What we call sometimes Chinese is really a gigantic family of languages. They’re somewhat divided in mutual intelligibility, and somewhat united in their writing system. How are they different, and how are they maintaining themselves? Two Chinese researchers, Wu Mei-Shin and Ye Jingting, join us.
And what’s going on in the Cantonese lingopod world? We’re joined by Israel Lai of Rhapsody in Lingo.
Listen to this episode
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:
- Dustin
- Termy
- Chris B
- Chris L
- Matt
- Whitney
- Damien
- JoAnna
- Helen
- Bob
- Jack
- Kitty
- Lord Mortis
- Elías
- Erica
- Michael
- Larry
- Binh
- Kristofer
- Andy
- Maj
- James
- Nigel
- Kate
- Jen
- Nasrin
- River
- Nikoli
- Ayesha
- Moe
- Steele
- Andrew
- Manú
- James
- Shane
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Jonathan
- Colleen
- glyph
- Ignacio
- Kevin
- Jeff
- Dave H
- and Andy from Logophilius
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Jingting Ye 叶婧婷
https://home.uni-leipzig.de/jingting-ye/
Mei Shin Wu | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
https://www.shh.mpg.de/person/91421/375796
TTS #TextToSpeech #DrunkTTS #LearnOnTiktok #EduTok #Linguistics #LingTok
TikTok link
Speech Synthesis – an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/speech-synthesis
Listening to speech with a guinea pig-to-human brain-to-brain interface
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-90823-1
Researchers were able to re-create a bird’s song by reading only its brain activity, reproducing a songbird’s complex vocalizations down to the pitch, volume and timbre of the original. The study is a first step towards developing vocal prostheses for humans who have lost the ability to speak. : science
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/o4kcj8/researchers_were_able_to_recreate_a_birds_song_by/
Neurally driven synthesis of learned, complex vocalizations: Current Biology
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00733-8
New curricula to boost local language diversity: MOE – Taipei Times
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/01/18/2003750793
About me – Rhapsody in Lingo
https://rhapsodyinlingo.com/en/about/
Translation of Hit Chinese Buzzword: 后浪 (hòu làng) | Free Chinese Word Card Study – China Clife
https://www.chinaclife.com/chinese-word-card-glossary/translation-of-hit-chinese-buzzword-hou-lang-youth-generation-free-study/
长江后浪推前浪 : lit. the rear w… : Cháng Jiāng hòu làng tuī qián làng | Definition | Mandarin Chinese Pinyin English Dictionary | Yabla Chinese
https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-english-pinyin-dictionary.php?define=%E9%95%BF%E6%B1%9F%E5%90%8E%E6%B5%AA%E6%8E%A8%E5%89%8D%E6%B5%AA
Riding the Wave | The World of Chinese
https://www.theworldofchinese.com/2020/08/riding-the-wave/
China’s ‘red’ tourists learn about history, even if it’s not all true | South China Morning Post
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/travel/article/3132256/red-tourism-china-ahead-communist-party-centenary
No Caveat | Didion’s Bible
https://didionsbible.bandcamp.com/album/no-caveat
Transcript
Hedvig: While we were hanging out, Daniel and I were arguing about the title for the episode.
Daniel: [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: So I want it to be called “The Chinese Dragons” because I think that’s really cute. Like that the many languages are like little dragons. But Daniel is for something a bit simpler like “Chineses” or something “Chinese Languages” or something
Daniel: I don’t know what I like anymore
Hedvig: What do you guys think?
Wu Mei-Shin: I don’t have any preference. So it’s all good to me. [LAUGHTER] Sorry I really bad at, you know, create names.
Daniel: Titles are hard!
Wu Mei-Shin: Yeah.
[INTRO MUSIC]
Daniel: Hello and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics: the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. And with me now… she speaks Swedish, English, German, Samoan, and possibly some other languages, but she still gets annoyed when people ask “How many languages do you speak?” It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: Thank you very much for the introduction. I have to issue a small correction. I’ve changed my personality. I no longer get annoyed at this question.
Daniel: Yay!
Hedvig: I actually happen to think it’s a good question. I think linguists that know more languages are often better linguists.
Daniel: I threw that in there a bit presumptuously because linguists often do get annoyed. But have you noticed that the tide is turning people are like, “yeah, you know what, that’s not a terrible question.” And people should…
Hedvig: It’s not a terrible question
Daniel: No.
Hedvig: and maybe it’s a bit presumptuous to think that a general lay person would know that much about linguistics to know that that’s a weird question. Like, of course it’s a good question. Your work is about languages. Someone’s interested in you.
Daniel: And being able to engage with that question meaningfully to a lay person is a really useful thing. And I think every linguist should have a response available.
Hedvig: Yeah, exactly.
Daniel: Yep. All right. We are also joined by two very special guests. Hedvig, would you mind introducing them, please?
Hedvig: Yes, I’ve gotten some training in doing the names. So first of all, we have Dr. Ye Jingting who is joining us today who has just defended her PhD thesis on the typology of adjectives in the world’s languages at the University of Leipzig. [CLAPPING]
Daniel: Good job!
Dr. Ye Jingting: Hi, everyone. My name is Jingting. I do research on linguistic typology. And basically, I compare languages all over the world and doing a large scale language comparison in order to find some universal patterns behind the linguistic diversities in the world’s 7000 languages. I’m a junior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution. And I work with Hedvig in the Grand Bank project.
Daniel: All right
Hedvig: Exactly. And we also have a second guest here. We have Wu Mei-Shin.
Wu Mei-Shin: Yeah
Hedvig: I hope I did that okay. We practiced that before and I think I screwed it up a little bit still. I’m very sorry. My Mandarin is not what it used to be. And she’s a doctoral student also at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at … well at the Science of Human History Max Planck and the Evolutionary Anthropology Max Planck, I believe. And she works on computer-assisted language comparison, mainly in East Asia.
Wu Mei-Shin: Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Mei-Shin. The surname is Wu. So I use computer to analyze historical linguistic data. I focus on Sino-Tibetan languages. Also Hmong-Mien languages in Southeast Asia. Yeah, that’s all I can say about me [LAUGHTER].
Hedvig: No,
Daniel: If you don’t mind me asking, what’s in your language background? Obviously, English. What else have you got?
Wu Mei-Shin: I speak a little bit of German. Maybe A2 level or B1, sometimes being ambitious E1. I speak Mandarin, so Taiwanese Mandarin. I speak Min language, so Taiwanese Min language, but I’m out of practice, so I probably can’t speak it so fluently now. Yeah.
Hedvig: Well, we’re very grateful for both of you for coming on and sharing with us your breadth of experience into the various languages that we group under one umbrella, and we call Chinese. Maybe we shouldn’t group them like that. So maybe during this show, you can help us by helping us figure out some of the differences and basically where the Chinese languages are going.
Hedvig: It’ll be very interesting. I should also say this is a personal favorite topic for me. So I prepared lots of lots and lots of question for Mei-Shin and Jingting
Daniel: [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: and I’ve had to really restrain myself to constrict it. So maybe if our listeners like this, and they send in more questions, we’ll do another show some other time on similar topics. For now we’ll do as much as we can within the space we have.
Hedvig: Yeah. Now, before we get to the news, our last two episodes were bonus episodes for our patrons. One was with Helen Zaltzman of “The Allusionist” podcast where she helped us answer our mailbag. And the other one, just gone was a cozy chat with Grant Barrett of “A Way with Words” where he helped me go through an entire episode of Words of the Week, and it was great! Me and him, nerding out over words. It was fun. If you are a Patron, you get to hear all of our bonus episodes depending on your level. You can also maybe join us on our Discord channel. You can get mentioned on the end of the show. Sometimes we just invite all of our Patrons regardless of level to join us to do stuff like live episodes. Or last week, we all hopped online and play Blabrecs, and it was really, really fun. And of course, our yearly mailout which goes to all of our Patrons. So if you want to help support the show, and keep us going, you can by going to Patreon and signing up as a patron we are Because Lang Pod.
Hedvig: And we should say Ben isn’t with us this week. But we are going to do the episode nonetheless. And we’re going to now go to news in the worlds of linguistics and the week gone past.
Daniel: [CHUCKLE] Thank you. Wow, that sounded very Ben-like
Hedvig: I’m gonna try my best to be Ben for this episode. It’s gonna be a struggle. I know it’s big shoes to fill.
Hedvig: [ATTEMPTING BEN ACCENT] Hey, wait a minute. How come you always get to be Ben? I want to be Ben. I want to be the audience surrogate because I know nothing.
Hedvig: Yeah, but we really need you to be the person keeping us on track.
Daniel: [DISGRUNTLED NOISE]
Hedvig: I really really need that because I can’t be Daniel. I can’t do that. So I’m sorry. I’m gonna have to be Ben.
Daniel: Well, if you’re gonna be Ben, then I get to be Hedvig. No! I can’t be Hedvig. I can’t do it.. AH! okay.
Hedvig: No, No.
Daniel: I’m just gonna have to be me
Hedvig: it’ll just… it’ll just derail too much. We can’t have a… you know we can’t have a Ben and Hedvig episode. That’s just not possible.
Daniel: Oh, now that you said it, I like this.
Hedvig: [SIGHS] Oh… no.
Daniel: I would like a vacation. Okay. But anyway, let’s get to the news.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: This one. The first story comes to us from Pontus on Facebook, who says, “Hey, found a very interesting TikTok about the text to speech on TikTok. So you can type stuff, and there’ll be….” now, this is a new thing… “a computerized voice that will read what you type except…” says Pantos, “the new voice has been doing weird stuff when you feed it certain kinds of nonsense.” Okay. So for example, some people have been typing an H. I will now play what happens when you type H over and over again.
[RECORDING] h, h, h, h, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, jajajajaaaaaaaa [CD SKIP SOUND]
Daniel: Well, that’s quite enough of that. Okay, so this is where we have to put our natural language hats on and figure out what’s going on. Any idea of why this might be doing this?
Hedvig: Well, first of all, I shouldn’t have training data for like ‘asdf’, ‘g, h, h, h, h h’, like random stuff like that. It shouldn’t have any way of predicting how to pronounce it. So it’ll just try it’s computer little best. [LAUGHTER] Do the best you can. Little mission that could.
