Comments on: Beijing Drift http://www.sinoglot.com/bjs/2007/10/beijing-drift/?&owa_medium=feed&owa_sid= Home of the Beijing Sounds Studios: productions mostly of language through foreign ears Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:08:32 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: Mike Wright http://www.sinoglot.com/bjs/2007/10/beijing-drift/comment-page-1/#comment-2 Mike Wright Thu, 17 Jan 2008 02:55:10 +0000 http://www.bjshengr.com/bjs/?p=4#comment-2 Hi--Great stuff on 儿化音. Regarding the ball-catching birds, you wrote: (là zuǐ lit. means "candle beak" -- not sure what this is in English). From the pictures, I guessed a kind of finch. Sure enough, a trip to DeFrancis' ABC Dictionary found 蜡嘴雀 as "hawfinch". "Haw" is the fruit of the hawthorne 山楂. Doesn't the fruit at http://www.e2121.com/herb_db/imgdir/shan_zha2.jpg look a bit like those balls the bird was “taught” to catch? Maybe it already knew how? Hi–Great stuff on 儿化音. Regarding the ball-catching birds, you wrote: (là zuǐ lit. means “candle beak” — not sure what this is in English).

From the pictures, I guessed a kind of finch. Sure enough, a trip to DeFrancis’ ABC Dictionary found 蜡嘴雀 as “hawfinch”. “Haw” is the fruit of the hawthorne 山楂. Doesn’t the fruit at http://www.e2121.com/herb_db/imgdir/shan_zha2.jpg look a bit like those balls the bird was “taught” to catch? Maybe it already knew how?

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