not realise is that they are always doing this, even when speaking with friends, or when buying food at a hawker centre.

Taking a simplified example, I've noticed that my Singapore English-speaking friends and I will avoid using sentence-final particles like lah when speaking with non-Singaporean English speakers. However, these particles may appear again when speaking in the presence of Singaporean English speakers. On one level you might say, "It's because others don't understand 'lah'." But it's more than just that. In a sense, what we're doing is monitoring our own speech to ensure that we are recognised as competent English speakers in the first situation, since lah is associated with 'broken English'. In the latter, we're subtly asserting our identity as a Singaporean and that we share some cultural knowledge that others may not be aware of.


Why u so liddat ah?

Some people might ask: But why do we do this? Shouldn't we be free to say whatever we want and however we want to, especially when we are in less formal situations?

A few days ago, I went to Toast Box in Clementi for lunch. I ordered nasi lemak. The person at the counter told me that they'd run out of ikan bilis. I took an extra second to look at the menu to see if there was anything else that could satisfy me more than an ikan bilis-less nasi lemak. In those few seconds (milliseconds even), the person at the counter interpreted my hesitation as confusion, and proceeded to explain to me what ikan bilis was: "the small fish".

For me, something had gone wrong in this communicative exchange, minor as it was. Having grown up in Singapore, of course I knew that ikan bilis refers to the crispy anchovies (which really should accompany any decent nasi lemak)! However, some element of the interaction, whether it was my appearance or my accent or my choice of language (although, all I said was, 'One nasi lemak'), signalled to her that I may not have been Singaporean. Consequently, rather than interpreting my hesitation as 'considering my choices', she thought it was because I didn't understand what 'ikan bilis' meant. From her perspective, she was just trying to be helpful, but from my perspective, it was actually a little annoying that she didn't recognise that I was Singaporean, and that she had to explain to me something that I understood as basic local knowledge.

This is one reason why we might modify our language behaviour and more generally, present ourselves in a certain way (which I clearly failed to do in the above situation) - we are trying to make it known to the people we are talking to that we have shared knowledge and experience. At the same time, we are also using cues from other people in the conversation to work out if we do share any of this cultural knowledge and experience. Ultimately, this has consequences for what we talk about and how we talk about these topics (e.g. what attitudes we can share) within that particular conversation.


Damn atas, he

As much as language is used to mark membership of a group, it can also be used as a basis for exclusion. Taken to its extreme, people can use language to isolate and ostracise others who do not belong to the community - at the national level, we have the infamous diction test from the White Australia policy era, but all societies have had their own shibboleths to mark who belongs in a group, and who doesn't. It does seem that at least a small degree of exclusion is necessary to maintain an individual and a group's sense of identity (through a process of 'Othering' others.)

It is not just a case of people with higher status excluding people who are perceived to be of lower status. The opposite can happen too. For example, if an Australian went to the UK and came back speaking with any sort of British accent, they would probably be ostracised and called a 'twat'. Similarly, if a Singaporean started speaking with a foreign accent in most informal situations here, people would say they 'talk like ang moh'. There are a myriad of reasons for the adoption of the other accent, especially if the person grew up in that country. When the other language variety carries more status or power, people back in the home country may read the linguistic cues as a projection of dominance by the returning person - 'They think they're better than us!' In some cases, they would be right, but even in others, social exclusion is still inflicted on the 'offending' person where no offence was intended.

I've also encountered this myself - once I was criticised by a friend and a waiter for sounding atas, a term used to describe something or someone as being 'high class' (from Malay, meaning 'above'), but with a slightly pejorative sense. All I was doing was speaking what I considered to be 'standard' Singapore English, as opposed to the more colloquial form of Singlish. In a sense, I was being 'punished' for not conforming to the expected social norms of that situation.

But as frustrating and painful as it is for individuals to be marginalised like this, we also need to remember that the very groups responsibility for this marginalisation -usually speakers of the basilectal / most colloquial varieties of Singlish and Singdarin who are generally unable to codeswitch to more standard varieties- are also among the most marginalised within Singapore society (typically an English-speaking elite and middle class). It is easy for a speaker of a dominant language variety to ignore the sociolinguistic realities of other people in society and think, "I speak [language / language variety], why can't they too?" or to assume that people of lower status will always want to emulate the speech of people with higher status. That speakers of non-standard varieties of English and Mandarin continue to use and enforce the use of these varieties, can be seen as the result of their own social exclusion from the rest of society. The solution therefore cannot be for the government to simply tell people to accept the standard form and to stop speaking the way they currently do.