Daniel: Well, I think that’s right. And at first, I wondered why the speech synthesizer doesn’t just, you know, say it. But then I came to realize that a speech synthesizer doesn’t just read sounds off the page, because the same letter, or combinations of letters could be ambiguous. And a few NLP folks have pointed out that things could go wrong at the stage where it turns the words into phonemes. But it could also go wrong when it turns the phonemes into sounds. These are all based on recorded human speech. And if the system runs into something unexpected, it can have problems putting the sound together in a sensible way. And then that’s what you get. We noticed a few years ago back in our social show with kitten Joshi, that if you typed ‘dog’ into Google Translate over and over again, and the language was Maori, it would spit out paragraphs of this apocalyptic text of everything being destroyed and people on fire running down the street, gigantic space lizards. And the reason it was doing that probably was that for low resource languages, one text that it always has is the Bible.
Hedvig: Hmm Yeah.
Daniel: And the Bible has some pretty apocalyptic stuff in there. So
Hedvig: Yeah
Daniel: Is that what we’re saying? We’re saying it doesn’t have anything to go on. So it’s doing its best and mucking it up?
Hedvig: Yeah. But then there’s probably something interesting about like, because it’s not spinning out, you know, fire and brimstone. It’s spitting out these weird sounds. There’s probably some significant difference, but we don’t… I think the short answer is we don’t really know. But it doesn’t have training data. So you’re asking you to do something it’s not been prepared for.
Daniel: By the way, I have posted our second TikTok video. We’ve got two TikTok videos now.
Hedvig: Amazing.
Daniel: And it’s about Cheer Cheese.
Hedvig: Oh, yes, I saw that.
Daniel: Cheer cheese.
Hedvig: This might be something Mei-Shin and Jingting don’t know about. Because we are an Australian team show. There used to be a cheese in Australia known as a quite kind of racist slur
Daniel: Racist cheese. [Chuckle] It was slur cheese.
Hedvig: And they have faced a lot of pressure to rename it. And now it’s called Cheer Cheese like Cheers, Cheer Cheese. They just renamed it.
Daniel: Cheer cheese! And this was the week that in my supermarket, I happened to be there. And this was the week that they had crossed over where some varieties still had the old racist name. And some had been replaced with the new name. So this was crossover week for Cheer Cheese.
Hedvig: Very exciting.
Daniel: Yay. All right, what’s next?
Hedvig: What is next is something I’d love for you to tell me more about because I read a bit about this. And I am excited and a little bit confused. So is it true that we can now have telepathy with guinea pigs?
Daniel: Yes, yes, it is. Language functions essentially the same. Their brains can do it, but they just simply don’t. Maybe they don’t want to. Yes, guinea pigs have language.
Hedvig: So I read a little bit about this. And can I give you my rendition, then you can tell me if it’s right or wrong?
Daniel: Okay, sounds good. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: They did a study where they played sounds to guinea pigs. And then they put electrodes inside the brains of guinea pigs and recorded the neurological signal and the auditory center.
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: And then they fed that into a cochlear implant into human and the human…. So it didn’t do the sound waves into the cochlear implant, but the neurological impulses.
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: And then the human reported hearing the same word that had been spoken to the guinea pig.
Daniel: That is kind of the story. So it was a little bit more constrained than that. Yes, it’s true, they use electrodes to wire up a guinea pig in a very invasive techniques. So you couldn’t do this with humans very comfortably.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: And they did capture the goings on in the brain and then piped it to a cochlear implant. What they were doing was saying one of four words, to a guinea pig. So there were four different inputs that humans had. And they said, “Alright, human, you’re gonna hear this thing. You have to tell which of these four words it is.” And there were a bunch of different trials, there was ‘wood’, and ‘dime’ and ‘bomb’ and ‘goose’, and other words were ‘shore’ and ‘ditch’ and ‘mess’ and ‘jar’. So a human would say these words to a guinea pig, they would measure the guinea pigs brain goings on, and then play that through a cochlear implant to a human. And, whereas you’d expect a human to get it 25% Right by random chance, they got the right answer about 35% of the time. Better than random chance.
Hedvig: Oookay. Better than random chance, but not… First of all, not just picking any like…. it’s constrained, you have to choose between four things that you know that the word is one of four things.
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: So it’s not a random word that you just have to hear.
Daniel: And it’s not a sentence or anything like that.
Hedvig: It’s not a sentence. And compared to 25, it’s more than chance. It’s not like a lot more than chance, right?
Daniel: No, that’s right.
Hedvig: But it’s still cool.
Daniel: It’s still cool. And it’s a start. And it could have some application for reading the thoughts of people who can’t express themselves. Who have expressive disorders so that they can be understood. They can make themselves understood through maybe a speech synthesizer or something just by thinking the words.
Hedvig: Oh… That’s interesting. Because I know there’s already that kind of thing for spatial things, right? Isn’t there like you can move your wheelchair with your mind. Isn’t that already a thing?
Daniel: Ah, yes, yes, there is. They’ve even got bionic arms that you can use to pick up an orange without squishing it.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah. Yeah! So we’re like really close to what’s his face in X-Men? Uhm.. Patrick Stewart
Daniel: Yes, exactly. Mei-Shin, Jingting, any input on this? What are your thoughts when you notice this?
Wu Mei-Shin: And I’m reading the paper now [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: That’s a good good research instinct: reading the paper before you say anything.
Daniel: [SARCASTIC] Why are… Why are you reading the paper? What… what is this?
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: We’ve invited two academics on the show. They’re gonna start reading papers, if we ask for opinions like ~I can’t say anything yet ~
Daniel: You don’t have to replicate it [LAUGHTER]
Wu Mei-Shin: I want to know like, how many guinea pig they used and then like, how many trials they repeated and yeah. All these informations on the methodology. Yeah.
Daniel: Dang, that’s true. If it’s just one guinea pig… What if you take it to a different guinea pig, and it’s different.
Hedvig: I’m hoping, so this study was published in Nature, correct?
Daniel: Yes.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yes. So I’m hoping that they did it on more than one guinea pig. I’m hoping that Nature has some standards. But it is true. We want to know how many they did it on. It’s a good point.
Daniel: That is true.
Hedvig: But do you think in general, Jingting? Do you find this scary? This idea of mental, mental, mental to speech without articulatory organs? Or do you embrace our new, telepathic future?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Actually, I just found it very exciting to see something like this, because maybe in the future, we can just communicate without, without speaking. And that’s cool.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] And you know, what else you could do? You could bring in the work from MIT that we talked about a couple of years ago, where they examined the tiny, tiny jaw motions that we all do when we think about words, you know. When we think a word, and we don’t say it, we still move a tiny bit. And those can be read.
Hedvig: We do [INCREDULOUS]
Daniel: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, the team from MIT was able to distinguish, again, single words, from just using a camera to look at tiny motions in your lips and jaw when you think a word but don’t say,
Hedvig: I have forgotten about this study. I have forgotten about this. But this is very exciting. I’m sorry, I forgot about it. Because now I’m just like, trying to keep my jaw really still, I’m thinking about like the word monkey and the word bird, and trying to see if I do have a difference.
Daniel: [HUMMING WORD] monkey [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I can’t. No.
Daniel: In other news, and this one caught my attention as well. This is about song not language, but researchers have managed to reconstruct a bird’s song just by monitoring its brain activity. So same kind of process. You just look at the bird’s brain activity. And then you can reconstruct the song with the right pitch and the right timbre. And this could also help for people who can’t communicate, it could help with vocal prostheses and speech synthesizers. So it’s all happening…
Hedvig: That’s really cool.
Daniel: It’s all going on.
Hedvig: But presumably, it’s still… the reason why we’re doing in our guinea pigs and birds is because the procedure is quite invasive. So that needs to be less invasive, presumably?
Daniel: Yes, very much.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: And this is where I don’t know much about why a less invasive procedure wouldn’t work. I guess you’ve got to get into the sensory cortex or the motor cortex.
Hedvig: Yeah. I guess usually the less invasive things like EEG, electronic…. oh I don’t remember what it stands for…
Daniel: Electroencephalogram.
Hedvig: There we go. It only measures the, we call it the ‘brain bark’. You call it something else?
Daniel: The bark?
Hedvig: The outer bit. The outer bit of the brain.
Daniel: Yeah, okay, I’m calling with bark. I like that. Because I like thinking in my brain as a tree.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Or like a nut or something.
Hedvig: So presumably the things that are happening that are relevant are happening further inside of the brain.
Daniel: Hmm okay. Yeah.
Hedvig: And therefore, you need to probably put things inside of the brain, which you don’t really want to do in a human.
Daniel: No, not really. Okay, let’s see what’s next Hedvig.
Hedvig: Next, we have a news item that we talked about a few episodes ago, but that I wanted to see if Mei Shin and Jingting has some opinions about. This is the news from the Taipei Times, that in Taiwanese schools, children are going to be learning Hokkien, Hakka, or Taiwanese Sign Language obligatorily aside the rest of the education, which I understand is in Taiwanese Mandarin. So first, when I saw this news, it sort of said something like, “local languages will be taught”. And I got excited because I thought it might include some Austronesian languages of Taiwan. But that’s not the case. It’s these three, but it still sounds pretty, pretty interesting. What do you guys think?
Wu Mei-Shin: Okay, about that. Yesterday, I actually asked a friend of mine, his children, if they learn this Hokkien, or Taiwanese Min, at school, and then… Actually, yes, they they learn it. And also in some schools in Taiwan, near the mountain side, they have this… if the students majority populations are from Aboriginal people, then they will teach these Austronesian languages. Yeah.
Hedvig: Oh, very cool.
Wu Mei-Shin: Yeah, like the songs, the dance. Also, like some basic conversations. Yeah. So we actually have that. Now, I think it’s pretty good to have this.
Daniel: Jingting?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, I also think that it’s a very good news to hear that because if we don’t protect those dialects or languages, then they will just phase out at some point. It’s really a very good practice to have children to learn them at school. Because for instance, in Shanghai, like two decades ago, people just only teach Mandarin Chinese and maybe some foreign languages at school and the children, when they grow up, as… they are the same generation as I am… When they grew up, they don’t speak Shanghainese fluently anymore. That’s a pity. And I think this is absolutely very nice to have it at school.
