Shadow

I left a bait in an earlier post 伊辛巴耶娃 to 伊娃 :

… Doesn’t matter if you don’t read Chinese — each character is always a syllable (except for 1 character, which I will not tell here; let me know if you know the answer).

Kevin at timelysnow.com wants to know the answer. Here goes:

瓩 - Wiktionary

瓩 (radical 98 瓦+3, 8 strokes, cangjie input 一弓竹十 (MNHJ))

1. kilowatt
2. kilogram

[edit] References

• KangXi: not present, would follow page 748, character 8
• Dai Kanwa Jiten: character 21450
• Dae Jaweon: page 1156, character 14
• Hanyu Da Zidian: volume 2, page 1422, character 5
• Unihan data for U+74E9

 瓩 (pinyin qiǎn1wa (qian1wa3), qiǎn2wa (qian2wa3), Wade-Giles ³, ³)

It’s used quite frequently in Taiwanese publications, where in Mainland it’s written separately as two characters, 千瓦, also pronounced as qian1-wa3.

Interestingly, the same character exists in Japanese and Korean. In Japanese it actually means kilogram, not kilowatt. I suspect this one was made in Japan. It was not on Kangxi Dictionary — Watt was probably not born then. I suspect it was created in Japanese and then borrowed back into Chinese in the 1920’s to 40’s. But I have not way of proving now.

How did I find this out? It goes back to when I was bored in elementary school, and flipped through a half torn 新华字典 (New China Character Dictionary) and was stunned to find the character. I am pretty sure there is not another example like this in the modest New China Dictionary because I must have tried a thousand times to replicate my discovery.

Well, you probably argue that there is another case. For $38 USD you can buy one of these:

which is a pretty traditional paper-cut that you’d put on your windows during the Lunar New Year. What seems to be a single character is actually composed of 4 characters: 招财进宝 (but in traditional characters).

Good find, but I challenge you to find its unicode. 

If you can read this, you’re Number One!

"You Are No. 1"

Superstar Andy Lau, recently named China’s most desirable man by professor Jiang Jiehai, signed with East Asia Music yesterday in a deal rumored to be worth HK$200 million.

The photo at left is of Andy’s frequent co-star Sammi Cheng, also an East Asia artist, presenting him with a congratulatory wall hanging that her father wrote with his left hand (he lost the use of his right hand to a stroke). The characters read "You Are No. 1!"

That’s not a translation: the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters 腰呀冧吧温! ("yiu a nam ba wan!") approximates the English sentence.

Spelunker  says in the comment:

For artistic (or autistic) Mandarin speakers:

愚贰囡爸萬! (pinyin = Yu er nan ba wan!)

(The only problem is the second character, which actually means "two")

That’s funny. It reminds me of games we used to play in English classes. It’s not hard to phonetically transcribe English in Chinese. The real fun is to make it read like a real Chinese sentence.

my version:

幼儿难爸玩
(you4 er2 nan2 ba4 wan3)

which translates to

"little baby challenges daddy for fun"

Great find, Kevin. 三克油喂你妈吃

The Loom : Farewell, Seymour Benzer

As the geneticist Guido Pontecorvo wrote in 1958, "The analogy of the genetic material with a written message is a useful commonplace. The important change is that we now think of the message as being in handwritten English rather than in Chinese." In Chinese, words are single pictograms. In English, words are not the fundamental unit–they are made from letters. Likewise, genes are made up of nucleotides of DNA. That may seem like an obvious truth today, but only thanks to Benzer.

While linguists continue to debate on what to call the Chinese character writing system — logographic, logosyllabic, morphosyllabic … — the orthography itself has been adopted to write many languages. My latest delight is the Cantonese version of Wikipedia. Being a Mandarin-only Chinese speaker, I can understand about 70% of what this says, for example:

彈琵琶 (足球) - 維基百科，自由嘅百科全書

彈琵琶 (足球)

出自維基百科，自由嘅百科全書

跳去: 定向, 搵嘢

彈琵琶，原本係話玩一種中國樂器－－－琵琶嘅意思，但當用喺足球術語嘅時候，佢就解釋為守門員接射過嚟嘅波嗰陣俾個波由格助底跣咗入龍門入面，又或者接對手射波嘅時候抱唔實，雙手將個波彈返出去，俾衝埋嚟嘅對手有機會補射造成險象，甚至入波。

因為個犯錯嘅動作好似抱彈琵琶咁嘅姿勢，所以就俾人叫做彈琵琶。

Wikipedia/Cantonese offers a brief background on characters created for Cantonese only (Wikipedia:粵語本字):

