Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: This Is Not A Complicated Issue, in reply to Helen Miller,
BTW NZSL is the country’s third official language
I do appreciate the reminder. NZSL and Te Reo are on my to learn upon repatriation list.
Approaching this from my language geek point of view, it strikes me as being yet another (petty, spiteful) example of NZ's gross undervaluing of communication methods that aren't limited to standard New Zealand spoken and written English.
As Helen points out, NZSL is an official language. Is Dr Smith prepared to go to the expense of providing interpreters (I believe somebody upthread pointed out this would be more expensive than what is currently being requested - no time to check, though, supposed to be on my way to work)? If not, is this not a breach of the Bill of Rights Act and any other law regarding NZ's official languages? (lawyers, help!) Isn't provision for interpretation to and from Te Reo Maori already provided? Considering NZSL has equal status with Te Reo and English, shouldn't provision for interpretation directly between all three of these languages (i.e. directly between NZSL and Te Reo; Te Reo and English, English and NZSL without interpretation between, for example, Te Reo and NZSL to have to go via English) be provided not just in Parliament, but in courts and any and all other official places.
Yes I am asking for bucket loads more money to be spent on NZ's linguistic diversity.
Apologies for any incoherence. Must rush. Will clarify later if need be.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Russell Brown,
Unfortunately that insultmonger link now gets me a 404. Looks like it's just so old it's fallen off the internet, doesn't look like the usual GFW block.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to JackElder,
Hehe, yeah, I've met others who've had the same shock. It's funny, because the textbooks seem to go out of their way to inculcate a Beijing erhuayin, but what they teach is so sterilised. And then, you look at the map and realise most of the China officially speaks some variety of Mandarin/北方官话, from Harbin to Kunming, Qinhuangdao to Lanzhou, there's debate as to whether Jin (central and northern Shanxi and bordering regions of Shaanxi, Hebei and Nei Meng) is part of Mandarin or a separate language.... Then you do down southeast, where you've got Wu, Xiang, Gan, Hakka, Yue, etc.... Hell, different districts and counties of Beijing have dialects distinct from downtown Beijinghua.
I started learning Putonghua in Changsha, then moved up north to Taiyuan #rightbacktosquareone.
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The view out what was one of the main entrances to the building where my office is. Subway construction, not quite hard at work, this machine, but the site is buzzing.
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So I just had a wee look on Youku (no GFW or IPR worries) at one small clip from Firefly, roughly 2 1/2 minutes worth. Four snatches of Mandarin thrown into otherwise American conversation, 3 out of 4 easily understandable, I suspect sound quality and/or lack of tones and/or knowledge of the wider context of Firefly may be why I missed the other one. It's Modern Standard Mandarin/Putonghua as pronounced by American beggining-level students. Certainly not the worst attempt I've ever heard. For instance, a lot of the Americans I met out in Taiyuan seemed to think they came from Měiguā (beautiful melon?) rather than Měiguó (USA).
Oh, and the Firefly clip included a Mandarin swearword, for those who may be interested: 他妈的/tāmāde (often written TMD on the internet), a fairly mildish exclamation roughly equivalent to 'shit' or 'bloody'. It can stand alone like 'shit', or it can modify the following word, like 'bloody'. Literally it's 'his (or hers or its, but I've written his up there) mother's, with 'cunt' implied. Tāmāde is probably one of the most common Mandarin swearwords. But for crying out loud, don't swap the tā for 你/nǐ unless you're ready for a hell of a fist fight. 'Your mother's...', as I think we can all imagine, is several degrees of magnitude more serious.
As for strong female/minority characters, there is a quantity issue, but there's also definitely a quality issue. I remember in the course I did on Le théâtre de Jean Giraudoux at university one lesson my classmates and lecturer started talking about how well Giraudoux wrote female characters, made them behave like real women, and how rare this is for a male writer. That was one of several lessons that ended with an apology to me for any discomfort I may have felt as my classmates and lecturer forgot there was a man in the room (actually, never felt any such discomfort, their discussions were most enlightening).
Comparing the book and film versions of To Live (original book by Yu Hua, film by Zhang Yimou) shows a similar sort of phenomenon. I made the mistake of watching the film before I read the book, and another mistake of reading lots of Lao She and Lu Xun before I read To Live (I'm not the only one to complain that contemporary Chinese writers absolutely cannot compare to the Moderns (late Qing, Republic of China period)). But one thing about the book that really disappointed me was that the characters were all so flat. Nothing more than names that shit happened to. They didn't grow, didn't develop, just had shit happen to them. Not even Fugui, whose story the book very much centres around. The film, on the other hand, brings the characters to brilliant, vivid life. Partly that's the acting talent - Fugui is played by Ge You, and it's one of those films in which Gong Li turns in a splendid performance. But it's also a dramatic improvement in sheer story-telling skill. So it turns out to be one of those rare films that is actually better than the book it's based on.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Bart Janssen,
If she's part Chinese, then she's got Wu Zetian, Hua Mulan, and Cixi as models...
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Richard Aston,
Chinese: May you get everything you wish for
Really? Not one I've heard. The most common swear words around Beijing involve somebody's mother and an intimate part of her anatomy.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Islander,
Swearing is one of those things that really just don't translate very well at all - one of those things where the 'translation' is really more 'finding the local/L2 equivalent'. I think only humour and poetry would be harder to translate, and puns impossible.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Emma Hart,
And if it’s being spoken as widely as English, it’d be in as wide a variety of accents.
Which is actually true of real world Mandarin as it is spoken in the here and now.