Hedvig: Yeah, it just seemed like a great initiative. Probably, you know, like having a few lessons a week is… it could be always more. I thought it was quite interesting that there was also the option of Taiwanese Sign Language alongside these other languages. That’s, that’s really cool. Usually signed languages get left out of initiatives like this.
Daniel: In most of the reading that I have seen, it does look like languages other than Putonghua or Mandarin, are under a lot of pressure. And Mandarin is sort of held up as this good language, the majority language, the more majoritarian language, even sometimes a civilized language. And other ones aren’t. Do you think that this represents a change? Or do you feel like it’s just that there are pro-language people, and then there are pro-Mandarin people, and this was a case of the pro-minority-language-people getting a win? What do you think’s going on?
Wu Mei-Shin: If I remember correctly, in my parents’ time, the government were emphasized on speaking Mandarin most of the time, and you are not allowed to speak any other languages at school. Not at my parents time. And now, I feel there’s a change happening, that they say, “you should learn more, you should learn the languages that your family is speaking”. And I’m really happy to see these changes. Because I also, when I was young, I practice Min languages and I practiced with my grandma. And sometimes my grandma will feel really reluctant to practice with me. And she’ll be like, “Oh, you can speak Mandarin? I understand.” I said, “No, no, I actually want to try.” And so that’s why I can sort of speak something, of course, compared with other friends of mine. I’m not really good at that but I’m still trying.
Daniel: Wow.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah. I’ve also seen a change in that in mainland China. For instance, in the past, when we go on public transportation, we hear the forecast about what’s the next station, and in the past, we only have like Mandarin Chinese and sometimes also English. But we don’t have Shanghainese in Shanghai. But like, maybe five years ago, or so if I remember correctly, we started to have Shanghainese as well as saying next station. That’s also a change. I think people have realized that it’s really very valuable to have this heritage from the past. So the dialects of some local languages are very precious to keep. So that’s why we see these changes.
Daniel: That’s so good.
Hedvig: That’s interesting that it’s happening in Shanghai as well, because if you’re very cynical, you could think that it’s happening in Taiwan, because Taiwan is trying to, you know, politically distance itself from Mainland China. But if it’s happening in Shanghai, as well, that’s a little bit of a different story.
Dr. Ye Jingting: And also, we have to have some courses teaching Shanghainese at the universities. So you can go to the courses and then learn Shanghainese
Hedvig: Mei Shin, were you going to say something.
Wu Mei-Shin: No I just thought about a very short clip that my friend sent me about this Shanghainese in the broadcast in the train. I was like, Oh, that’s so cool. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] It is.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s fantastic.
Daniel: Um, let’s move from from Shanghainese to Cantonese. It’s a big world out there. And on our show, Because Language, we tend to talk a lot about English we tend to be a bit Anglo centric, even though we do try to discuss other languages when we get the chance. But lately Hedvig I got to have a chat with Israel Lai. He is a classical composer. He’s a language learner, a YouTuber, a blogger, and he’s a podcaster on the show, Rhapsody in Lingo which is all about linguistics but not in English. It’s in Cantonese. And so Hedvig and I got the chance to have a chat. How did you run across Israel, Hedvig?
Hedvig: He is a listener of ours. And he tweeted something about us. And I looked him up. And I found out that he had a podcast about languages and linguistics in Cantonese. And I thought, That’s amazing. Because just like you said, we usually cover English, we talk in English, about linguistics. But of course, you can talk about linguistics in other languages. It seems like a no brainer, maybe. But if you look at the linguistics communication out there, it’s majoritily… majoritily is my new word…
Daniel: I love it
Hedvig: in English. So yeah, I thought it’s really interesting to have a little chat with Israel.
Daniel: Israel. Thanks for joining us.
Israel Lai: Thanks for having me. I’m very excited. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah, and because we should say the reason we know about this podcast also, because I understand that Israel is also a listener of this podcast. Is that correct?
Israel Lai: Oh, yeah. Basically, all of our hosts are a big fan of BL in general.
Daniel and Hedvig: [EXCITED SOUNDS]
Israel Lai: So in a certain way, our podcast is sort of partly modeled after yours. So yeah! So we have a lot in common, I’d say,
Hedvig: Oh, that’s really cool. I really wish I could listen to your podcast, because as I understand it, the podcast is not in English. Is that correct?
Israel Lai: Yes. So we’re doing a podcast about language and linguistics, in Cantonese, which… I came up with the idea because I thought it was something that probably not many people have done yet. There are lots podcasts in Cantonese about other topics, politics. There are podcasts about language learning, but not one about sort of study of language specifically. So that’s why I wanted to… you know explore that area a bit.
Hedvig: Yeah, fill the gap.
Israel Lai: Exactly.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Tell us about your language background. You are a speaker of Cantonese, obviously. But what else?
Israel Lai: Oh, yeah. So like everyone in Hong Kong I grew up speaking Cantonese, English, and a bit of Mandarin. I studied some French in school. But then, starting from university, I started teaching myself languages. So actually, I’m more of a language learner than a linguist. I’m not really trained in acoustics, relatively speaking. But since then, I’ve studied around I don’t know, 10 languages.
Hedvig: Oh cool!
Israel Lai: Yeah, so that’s my thing.
Daniel: No big deal.
Hedvig: That’s very cool. Well, we found, with our show, that not being trained in linguistics is not always a bad thing. It can be great to have different sort of angles on the topics and news that we discuss. So I think, I think you shouldn’t see it as a disadvantage. It can be a great advantage, especially if you have that kind of like passion and interest for the topic.
Israel Lai: Oh, definitely. So my perspective is definitely coming from the side of, you know, language learning. And that’s what made me interested in linguistics in the first place. And then I did a bit of linguistics when I was doing my exchange in Sweden. And so that’s basically all of it. But then my other hosts are more well versed in linguistics. One of them, Samuel, studied linguistics in university. Now he’s doing natural language processing. He’s actually the one who sent a recording to you guys, last year about Cantonese and Mandarin, if you remember.
Daniel: Yeeesssss. That’s right. Yeah, that’s right.
Hedvig: Yeah. And tell us about your other co-host.
Israel Lai: Yeah, sure. As I said, Sam is the one who is, you know, the most knowledgeable in this regard, I’d say. I’m the… kind of like the Ben in this show. But I’m taking the role of Daniel.
Hedvig: Okay! A Ben-Daniel merger. Interesting.
Israel Lai: Whereas Kenneth is, well he’s the only one in Hong Kong now, and he’s not a linguist either, but he’s… compared to me is more interested in sort of comparison between languages. He is more knowledgeable in a wider variety of languages that he doesn’t speak. So he’s more of a linguist. He’s also a con-langer, which is quite interesting.
Hedvig: Ohhh!
Israel Lai: So that’s why we’re able to cover a larger variety of topics. Like we did some conlang ones. We did some music. So yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah. So what kind of topics do you talk about on your show? More specifically, language and linguistics is a very broad topic, eh.
Israel Lai: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, exactly. Um, so we we do do a bit of everything really. Usually, we have one main topic each episode we talk about. So it’s sort of like the “let’s educate our audience” kind of thing, but a bit of discussion as well. And well, as I said, the reason I started this show was because I saw that you guys have a great show. And then I thought, well, your show is a very, you know, English-centric one. You talk about things that are happening in the English world, mostly. And then I thought, well, what are we talking about something that’s more relevant, to a Cantonese speaking audience. So for example, some things about the Sinitic family or Asian languages, sometimes we talk about language news as well that are happening in Hong Kong or sort of in like the Sino-sphere or whatever. For example, this month, we did a pride month episode, which I’d say it’s quite brave, because I mean, compared to the English speaking world, Hong Kong is a relatively conservative place. So we do cover a large variety of things. We covered things about, you know, terminology we use in Cantonese to talk about these minorities. So that those different language in certain ways… Oh, fun fact, BL actually means something like that in Cantonese, or in Asia in general.
Hedvig: Oh, what does it mean?
Israel Lai: It means I think, boy love or something? So it’s the name of the genre of gay erotica or not necessarily or television or something.
Hedvig: Interesting [LAUGHTER]
Israel Lai: So congrats for getting on BLs. Like… Ah okay.
Daniel: Jump on it. Awesome.
Hedvig: That’s so interesting. And I think that’s really important what you said that I mean, we’re a show in English. So we’ll talk about like, oh, what about this development in English, or someone writes a book about the history of something in English etymology or something? And we’ll cover that. But obviously, that’s not as interesting to a Cantonese audience that they might have a completely different topics that are interesting. What are some other differences you think you found about what it’s like to cover linguistics? And perhaps your audience expectations and assumptions about language?
Israel Lai: Oh, that’s a very good question. I think our audience have a lot of different assumptions about languages. Especially there’s, I’d say more politics involved in sort of our side of the world. I mean, there’s a lot of politics in English as well, as you talk about frequently. But for us, it’s more the, you know, the actual politics politics. So there are a lot of assumptions about, you know, which language is superior, or a lot of confusion about the actual history of languages, and so on. So our first episode was actually just mythbuster. We wanted to get everything out of the way.
Hedvig: What are some of them?
Daniel: I’m curious. Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s hear some.
Israel Lai: Wow. Okay. So one common one is saying that Cantonese is the same as middle Chinese. And so when you say…
Hedvig: Oh okay.
Israel Lai: Yeah, when you say old Chinese poems in Cantonese, they rhyme better than Mandarin, which is true. But obviously, Cantonese came from middle Chinese. So that’s a different thing altogether. And then someone will say Mandarin is actually part of the nomadic languages. And the reality is that, well, they are influenced by those tribes, but in the end, they are also a descendant of Chinese. So these are the things that many people will talk about a lot, especially when I go on Facebook and see people talk about languages. But then yeah, people actually go and look up the actual history of things.
Hedvig: Wow
Daniel: What’s so interesting is that so much of it is about language history and language relatedness. We tend to deal with a lot of issues surrounding language prescriptivism, like people… Well, not even so much, really, but some.
Hedvig: They’re not all this way but we think that they are well behaved when it comes to prescriptivism. Usually….
Daniel: They kind of got the message.
