Recently in 中文 Category

It's always interesting when you learn a character for a word you know but didn't know had a character. Especially when it's super-complex. Take, for example, Cantonese zok6 'chisel':

鑿

Looks like 丵 zok6/zhuó 'dense grass' (?) is the phonetic, then there's a mortar (臼), and some beating (殳) with a metal object (金).

Here are some characters that look alike.

戊 wù/mou6 '5th of the 10 Heavenly Stems'. Used as phonetic in 茂 mào/mau6 'luxuriant; profuse'

戌 xū/seot1 '11th of the 12 Earthly Branches'.

戎 róng/jung4 'weapons; military affairs'. Used as phonetic in 絨 'down, velvet'. Interestingly, 'thief' 賊 zéi/caak6 looks like it has this as a component, but the original character had phonetic 則 zé/zak and the weapon radical 戈 gē/gwo1. According to Wenlin, there's an obsolete form 𧵪.

戍 shù/syu3 'defend; garrison'.

Recently I've been listening to these one-minute segments on how to make your Cantonese more correct, called 粵講粵o岩一分鐘.

http://www.rthk.org.hk/elearning/bettercantonese/listenpro.htm

It's basically a big prescriptivist-fest, telling native Cantonese speakers to correct their "lazy sounds" and not merge /n-/ and /l-/, not drop initial /ng-/, etc. There's two "hosts": the guy is 何文匯, whose name is on various Cantonese dictionaries, and the girl is 黃念欣, who I don't know.

For some reason, the guy is really good at making you feel stupid. "People are too lazy to look up the dictionary," he says. Or, "if people would just think logically, they wouldn't pronounce things all wrong." The girl is much more encouraging, but says things like, "if you say things wrong, you'll sound really childish."

Despite the tone, there are some interesting etymological/philological notes in some of the segments, and I did learn some obscure characters which I've seen before but never knew how to read.

Although they can get rather pedantic, in some ways it's kind of reassuring that people are being prescriptivist about Cantonese, because that means people actually care about preserving the language... and that's a luxury not all languages enjoy.

Brushing up on my Chinese, I came across this character: 躍. “I wonder how you pronounce it,” I said to myself, and tried to look it up under pinyin yào, since it shares the phonetic with 耀 ‘shine’. No dice.

As it turns out, 躍 ‘leap’ is Mand. yuè / Canto. joek6 (or joek3). But in Middle Chinese, it was homophonous with 藥 yào / joek6 ‘medicine’ (they’re listed right next to each other in the Guangyun). They’re still homophonous in Cantonese, but in Mandarin they’ve taken on separate readings. A similar thing happened with 角 ‘corner’ (Canto. gok3), which is sometimes read jiǎo and sometimes jué.

To add to the confusion, here are some more characters with the same phonetic but read differently:

• 耀 yào / jiu6 ‘shine’
• 戳 chuō / coek3 ‘jab, poke’
• 擢 zhuó / zok6 ‘pull out’

while reading up on Tibetan, i came across a disturbing entry in the dictionary: 暫 (the book's in Chinese). Apparently, the pronuncation in China is zàn, but in Taiwan it's zhàn. Not too big of a deal, but it's one more thing to remember when looking things up in the dictionary, which is annoying.

I've moved my blog to my new domain, blyt.net. My friend Adrian is generously giving me some of his server space to host my web presence, and... well, this is huge! Now I've got more database and blogging and content management capabilities than I can shake a stick at!

So here's the plug: if you need a place for your web site, go to http://www.icestorm.com for all your web hosting needs. Reliable hosting, great prices, and friendly support. And you can't beat the 30-day money-back guarantee.

So, why blyt, you ask? Well, if you look up 筆 'pen' in ancient Chinese texts, you'll find the phrase 不律為筆. Roughly translated, it says "No rules is pen." This makes no sense unless you read it not for meaning, but for pronunciation: "The character 筆 is pronounced like 不 + 律", which linguists nowadays guess might have sounded like b-liwət. Of course, that's rather inconvenient for a domain name, and naturally blit.net was taken, so here we are. Welcome to blyt.net, where I shall put digital pen to digital paper.