廣府話雖 然有長遠嘅歷史，但係自古以來，讀書人書寫嘅時候多數会採用文言文。以至廣府話中嘅詞語，少用於書寫，又或者變咗音調。久而久之，啲人已經唔記得廣東話中 嘅詞語原字係點樣寫，甚至以為：廣東話根本就係有音冇字嘅。如果你係咁想，就錯啦！ 喺省、港、澳，用廣東話寫傳奇、小說，一直代有其人。粵劇曲本、坊间小說，好容易揾倒例証。呢啲作家喺有需要嘅時候要寫番個正字出來，好難！只有自造一堆 同音字來代替。 二十世紀後期，港澳興起幫呢啲口語嘅字搵返本字。好多人去研究廣東話，響呢方面都有啲成績。但係噉，廣東話社會，尤其係香港，對用本字定係造字亦都有爭 論。用本字當然係正確，但係唔係人人都識。用造字係約定俗成，人人明講乜，但係就失去咗承傳。

粵語維基百科家下並無官方指引，而採取比較鬆態度，兩樣都同時存在。不過，使用假借字嘅原則係借字一定要同本字同音，例如「喺屋企樓下」同埋「呢條友係維基人」入面，一個「喺」、一個「係」，係唔可以掉轉嘅。

Check out:

• Wikipedia:粵語用辭
• Wikipedia:粵語本字

Chinese U has an online Cantonese character dictionary.

And if you are in the mood of taking a test of these native characters, go to 趣谈粤语本字. 

In his recent post The Ginormous question of language and creativitivity, revisited yet again… Kevin refuted the idea that the Chinese writing system deprives its people of X, where X in question this time was creativity. Kevin suggests that much of the neologistic creativity in English happens at the morphological level (c.f., this year’s Top 10 New words Merriam-Webster’s site). Chinese characters, which generally correspond to morphemes, is as good a medium as any other language/orthography for word plays.  John B gave a great example in the comment,

The Chinese make up an enormous amount of slang — they just do it in different ways. 疯购 (shopaholic, a play on 疯狗, rapid dog), for instance, is one of my current favorites.

There was a period of time after the oracle bone script when  new characters were constantly created for new morphemes in the Chinese languages. Creativity, however, quickly lead to decaptivations. One of the first things the First Emprior did was to clean up the numerous orthographies in various states, and he — his minister Li Si — achieved this by burning books and burrying scholars alive. But I guess this is not what Rob Gifford meant by lacking of creativity.

The Chinese characters become relatively fixed in the next 2 thousand years or so. I don’t mean to suggest new characters were not created — in fact, just the contrary. The primary linguistic creativity, however, has shifted from inventing mono-syllabic morphemes to bi-syllabic morphemes and words.  That is, the number of characters had become relatively stable, whereas compound words graduatlly became the predominate phonological forms of words. 

Creativies with characters never died out completely. In fact, the turn of last century saw a renewed character creativity when Western chemestry was introduced to China. There you have a whole bunch of morphemes that never existed in the language. And you bet, new characters were created for them. The alternative — phonetic translation using existing characters — was tried and failed. We are left with 40+ new characters for names of basic elements and a whole bunch more for organic chemestry terms. Luckly, this surge of orthographic creativity didn’t go too far. Newer loan words tend to have multi-syllabic phonetic or semantic translations.

One can still find examples, albeit few in number, of intra-syllabic/morphemeic creativities in Chinese. 甭 (beng2) merges 不 (bu4 or bu2, "not") and 用 (yong4, "to use; to need"), and means literally 不用 ("not necessary"). Similarly, 孬 (nao1) is a combination of 不 (bu4, "no, or not") and 好 (hao3 "good"), and you guessed what it means. Both probably originated in dialects: 甭 is frequently used in Beijinese; 孬 is probably used in Henan or the vicinity. There are probably more examples like these in Chinese. 

Speaking of English neologisms, it appears that the rule governing these sub-morphemic mergers is not unlike that of Chinese compounding. Whether it is ginormous, confuzzled, or chillax, you mix parts of two synonyms (or near synonyms in a particular context) together, which mutually reinforce the meaning of both and the new word. This is essentially how losts of Chinese di-syllabic words are made — combining synonyms or antonyms. Given the ginormous homophone problems in the Chinese language at the morphemic level, you need the reinforcement of the two elements to convey what you mean. Psychologically this involves forward and backward priming from partial words. Maybe others can shed light on the phonological constraints involved here.