Hedvig: or if not we sort of deprogram them.
[LAUGHTER]
Israel Lai: I think our audience is a relatively linguistically conscious one. So it’s… some of them are actual linguists, so they would be descriptivists… but at the same time, we do deal with a lot of prescriptivism as well.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Israel Lai: So for example, my other goal for creating the podcast was to create language learning materials for Cantonese learners, because it’s really… the situation is really dire in that regard.
Hedvig: [SURPRISED] Really?
Israel Lai: Because… Well, I can refer you back to that recording that Samul sent.
Hedvig: Oh yes.
Israel Lai: So because everything that’s spoken in Cantonese is written in Mandarin. So learners have a lot of trouble just getting the input that they need. So I am the one who is responsible for creating transcript for every episode.
Hedvig: That’s a big task.
Israel Lai: And we… Yeah. We have a lot of problems because Cantonese is very, not standardized. So I have to very carefully pick what words to use. And then the language model that produces our rough transcript is also problematic in some ways. So I have to do a lot of fixing. Yeah, for example, sometimes we have the same character for two different grammatical particles.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Israel Lai: So yeah, there’s a lot of debate how to write it because we have a very relatively new convention of writing things in Cantonese.
Hedvig: Wow, I realized that we were gonna have a short chat. But we obviously have a lot more to talk about.
Daniel: I do have one more question, though. A long time ago, back in the Talk the Talk days, we talked to Zoe Lam, a PhD student in Canada, who reckoned that Cantonese was under immense pressure, and that it was not endangered, but in danger of becoming endangered. What’s your view on that? Do you feel like it’s healthy? Or it sounds like since you’re making teaching materials, you feel like it needs some promoting? Would that be right?
Israel Lai: Yes, I would agree. But I would say that it’s currently very healthy, because lots of people speak and use it in their everyday lives. But I do agree that it’s under threat in a way because of, you know, the politics involved in our education system. And as well, currently, the huge wave of immigrants. So obviously, we might, in the end, lose our language in certain domains. But at least for now, I think we are in a good place. And if we managed to, you know, get more recognition for the fact that Cantonese is a language, then we… I think we’re golden.
Hedvig: Well, it is kind of jarring in a way to talk about Cantonese being endangered when it has so many speakers.
Israel Lai: Yeah, so that’s why… really it’s not endangered for now. Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah, but I think…
Israel Lai: It’s just under threat.
Hedvig: you still have a good point that it’s still in a different kind of position. Political wise, politics wise. It’s not the same as other like, I mean, you’ve been to Sweden. Swedish is not an endangered language. But it’s also a much smaller language by number of speakers than Cantonese. But it is the language of the government and the newspapers, and it has a standard writing system. And, you know…
Israel Lai: Yeah that’s why we’re trying to write more Cantonese now. So there is a new, one year old, literary magazine in Cantonese work that encourages people to write in Cantonese. Which is actually a very new thing. So we tried to preserve it in a way…
Hedvig: That’s really cool.
Israel Lai: MmHmm!
Daniel: I’m sorry, I’m having a little trouble here. Because my impression is… knowing nothing…was that Cantonese retained an older writing system whereas it was Mandarin that did all the modernization? In what way is Cantonese kind of a new or not quite yet standardized writing system?
Israel Lai: Okay, so I don’t know how much time we have for this. But…
[LAUGHTER]
Israel Lai: Yeah, you’re thinking of the script.
Daniel: I am.
Israel Lai: So in Chinese there are two scripts: the traditional script and simplified script, which is what you described. But the writing language is a different story. So they are independent things. So traditionally, we write in sort of a version of Mandarin, even though we’re speaking Cantonese. So that’s a diglossic situation. And we have a century old history of writing bits and pieces of Cantonese. So actually, we’re better off than other smaller Sinitic languages, but we feel very weird when we write something poetic or something formal in Cantonese. So that’s what we’re trying to change.
Hedvig: Hmm.
Daniel: Wow.
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s really fun talking to you. We were going to talk about some of these topics as well in the rest of the show
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: So it’s funny maybe we should have you guys on some time to talk more about your show? All three of you at some point?
Israel Lai: [GASP] Oh fingers crossed.
Daniel: Yeah I think that I would like that. I would like that very much.
Hedvig: Yeah!
Daniel: Okay [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: So um… Oh, God now I’m still talking on the recording? I should say something that’s better at finishing up. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Shall I do the thing or…
Hedvig: You can do the thing.
Israel Lai: [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: We’ve been talking to Israel Lai ,the composer, language learner, YouTuber, blogger and podcaster of Rhapsody in Lingo. Israel, how can people find you and find out about what you’re doing?
Israel Lai: Well, I’m on Rhapsody in Lingo basically, everywhere. So Lingo as in L-I-N-G-O, and the podcast is officially called a Cantonese name, but you can also find us through that English name.
Hedvig: Yes! Can you please pronounce the Cantonese name?
Israel Lai: 我係邊個
Hedvig: So ying shan… hmmmmm?
Israel Lai: [CORRECTIONS]
Hedvig: can sung.
Israel Lai: Yeah. Not bad.
Hedvig: No, no, no, no, I want to do it. Please can you do it one more time for me?
Israel Lai: So Ying
Hedvig: So Ying
Israel Lai: Kwan sang
Hedvig: Kwang sung. Kwan…no was the last consonant
Israel Lai: Vowel? Oh consonant? That’s a [ŋ]. That a… uh…
Hedvig: Oh its the velar nasal [ŋ]
Israel Lai: Yeah. Yeah. And we have the [ʊ] in Cantonese.
Hedvig: [sʊ jiŋ kɑn sʊŋ].. Hmmm I did the tones wrong.
Israel Lai: [sʊ̌ŋ]
Hedvig: [sʊ̌ŋ]
Israel Lai: Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yeah cause you have the [ʊ] in Swedish
Hedvig: [sʊ jiŋ kɑn sʊŋ]
Daniel: I’m just standing back watching.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: I did take two years of Mandarin in high school and I know something about tones but it’s all sort of… it’s whenever I meet someone who has a Chinese name I try really hard, but then they pronounce it English without the tones and then I’m lost.
Israel Lai: Oh! Sorry about that. We do have a lot of vowels that aren’t in Mandarin.
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s… that’s… I’m Swedish. That should be easier
Israel Lai: Exactly.
Hedvig: Anyway, thank you very much for coming on the show and giving me a chance to practice some tones. We look forward to maybe having you on some other time again for a longer time.
Israel Lai: Yeah come see me on YouTube?
Hedvig: Yes, we will.
Daniel: We’ll have some links on our blog Becauselanguage.com. Thanks, Israel.
Israel Lai: Thank you.
Daniel: Talking to Israel Lai of the podcast Rhapsody in Lingo.
Hedvig: Have you guys heard that idea that Cantonese is like, older or more conservative?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah. Yeah. And actually, people think that Southern Chinese dialects are more archaic than the Mandarin moralities. But the most archaic one is actually Min dialect instead of Cantonese.
Hedvig: Oh.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah.
Hedvig: Israel mentioned that he thought that it might be true that Cantonese might be, not endangered, but in danger of becoming endangered soon. And when I’ve asked this to Cantonese speakers, they’re like, “no, that’s ridiculous. Don’t be silly. Cantonese has a lot of has a lot of speakers.” And it does. But Shanghainese used to have a lot of speakers too. But when the pressure gets on it to drop a language and to shift to another language, that can change really fast. Do you have any impressions of what’s going on with Cantonese? Should we be concerned?
Dr. Ye Jingting: I don’t think it will disappear. [LAUGHTER] Because Cantonese is really different from Shanghainese. Cantonese is spoken not only in Guangdong Province, but also in Hong Kong and also overseas, and those people have… yeah, or around the world. And those people, they really have a very strong association or affiliation with this culture, and this language and they don’t want to shift at all. And even nowadays, in Guangdong Province, if you come across any people or any people in the street, or you speak to them, they will reply in Cantonese. They won’t reply in Mandarin Chinese at all. [LAUGHTER]. So I don’t really think it is in danger.
Hedvig: Is that your impression as well, Mei Shin?
Wu Mei-Shin: About Cantonese? I am not very familiar with that situation. But actually, long time ago, I read…. So I watched a YouTube video and a person said that he’s very worried about Taiwanese. Taiwanese Min language being endangered. But I was thinking “No, that’s that’s really bizarre. You say that… because that lots of people speaking Taiwanese Min language”. and he start talking the whole video in Min language and use a lot of words that are kind of… old, I will say. And I was like, Oh, that’s really not… I’m not really familiar with these words. So probably Min language is, or especially Min language in Taiwan, is on the verge of you know, disapearing, probably. Like the proper one.
Hedvig: Because it is a bit of a different situation in a way. Usually when we talk about endangered languages, we talk about very small populations. Some people say that in order to be endangered… or like that 20,000 is… if you’re below 20,000 speakers, that’s like a critical point. But there’s also the question of transmission and official status. So even if you have a lot of speakers, if you’re maybe not used in the school, maybe not used to newspapers or on television channels, if… Israel also talked about, he transcribes every episode, and sometimes he’s a bit unsure of how to transcribe certain words or their options. And also for the linguistic lingo, they’re finding themselves having to create terms in Cantonese to talk about linguistics. And all these things are sort of expressions of it not having the same status as Mandarin. And if all the Cantonese speaking families send their kids to Mandarin speaking schools, you know, it could actually happen, but it’s probably further away than for the small languages that we might be talking about in places like Australia or New Guinea or Indonesia.
Dr. Ye Jingting: But that’s also the case with German actually, for instance. If we talk about linguistics, in German, we have to use a lot of English terms.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Dr. Ye Jingting: That’s just because that’s the way we communicate in English, mostly in the international community, but the German wouldn’t really disappear.
Hedvig: Yeah, that example might be not a sign of endangerment. That’s a sign of endangerment in, as a linguistics language. It’s the same with the Swedish. I’m very pleased whenever I read Germanic linguistics literature, it has some of the same words as Swedish, like sustantiv for noun. So I can understand German linguistics somewhat. Yay! [LAUGHTER]
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yay [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Yay. That’s Rhapsody and Lingo. You can listen to that by doing a search for Rhapsody in Lingo. Thanks to Israel Lai for that chat,
Hedvig: You should go listen to it if you can understand Cantonese. Or if you just enjoy hearing… Or if you like hearing Cantonese, you can also listen to it. Yeah, I’m sorry about that.