Furthermore, I suggest that Singdarin actually serves an important function of helping to distinguish Chinese Singaporeans from more recent migrants from the Peoples' Republic of China, given the very different histories of the two countries. For instance, Mao and the PLA mean very little to people here, and there's still a great deal more trust among people here since we never went through the Cultural Revolution. The current Speak Mandarin Campaign slogan "Mandarin - It Gets Better With Use" seems almost absurd when we consider the contexts where Singdarin is currently used and why it is used. However, I acknowledge that more research is needed in this area before any conclusive arguments can be made.


Switching back and forth

If we recall, use of these varieties form the basis for social identification through their use in everyday interaction, which would be lost if people were made to speak like people from China, or to emulate 'proper' English speaking habits derived from British English. (In fact the problematic nature of what is 'standard Singapore English' and 'Standard Mandarin' will have to be discussed in another post.) The effect of forcing most Singaporeans to use standard Singapore English or standard Mandarin, which are associated with more formal situations, in all day-to-day interactions would be akin to making the participants at a birthday party sound like they were at a business meeting full of strangers. What would work better is if speakers were able to switch between the colloquial and the standard.

I should state that I'm not actively advocating the use or development of Singlish or Singdarin. What I am advocating is that we acknowledge their existence and the important role they play in personal and social identification in this country, which will explain their continued existence despite the government's efforts. At the moment, there is little motivation for Singdarin speakers who only live in Singapore to give up Singdarin and only speak 'standard' Mandarin, especially if it means that they will end up being identified as Mainlanders themselves. There is also little motivation for individual Singlish speakers to completely abandon Singlish in favour of standard Singapore English in their day-to-day interactions with other Singlish speakers, since they would risk being labelled atas or worse, like they talk like ang moh.

Ideally, these speakers would be able to codeswitch between Singlish and standard English, or Singdarin and standard Mandarin, depending on the situation. The problem here is that many speakers can't switch between the two varieties (not that they need to in many day-to-day situations) and it is unrealistic to eliminate the colloquial varieties, since others will pop up to fulfill the sociolinguistic functions mentioned above. Consequently, we will end up in an never-ending cycle of campaigns encouraging 'better' language use.

The current language policy favours a one-variety-or-nothing rule (for both English and Mandarin) and ignores any of the sociolinguistic functions of these language varieties. My own feeling is that rising xenophobia in this country can be partly attributed to the fact that a good portion of the population is constantly told both by the government (and by new arrivals) that they are not good enough, that their language skills are not good enough, and that they should learn to be and speak more like foreigners - and to essentially, give up their old identities. And yes, at the moment, many people have language skills that are not good enough if they want to work in areas like the banking sector, but how do we get to a point where most speakers of these varieties and their children are able to effectively switch between varieties for use in different situations?

I hope that from what I've discussed, it has become to some readers that a good first step is to acknowledge the need and the value of these local varieties in providing social cohesion, instead of trying to eliminate them completely. They do not need to become enshrined as official languages, but the people behind language policy and language teachers need to know they have more value than people realise. For instance, at the classroom level, teachers could be trained to help students codeswitch between the two varieties. In this way, students can maintain a sense of identity (and self esteem), while picking up the language skills that the government so desperately wants its citizens to have to participate in its workforce.

Finally, although I've been speaking about Singlish and Singdarin as being distinct varieties from their respective standards, it might actually be more useful to think of them as being on a continuum. Even speakers of the 'standard' varieties will find themselves on different parts of the continuum in their interactions with other Singaporeans. I would argue that for many of these speakers, it is their ability to place themselves on this continuum depending on the situation that actually forms the basis of identity for them, much more so than any official 'mother tongue' they are supposed to speak.

Of course, if the government and the educated public still find these language varieties so vile and broken, maybe we should try and bring back Chinese dialects and encourage speakers to codeswitch between them and standard Mandarin.

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]

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.