Daniel: I know, and I can’t go listen and that kind of bothers me. So it makes me want to support them on Patreon. So that as a stretch goal, they could translate their episodes into English because [SARCASTIC VOICE] why should not everything be in English so I can understand it.
Hedvig: [TEASING] Why should it not be accessible to me? Yeah
Daniel: [LAUGHTER] I must be a part of every conversation!
Hedvig: We can google translate the transcripts into English and see if we… see if they do a topic we find interesting and then ask them to come on the show or something. Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, you know what, I am definitely doing that.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
Daniel: We’re talking to Wu Mei-Shin and Ye Jingting, talking about the ins and outs of what some people called Chinese, which is actually a massive group of languages, some related and some not. I’ve always had trouble getting my head around this. So I’m really grateful to you two, for coming on the show, and talking us through it. Thanks very much for being here.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Thank you very much for inviting us. And when we talk about Chinese actually we talk about a lot of Chinese dialects or dialect groups. In China, we normally always say that we have 7 or 10 different dialect groups. For instance, the Wu dialect is actually not a language or a dialect but a group of different dialects. For instance, they have differences in tones or other aspects. Just to take an example, if we say Shanghainese, Shanghainese has only five tones, but just a very small town, which is near Shanghai, like with one hour drive, or so you can arrive that town. That town’s name is Wuzhen. And in this town, they speak Wu dialect, which has 10 tones. There’s actually huge differences in even in the Wu dialect itself. So actually, there is a huge universe thing, I would say.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Dr. Ye Jingting: And regarding other Chinese dialects, for instance, in Cantonese, we also see these kind of varieties in tones. In Cantonese, standard Cantonese, we have different tones as other varieties of Cantonese. Normally, we say that variation is between six to nine or so. So they’re really different.
Daniel: Wow, okay.
Hedvig: Yeah and that brings us to the first question, which is, how many things are we talking about here? Because if we look at, for example, Glottolog, which is catalog of languages, there’s a group there called modern and middle Chinese. And if you exclude middle Chinese, which is an ancient language, it has about 18 languages as it lists as mutually unintelligible. And then each of those languages, if you click on them, has a whole heap of dialects. So it’s, it’s, it’s a lot. And I know that there are different policies like the the Ethnologue catalog, and the Glottolog makes different distinctions. And I know that within Mainland China, people make different distinctions. And this can sometimes become political as well. Because you know, what people say: a language is a dialect with a navy and an army.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Ah Yeah.
Hedvig: It’s power to say that something is a dialect or language. And then linguists come in and say, “oh, but we have this great thing called mutual intelligibility.” And if you, if you can understand each other, you are the same language, but maybe people understand each other because they are multilingual.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel
It’s tricky.
Hedvig
Yeah!
Daniel: Can you just get…. Can I just get my footing here and just run through some of the languages that we’ve already talked about? We’ve talked about 普通话 (pútōng huà) or Mandarin. We’ve talked about Cantonese. We’ve talked about Shanghainese. We talked about Hokkien, and that’s just four… what else are we talking about? What are some other languages that I would know that we’re talking about here?
Hedvig: Hakka language?
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: And then Min we talked about
Daniel: Min, yeah that came up .Yep. Okay, good
Dr. Ye Jingting: …and also Ganzhou dialect, which is spoken Jiangxi province, Gan. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Okay. Okay. So those are the main ones? Any more we should throw in? We’re not going to talk about all of these in depth, but I just want to get the lay of the land here.
Wu Mei-Shin: It’s a lot actually. So yeah, you have a Xiang dialect.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah.
Wu Mei-Shin: yeah. So Xiang as in like X-I-A-N-G, for example Glottolog lists as a language.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah Yeah [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Now if I’m a speaker of Xiang, what other languages but I also probably speak?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Maybe Mandarin Chinese. And also… some of them maybe also speak kind of Southwestern Mandarin but not not everyone I think.
Daniel: So you do have a situation where pretty much a lot a whole bunch of people are walking around speaking two or three languages, maybe on a daily basis. Would that’d be right?
Dr. Ye Jingting
I think most of the people in China would speak the dialect Mandarin Chinese, so two.
Daniel
Okay, basically two.
Dr. Ye Jingting: … and it’s also normal for people to speak…. in Guangdong Province, for instance, it’s normal for people to speak Hakka dialect and Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese. And it’s very normal to speak three languages, then. Yeah, that’s the case.
Hedvig: Yeah. And if we go the other way around, maybe… so like in mainland China, the largest language overall is Mandarin.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, that’s correct.
Hedvig: And then it’s also known as pútōng huà or hànyǔ , or zhōngwén. Lots of words. Are all of these referring to the same thing?
Wu Mei-Shin: I think hànyǔ does not refer to pútōng huà.
Dr. Ye Jingting
Yeah, we can also say, hànyǔ fāngyán which means Chinese dialects.
Hedvig: Yeah, because Han is ethnic.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Ethnic, uh huh.
Hedvig: Yeah. Ooh, okay. And then we have places like Shanghai and Hong Kong, that are a bit special, maybe. And so what do people speak mostly in Shanghai?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Most of the people actually nowadays they all speak Mandarin Chinese as well, and some of the older generations speak more Shanghainese. But the younger generation speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, and they don’t really speak so fluently Shanghainese anymore, unfortunately.
Daniel: Why the change?
Hedvig: right?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, because in school, you have to learn Mandarin Chinese and if you can have maybe better scores if you speak very good Mandarin Chinese and the teacher will like other students who speak better and and also because there is a huge difference between Shanghainese and Mandarin Chinese now.
Hedvig: What are some differences between Shanghainese and Mandarin specifically?
Daniel: You mentioned tones.
Dr. Ye Jingting: The tones and also for instance, pronouns are different. For instance, ni is the pronoun for ‘you’ in Mandarin Chinese, but if you say it in Shanghainese, it would be ‘no’. And wǒ is for first pronoun, and ngu is the first pronoun in Shanghainese. It is a totally different
Hedvig: Oh… Wow, can I ask you to say, “You’re listening to Because Language” in Mandarin and then in Shanghainese.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Uh Yeah. [LAUGHTER] I will try my best.
Hedvig: Yes,
Dr. Ye Jingting: Nǐ zài tīng yīnwèi yǔyán ??? This is Mandarin Chinese. And in Shanghainese, it would be more or less like ???.
Daniel: That was great. Thank you.
Hedvig: You went up in general pitch like a lot. [LAUGHTER] Did you notice?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah. Besides the words being different, you also just… your overall pitch just went up like… you sounded, yeah, higher, overall. That’s really interesting. Thank you.
Daniel: Some of those words sounded the same. Which words were the ones that pretty much were the same in both, or did I get that wrong? Are they just totally different.
Dr. Ye Jingting: I think they’re very different but Yīnwèi, Yīnwi (???). So that’s ‘because’. That’s very similar. However, for instance, ??? is ‘no’, in Shanghainese. And ‘now’ it is ??? in Mandarin Chinese spelling Shanghainese, it will be ???.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Oh that’s quite different.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah Yeah.
Daniel: So lexically, really quite different, in tone quite different, in the way that you sort of, I want to say perform the language quite different.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel: What’s kind of the same between those two?What does carry over? and Mei Shin and feel free to jump in here.
Dr. Ye Jingting: However the words, I would say that they come from the same ancestor. So they were more similar in the past, but then it’s this split at some point in the history and actually, Southern Chinese dialects, although there are a lot of differences then maybe we can see more similarities among them. I can also try to speak the same sentence with Cantonese and Hakka dialect. And then maybe you can see more differences. First Cantonese: ???. and then Hakka dialect. It’s like: ???. [LAUGHTER] These are more similar. Yeah. So ??? So the podcast is also kind of similar in those Southern Chinese dialects.
Daniel: Is podcast a loanword?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, that is. Yeah. Because you don’t really say that in the local language.
Daniel: Oh Okay.
Hedvig: and maybe, and Mei-Shin, I know that you speak some some Min. You said earlier that you’re not as fluent as maybe you like to be. But do you know how to say a sentence like, “You’re listening to Because Language. A podcast about linguistics” in Min?,
Wu Mei-Shin: I can try the first half. ??? And today, ???
Hedvig: Wow that sounded quite different
Wu Mei-Shin: I find a really interesting is because Taiwan is very used to code-switching so we sometimes don’t really forcefully translate English to Chinese or to Mandarin. So sometimes we will just say podcasts.
Hedvig: Right.
Daniel: Well, since we’re talking about loan words, maybe we could explore that a little bit. I know that in some languages, like French or even Iranian, there’s a feeling like English is encroaching on the vocabulary, or there’s some resistance to loan words. In other languages, they happily take on loan words, and it’s no problem. What’s the situation with say Mandarin or the languages that you’re familiar with?
Dr. Ye Jingting: I think when Mandarin Chinese take loan words, they’re normally make it Chinese word. So they’re just a very literal words that are just taken from other languages. For instance, we only have maybe chocolate, and it is translated in Chinese like [tʃôu ku lí]. This sounds quite similar. But for other things. For instance, computer will say ??? which is translated by meaning. So we don’t really hear the English word anymore.
Hedvig: And is that different in Taiwan?
Wu Mei-Shin: In Taiwan, some more recent borrowings, we just we don’t translate it, like I said, but in the language, you can notice a lot of words that are coming from Japan. So because of the colonization history, for example, ‘soap’ [sop] in Japan, it’s it should be ‘soap’ [sop]. And in Min language we call the [sabun], because we heard it [sop] and then we cannot pronounce [sop] so we just say [sabun]. And tomato. In Japan, Japanese is also ‘tomato’ [tomɑto]. And, in Min languages just call it [tomɑto]. Yeah. [CHUCKLE]
Hedvig: I know that in Taiwan, I also heard lots of different language names. I heard Hoklo, Holo, Taiwanese Hakkien, Minnan, and Southern Min. And some of those are the same maybe and some of them are different. I was wondering Mei-Shin if…
Wu Mei-Shin: Because Taiwan’s history is a little bit complicated.
Hedvig: Yeah
Wu Mei-Shin: So before… so that’s a Ching Dynasty, or maybe even earlier, there are several waves of Han Chinese moving to Taiwan. So they are mostly coming from Hokkien province. So Fujian Province. So there are… also there are some other provinces as well. But then Taiwanese Min actually, you can say is composed of four different Chinese dialects…. so Min dialects. Sorry actually three, Quanzhang is two, and I remembered another one. Sorry, I forgot the name. Yeah, but I know Quan and Zhang are really two big groups in Taiwan and in different geography and locations. And so because it’s an island, so somehow people move around and then kind of nowadays, just all mixed together. And they even we say, all mixed together. We still love each other. Your pronunciation. Like we say ‘egg’ is ??? [nʊŋ] in my in my city, in other city, they say ??? [nuí]. So we just laugh like ~ha ha ha, you don’t really know how to speak ‘egg’ properly~ [LAUGHTER] Actually, that’s not their fault. It’s just, yeah, different Min dialect.
Dr. Ye Jingting: And also to answer your question about the distinction between Hoklo, Holo, and Min or Southern Min
Hedvig: Oh Yeah.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Actually Hoklo and Holo name the people. It’s in Min dialect. I don’t speak the language but more or less, it’s like, Hokkien is like, Fujian in Mandarin Chinese, referring to the province.
Hedvig: Ahh…
Dr. Ye Jingting: And if they say people, then it’s like, Hok-lo, because it just pronounces like that, too. So Fujian people, it means just the people from this province. So Hoklo and Holo, they refer to the same thing. So people from the Fujian Province.
Hedvig: Wow, it’s so… yeah. I’m sorry, we don’t have a time to tease all of this out. I’m sure people have written multiple books on this. So I know that Mei-Shin you are working in sort of historical linguistics, computationally supported historical linguistics, and the Sinitic family is not my area of expertise. But I have heard rumors about something called the “Fallen Leaves Theory”. I was wondering if you could maybe summarize that for us.
Wu Mei-Shin: So about Sino-Tibetan or Tibeto-Burman, this labelings about languages in China and also the neighboring countries. So, there are many, many labels that are proposed. And each label is that they just basically refer to who is the origin of these whole language families. And there are so many phylogenies have been proposed. Until van Driem, he proposed these fallen leaves models. Basically what it means is like… so he used the analogy or like metaphor. So like, can we just admit that we really don’t have enough information to infer a whole phylogeny. These are the groups that we agree with. Let’s just imagine these are the leaves are falling alongside of Himalayan. So like, here and there are a little bit groups. And so he proposed like 80 groups, I remember. And when I was studying Sino-Tibetan language families. I was actually quite interested in this model. Because that’s the fact… that it’s very hard to infer the final tree because the whole languages in China, they have so many language contacts in the history and these contexts may slowly blur out these vertical transmissions. So now, of course, three groups, they have published three different studies using Bayesian analysis to say that like, “okay, we say Northern China origins” and now, kind of fallen leaves, to people’s, minds, they will say, these people, they more support this Himalayan origin. So like the languages develop nearby Himalayan or you can say, Sichuan Province, and then they migrate east and then radiate to north and then south. So that’s all these informations.
Hedvig: Okay, because… yeah, like you were saying people sometimes say, Sino-Tibetan family. So obviously, Tibetan is part of that. And that’s quite far west. And when people say Tibeto-Burman, they also include the languages of Myanmar as well. So it’s a very large family. I really like this metaphor. So it’s sort of like, we don’t know what the final language tree is. But we can we can look at the leaves, because the leaves… is the idea that they sort of overlay each other, which is like, mimicking the contact. So there’s too much contact between the languages to say, what is the proper tree? Because maybe, you know, maybe there isn’t one, maybe it’s all networks or something. People also say wave model…
Daniel: The wave model. I was thinking of that. Hmm.
Hedvig: Yeah, but yeah, like the fallen leaves metaphor.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, I like this metaphor as well.
Wu Mei-Shin: But I have to say that, although I really, really liked this metaphor, but there are also some drawbacks about this model. Because, in fact, people really can categorize “Oh, there are some groups that are more closer to each other than to other languages, right”. Than to other Tibeto-Burman, or Sino-Tibetan languages. So somehow these fallen leaves is in a way saying, “No, your your findings is not really relevant.” Like, we just say we agree on these little groups, and we don’t really accept these larger, you know, a little bit more upper layers of relationship. So that’s why people don’t really like this. I cannot say this so definite, so more like, not so many people agree with this model. But I do think that this metaphor has some sort of meaning there. It’s just, we need more. I think that van Driem really had to say more clear what he thinks is that we need more information: More fieldwork, more language data to confirm.
Hedvig: And maybe…
Daniel: Okay, we need to move on to writing.
Hedvig: [LAUGHTER] yeah. Oh, writing means I get to talk about the word for Swedish in Mandarin.
Daniel: Okay, what is the word for Swedish in Mandarin?
Hedvig: Yes, it’s one of the things I remember from it. So there’s lots of different ways of… but so when people in the Sinosphere first heard about Swedish people, it was Cantonese people. And they wrote down two signs that sort of sound like Swe-den or something like this. And then they sent a letter. This is the story I got told in Chinese class in high school. And then they sent a letter to the Emperor. And he pronounced it [Ruìdiǎn].
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah. [CHUCKLE]
Hedvig: Which now is the name for… so if you pronounce it in the language that it was first written in sounds like Sweden, because it was like European, Dutch and English people. But if you pronounce it up north, it sounds completely different.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: So it must mean that this writing system, you can communicate sort of meaning, but not necessarily sounds, which is fascinating to me.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah! Yeah.
Daniel: The only thing that I knew about Chinese languages, and this is probably wrong was that they were pronounced differently. But anybody could just walk up to a bit of written text, and read it in their own language and understand it. It would just sound different.
Hedvig: Is that true?
Daniel: But that’s probably wrong, isn’t it?
Dr. Ye Jingting: That’s partially true, I would say. Because, even though people who speak different dialects can’t really understand each other if they speak to each other. But if we look at the written Chinese, we can understand each other. That’s actually also the case, even if we go to Japan, and then we see some Chinese characters, and then we can understand more or less that. But if we don’t learn Japanese, then we can’t really speak to the Japanese people. For instance, taking the example ‘library’ is written the same in Japanese and in Chinese. Or more or less the same. And if we look at the written Japanese ‘library’, we can understand in a minute. So what it means, without learning [LAUGHTER]. So that’s also the case with Chinese dialects. And if you write something down to the other person who doesn’t speak Mandarin Chinese, he can understand you.
Hedvig: But what about things like word order, or grammatical words, because even if some nouns and some verbs are the same, even if you can read signs, like, “Oh, that’s the library, or that’s a water fountain.” When you get into more complicated text, where you… when you said those sentences, sometimes there were words that were different, and they might have different signs. So some of the grammar must be missing, must be different in the writing as well. No?
Dr. Ye Jingting: That’s true. That’s true. I would say that, for instance, there are many more classifiers in southern varieties of Chinese.
Hedvig: Oh really?
Dr. Ye Jingting: But in the written system. Maybe sometimes we just leave it out. So [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Maybe we need to say what a classifier is, briefly.
Daniel: They are incarnations of your worst nightmare.
Dr. Ye Jingting: [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Nooo. No they’re lovely.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah. I also think they’re lovely. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: From my meager study of Japanese, I remembered that it’s a particle that you have to add to a number, especially a number, depending on what kind of object it is. So from Japanese, if it was cylindrical, it was ‘hon’. So if you want to say that you got one piece of spaghetti, like hard spaghetti, you can’t just say it’s ‘one spaghetti’, you have to say it’s ‘one hon ippon spaghetti’, because ‘hon’ is the classifier for cylindrical objects. It’s kind of like an English I can’t say ‘one fruit’, I have to say a piece of fruit. So piece is kind of functioning as a classifier for fruit kind of. That’s the closest thing I can find in English,
Hedvig: I remember the most common one [gʊ] ‘gu’ ?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Ah yeah! ‘gu’ is the most common one. And actually, it is also used as a relativizer, or attributivizer which…
Hedvig: Oh my God.
Dr. Ye Jingting: …it’s like, regarding the word order, I would also say that, even if sometimes you get the word order wrong, you can still understand it more or less.
Hedvig: Ah okay.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Because sometimes, for instance, as a foreigner, as a second language speaker of English, sometimes I also get to the word order wrong. Or in German, for instance. In German, we have…
Hedvig: Oh yes very easy.
Dr. Ye Jingting: we have the subclause. It is just so easy to get the subclause order wrong, because you always have the verb comes last. But sometimes just speak German in the normal word order for the sub clause, they can also understand. So I think it’s not a big deal there. Yeah.
Hedvig: So you’re saying that, even though there are some grammatical differences, because the semantics is so much maintained in the writing system, you can understand text, even if the grammar is a bit different from the different languages and dialects. But then I was gonna ask Mei-Shin as well, because I know that in Taiwan, people maintain the traditional writing characters more often than these simplified ones. And is it difficult for Taiwanese people to read mainland text?
Wu Mei-Shin: You need some time, but not long. [LAUGHTER] For me, I can understand. So because there were times where I was really fascinated by China’s… so novels in China’s word style or something. And I just… so I spend like, one hour to get used to the whole writing system. And I more or less can understand. But really, when I read texts from Cantonese… Oh my god, that’s like an alien! [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Really?
Wu Mei-Shin: Yeah, I totally… I cannot understand at all.
Daniel: Wow.
Hedvig: That’s interesting.
Dr. Ye Jingting: That’s true. That’s true.
Hedvig: Yeah. Wow, that’s really fascinating.
Dr. Ye Jingting: That’s true, because Cantonese has a different set of characters that are different from Mandarin, from the traditional or simplified written Chinese, because Cantonese characters are just used to to write down the Cantonese. [LAUGHTER] It is just different. But there is also another difference. The Cantonese characters are not really standardized. Sometimes they just pick up some characters to write down the dialect. But it is not standardized, and not like the traditional written Chinese and simplified Chinese characters.
Hedvig: That’s similar to what Israel Lai was saying about the transcript. He said that sometimes he was unsure of what, you know what to write, because it’s not standardized. So that’s really interesting, because sometimes you come across the misconception in the West, that there’s one Chinese script. And if you write something in the Chinese scripts, you have suddenly served all of the Sinosphere communities at the same time, but you’re telling us now that while some of the languages and dialects maybe can be mutually intelligible in the script, not all of them can. So like yeah. Mei-Shin if you can’t read the Cantonese texts, then you know, obviously it doesn’t work. Even if we think you know, if you’re a Westerner and I looked at a Cantonese texts and a mandarin text, maybe I would say, “Oh, they look similar” but they’re not. I learned … I actually didn’t know that Cantonese was that different in the text as well. Thank you.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: In fact, our friend arisvemo on discord has asked “other than the simplified/traditional split, do any other languages use a different writing system? Is traditional exclusive to Cantonese at this point? Is it only Cantonese that uses traditional script?”
Wu Mei-Shin: In Min dialect, they also have their own words, but not so much nowadays. Like they don’t really write it down. They use Chinese to… like Chinese characters to write it and people know like, “okay, we can read it in Min language.” Yeah. So it used to have some words.
Hedvig: And these are basically just simplified and traditional, or is there a third thing?
Dr. Ye Jingting: The standard thing are just these two: simplified and traditional.
Daniel: Okay.
Dr. Ye Jingting: They’re also… in the history, we also have other character systems. But that was used in the past. And there is a huge literature on that. And there is a long history on Chinese characters and how it develops from the ancient article, scripts, and then to other different scripts in the past. So they’re all kind of different, but you can still see the trace. How it evolves into the forms of today.
Hedvig: I was told by my Mandarin teacher that while there could be about 80,000 unique Chinese characters, many of them are so so rare. Maybe they only occur in one last name that’s really archaic. And that in order to read a newspaper, I would need to learn between 3000 and 5000 characters. Does that?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, that’s true.
Wu Mei-Shin: Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah.
Hedvig: Because often when people say, “AH! There 80,000 Chinese characters”, it sounds like a lot, but then maybe it’s not that much. Actually.
Dr. Ye Jingting: No, it’s not that much.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Let’s get to some questions from listeners on our discord channel. PharaohKatt asks, “In Pinyin, what sound does ‘x’ make? I’m trying to hear it. And sometimes I hear [s]. And other times [ʃ]. My best guess is a combination of the two that is unfamiliar to my sound set. What is x sound like?”
Dr. Ye Jingting: So ‘x’ in Pinyin?
Daniel: Yeah.
Dr. Ye Jingting: ‘x’ in Pinyin sounds [çi]
Wu Mei-Shin: [çi].
Dr. Ye Jingting: Okay, I’m gonna try to do it. Is it [sí]? Or [si]?
[EVERYONE TRIES]
Dr. Ye Jingting: Let’s take some word as an example. For instance, ‘west’ is [çí çí]
Daniel: [si] [ʂi] Oh, you’re gonna lay that tongue twister, aren’t you… four is four and 10 is 10. And 14 is 14 and 40 is 40.
Dr. Ye Jingting: [çí]
Hedvig: I have to say that when I was learning Mandarin Chinese, the hardest thing was actually not the tones. It was these fricatives because in the Pinyin, you have ‘x’, and then you have ‘s’, ‘sh’, ‘c’, ‘ch’ and ‘j’. And they’re all sound a little bit similar to the foreign ear. They’re much harder than the tones.
Hedvig: So for the for the ‘x’, I’m getting somewhere between [s] and [ʃ]… kind of [ʂ].
Wu Mei-Shin: It’s more like a middle of ‘ancient’. [LAUGHTER]
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, it’s it’s actually an important… because it’s in the last name of the president of China.
Daniel: Yes it is.
[LAUGHTER]
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah. Yeah. [çi].
Daniel: Okay, I’ll work on that. Let’s see. Eugenie gave us a comment via email at hello@becauselanguage.com because we once answered a question about whether a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong could pass as a Mandarin speaker if they needed to. If it were somehow politically expedient for them to for the moment sound Mandarin.
Hedvig: This came up because I was listening to an ABC show where a protester in Hong Kong said that after the protest when police came, if she spoke Mandarin, then they didn’t think she was a protester. And she could go home in peace.
[LAUGHTER]
Daniel: So Eugenie says, “I have some doubts about whether or not many Hong Kong-ers can successfully pass themselves off as people from Mainland China purely through language, as most locals will have a pretty distinct Cantonese accent whenever speaking Mandarin. And it can take years of proficient speaking and instruction to get the standard Beijing accent down pat. So unless a Hong Kong-er or speaks Mandarin on a regular basis, perhaps due to work or schooling, verisimilitude and the relative ease of code switching may not come naturally.” What do you think?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, actually, the accent is really quite resistant in not only in Hong Kong people, but also for other people in southern China who speaks a southern Chinese dialect. And actually, I can hear [LAUGHTER]. The minute when I hear somebody from the south I know who speaks Cantonese or Min dialect or Shanghainese as a first language.
Hedvig: But it should be possible to… I’m assuming that because this protester was able to fool the police…
Dr. Ye Jingting: It is possible but do you need some time.
Hedvig: If you… also maybe if you have that kind of motivation. [LAUGHTER] Maybe you apply yourself a bit more Yeah.
Daniel: I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. And I think there’s room for more shows on this. But I think we should probably end our discussion here Ye Jingting and Wu Mei-Shin, thank you so much for coming and talking with us on Because Language today.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Thank you.
Wu Mei-Shin: Thank you.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
Hedvig: We’re gonna move on to our favorite segment: Words of the Week. Any words that we find that are breaking, that are trending, that are significant, or just on our minds. And we have asked Mei-Shin and Jingting to bring us some words from the Sinosphere. What you got for us?
Wu Mei-Shin: I can start. Maybe it’s not the word of this week, but it was quite popular among Taiwanese is the backlog.
Daniel: backlog. Okay.
Wu Mei-Shin: So when the COVID-19 situations was kind of, let’s say, blooming in Taiwan. And we had one year to prepare, but the government was kind of focusing on the border, but not with this, this PCR test, or this something kind of test. And so when all these infection cases reported, the government doesn’t have time to test all these. So they just report that the day that they can… the test number on that day, and then eventually, there are more cases than them. So then they had to, at the end of the week, they report a new case, that’s back in about the whole week. So that’s called backlog. And so people kind of just use it everywhere. Like, “oh, yeah, I cook 10 dishes a day and something” and then suddenly, like, “Oh, no, no, I correct myself. It’s 11 dishes. I do a backlog.” [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Ohhhh! I like that.
Daniel: So kind of a retroactive update. Okay.
Wu Mei-Shin: It’s a mathematical term I guess. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah, that’s funny. So people can say it about anything.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah. I’ve got a backlog of work here.
Hedvig: But can you say, you know, I drew 10 drawings yesterday, and I made one more today. And now it’s 11 yesterday, like I sent it back.
Wu Mei-Shin: You can use it. Basically, everything just joke around. If you want to joke around some kind of numbers, you just use it. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. But the thing is, these popular terms that fade away really quickly. So maybe it was really popular these two weeks, three weeks, and then suddenly no one use it at all. [LAUGHTER] So yeah, it’s just these two weeks probably.
Daniel: Yeah yeah that’s how it goes.
Hedvig: We’re very familiar with that here at the Words of the Week, it happens a lot.
Daniel: Oh, yes. Jingting, did you have one for us?
Dr. Ye Jingting: Actually, I have three Chinese words for you.
Hedvig: Wow
Daniel: I’m ready.
Dr. Ye Jingting: The first is nèijuǎn, which means ‘involution’. It just means a very competitive lifestyle in China, that for instance, you have your children learning piano, and then you found that your neighbor also has their children learning piano [LAUGHTER]….
Daniel: Okay.
Dr. Ye Jingting: and everyone learns piano and then in the end, everyone can play like lalala. In the end, it just brings nothing because everyone is like, struggling very hard in the same direction. And then in the end, everyone is good, but no one is good.
Hedvig: Ooh.
Daniel: Okay, so involution or nèijuǎn.
Dr. Ye Jingting: That’s why there is another word, which depicts another kind of lifestyle, tǎng píng.
Daniel: tǎng píng.
Dr. Ye Jingting: which means literally ‘laying flat’ in Chinese.
Daniel: [CHUCKLE] okay.
Dr. Ye Jingting: And these are that “I don’t want to struggle anymore. I don’t want to work hard anymore, because it doesn’t make any sense.” And another, a third word is the hòulàng, which means ‘behind wave’ literally. It just means a wave or a tide in a river that coming behind. And we have like a Chinese saying, cháng jiāng hòu làng tuī qián làng. This sentence means in the Yangtze River, we have some wave in the behind, and then it will push the wave in the front and then make them on the beach and silence forever. So hòulàng is actually the new generation. I mean, not to really silence forever, but the new generation will replace the older generation and then take dominance of the era. That that’s actually what it means that so we say some younger people We say that they are hòulàng. And then they will dominance of the world in the future
Hedvig: Ah I like that.
Daniel: So we’ve got nèijuǎn, which is the idea that society is moving really fast but it’s not really getting us anywhere. We’re working like animals and it’s not helping. And there’s ‘laying flat’ which is… uh which was that again?
Hedvig: That’s to not compete.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah to not compete with anyone. I just stay at home and lay flat on my bed and doing nothing and because anyway, I won’t get anywhere. So I at least I can have a rest. Enjoy my last day
Wu Mei-Shin: We have that in Taiwan. Yeah. We have now in Taiwan. Tǎng píng.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m tǎng píng. I feel like I’m gonna do the bare minimum to get by.
Daniel: I feel like I want tǎng píng. [LAUGHTER]
Wu Mei-Shin: we also have a saying in Taiwan like it was ???. So where so you have to say where you fail, you stand up.
Dr. Ye Jingting: It is to stand up from the same point.
Wu Mei-Shin: Yeah, but then now we say ??? tǎng píng. [LAUGHTER]
Dr. Ye Jingting: If you fall somewhere you just lay there [LAUGHTER]
Wu Mei-Shin: You just lay there [LAUGHTER]
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Ah I like this!
Daniel: It seems like a lot of young people feel at least in the West that capitalism hasn’t really gotten us anywhere.That the prospects for success are not great. And so that there’s there’s no need to kill yourself over things. And so there’s no need to work yourself to the bone. So tǎng píng is that reaction to that.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah tǎng píng.
Wu Mei-Shin: If I may the words I said about the backlog in Taiwan is called ???. ???
Daniel: Okay, okay.
Wu Mei-Shin: So ???.
Hedvig: Quay Quay?
Daniel: This is great.
Wu Mei-Shin: [CORRECTS PRONUNCIATION]
Daniel: Hedvig, have you got one for us?
Hedvig: Oh, yes, I also have a Sinos-y related word, which is “red tourism”. So as, I believe Mei-Shin and Jingting are aware, but maybe not everyone else, this year is the 100 year anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party. And they have been doing a lot of celebrations in honor of this 100 year anniversary. And people are going to specific places that were important in the Cultural Revolution, or places that were important to the party, and sort of doing tourism in the Chinese Communist Party history. And people are calling this “red tourism”, which also has the advantage of being domestic. Which in this kind of panini is a good idea perhaps.
Daniel: That’s interesting. Is this use of ‘red’ coming back into vogue? Because I remember that calling anything from China red, I mean, it was only popular among political regressives. Back in the 70s and 80s, there was like one regressive Congressman, referring to “Red China”. It was Jesse Helms, and it was really out of fashion. Do you think that the use of red is coming back?
Dr. Ye Jingting: I think so.
Hedvig: I was just gonna say as well that I got this term from the South China Morning Post, which is a Chinese based newspaper and they’re using the term and this was also recommended, by the way by aristemo on discord as well. So I appreciate you helping us with Words of the Week, but I think because it’s like this is not… I don’t know I think Mei-Shin and Jingting might know better, but this is like red as in communist, not red as in Chinese, if that makes sense. It does.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Yeah, red is the color of the Communist Party.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah Okay.
Hedvig: So it’s, it’s very… yeah, communist specific.
Dr. Ye Jingting: It’s very Communist Party, and actually Hóngsè lǚyóu or red tourism already existed in the past. And there were always people doing these kinds of tourism. This kind of red journey, and then just to see the important places. It’s just because this is a 100 year celebration of the Communist Party. So it becomes popular again, because of the time point.
Daniel: Well, I have one more word of the week, and it is… okay so Australia has one of the lowest COVID vaccination rates of any country in the OEC. Health professionals are ready, people are ready to get vaccinated, but the problem is supply. Because, in part, our Prime Minister Scott Morrison declined to buy lots of doses of Pfizer last year. So when this became a political problem for the Prime Minister, he sort of said, “Okay, fine. Everybody can get AstraZeneca. Just go to your doctor. Just go get it. Even if you’re young, even if it’s risky for you, it’s okay. It’s cool. I’ll sign off on it.” So now health professionals are wondering what to do. It’s kind of been a bit of a botch in Australia. And so this is why Pharmacy Guild of Australia Victorian Branch President Anthony Tassome has condemned the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Australia as not a rollout, but a stroll out. It’s a really slow walk, and it doesn’t seem to be going very quickly at all. So…
Dr. Ye Jingting: That’s funny.
Daniel: We’ll see if that one catches on. Yeah [LAUGHTER] hih-larious. Yeah, it makes the prospects of future travel look pretty dim. I feel like we’ve been very fortunate in Australia to have kept things at the low level that they’ve been at. But it would be really, really nice to have the vaccine situation ramping up and it’s just not at this stage.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: So it’s stroll out.
Hedvig: Definitely.
Daniel: Okay, so nèijuǎn or ‘involution’, tǎng píng or ‘laying flat’, hòu làng ‘rear wave’ and then we’ve also got ‘red tourism’ and ‘stroll out’. Our Words of the Week. Let’s get to some comments. Sydney sent us an email Hello@becauselanguage.com. He gave us a correction in Episode 26 one of our guests thought that Taiwanese Chinese was a bit of a creole or like creole. It’s not a creole. A creole is a very specialized language situation that only happens in contact. It’s not the same as a contact language or just any situation where languages are changing, because they’re in contact with each other. Thanks to Sydney for pulling us up on that one. Sydney says related to Chinese, “I thought it was curious that you didn’t bring up written Chinese when talking about the lack of spaces in the conversation about Latin. Latin didn’t used to have spaces. And we made a comment about feeling sorry for the old Celtic monks who had to deal with spaces, but some of us like well over a billion have to read texts like this every day.” So that was an interesting point, spaces in writing.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: So thanks to Sydney for that comment. There are situations where it can be ambiguous if you place characters next to each other, and there aren’t spaces. Is that right?
Wu Mei-Shin: So Chinese reading without spaces? Oh, we don’t use spaces.
Hedvig: yeah.
Daniel: Does that make it hard?
Wu Mei-Shin: Ah, well, boundaries is such a huge topic, isn’t it?
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah, no it is!
Daniel: Yeah we could talk about that for a while!
Hedvig: I think… yeah, I think we set us up for a couple of Sino shows for a while.
Daniel: Oh, man.
Hedvig: In my… when you learn Chinese characters as a foreigner, you get texts with spaces put in for you. To help you. But I know that later, that might not be the case.
Wu Mei-Shin: So the thing is, for example, ‘weather reports’ tiān qì i bào ???. You can say tiānqì is one word, ibào is one word, but you can also say also say tiān qì i bào is one big word, right?
Hedvig: MmHm
Daniel: Right.
Wu Mei-Shin: I mean, people probably don’t agree with it. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. So I just feel like what boundaries here is a little bit, I don’t know, heavy to to mention.
Hedvig: Yeaah..
Wu Mei-Shin: We do learn how to break words into phrases. But yeah.
Dr. Ye Jingting: But we don’t need spaces for that. [LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Yeah. I mean, even the English term ‘weather report’ people write it with a space. Hey, I don’t think that’s good. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
Daniel: Finally, this one comes from Jeff on our discord channel. We had had a discussion about what do you call it when you go phlbttt [RASPBERRY SOUND]. That’s called a raspberry. By the way, why raspberry?
Hedvig: So this is like when you when you put your mouth towards something and you go phblttltlt [RASPBERRY SOUND]… like that. [RASPBERRY SOUND]. Or when you go [RASPBERRY SOUND] with your mouth? I guess maybe it’s like bubbles? and raspberries have bubbles?
Daniel: No, it’s not that. Why is it called the raspberry? If you go [RASPBERRY SOUND]. Here’s the answer. You’re not gonna believe it. It’s rhyming slang. Raspberry tart, which rhymes with…
Hedvig: heart.
Daniel: Fart. Because it’s a fart noise.
[LAUGHTER]
Hedvig: Oh yeah.
Daniel: And I didn’t mention that at the time. So then we had a big discussion about well is it … this is our discussion with Helen Zaltzman … this is a raspberry if you go [RASPBERRY SOUND]. But if you put your mouth up to somebody’s tummy [RASPBERRY SOUND], or your arm and do that, is that also a raspberry and some people do call it a raspberry. Other people call it a buzzer. Other people call it a zerbet.- C’mere and I’ll give you a zerbet. This is the term that I’m using. But we also wondered what happens if you do it to a cat. And Hedvig you…
Hedvig: I did it
Daniel: Bravely did this.
Hedvig: My cats are my…. Well, I have two cats. One of them is very easy to do it on. I uploaded it to our Instagram I believe. You can see it. It’s very easy to do… you just do it on your cat.
Daniel: And then cat claws your face off.
Hedvig: No, she just skitters away disapprovingly.
Daniel: Which she did in the video. Let’s listen now to Hedvig blowing on the cat known as…
Hedvig: Cement
Daniel: Cement.
[RASPBERRY SOUND ON CAT’S BELLY]
Daniel: But what if the pet is one of those hairless ones? Well, it turns out that Jeff on our discord channel says “I have a Mexican hairless dog, ??? I’m trying my best on that Nahuatl pronunciation. And he loves getting a raspberry.” Let’s hear that now.
Ali: “Hey, guys, this is Ali. And I’m going to be raspberry on his face. Your face. Ah! [RASPBERRY SOUND]”
Daniel: That sounds a lot like you’d expect.
Hedvig: Yeah
Daniel: He says also… Also when he does the dog shake thing, it sounds just like somebody furiously clapping wet leather together. Because I guess that’s exactly what’s happening…
Hedvig: Yeah. Yeah.
Daniel: So we appreciate your zurbits on pets. If you would like to send us your zurbits on your pets, especially hairless pets, we will always be up for them. Ye Jingting and Wu Mei-Shin, thank you so much for joining us on Because Language today. It’s been a real pleasure to have you. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. There’s a lot there. We’d love to have you back.
Wu Mei-Shin: Thank you for inviting us.
Dr. Ye Jingting: Thank you very much for inviting us.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
Hedvig: And if you enjoyed that and want to get in touch with us and tell us some more interesting questions. We did have more questions that we didn’t get to today but you can get in touch with us at Hello@becauselanguage.com or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok, Clubhouse and Substack and on all of those places, we are Because Lang Pod, and we especially appreciate if you send us sound files of you going raspberries on your pets. That sounds lovely to send those in. And we can’t do this show without all of our lovely supporters on Patreon. And today, for example, we had several words and questions sent in by our lovely members on Discord. We’d like to make a special thanks to all of our supporters. Their support also makes it possible for us to provide transcripts done by Maya Klein, which means that you can search our episodes to find out what we talked about in the past. So shout out to our top patrons. They are Dustin, Termy, Chris B., Chris L., Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Shane, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, and Dave H. Thank you to all of you.
Daniel: Special shout out to our newest patron Andy from Logophilius and also to Dustin @storiessandman, who, as always, has been telling the world about us and lots of other great linguistic pods. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who’s a member of Ryan Beno, and of Didion’s Bible. You can preorder the new Didion’s Bible release, ‘No Caveat’. It’s on their Bandcamp page now. No, this isn’t a conflict of interest. We just liked them and want to promote their stuff. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language. We did it!
Dr. Ye Jingting: Phew.
Wu Mei-Shin: Yay!
Hedvig: Wow thank you guys so much.