Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On continuity in an age of fragmentation — lessons from YU

Right-sizing through consolidation seems to be a global trend. GM, for example, after sucking at the government teat a little too hard, is being asked to go from, well, the Chevy Suburban to the Tata Nano of the American car industry.

The Beijing Sounds Studios cannot swim against the current forever. After months of dithering it was decided that, despite the continued success of the operations and the obscenely high profits per partner that have garnered so much outrage among the hoi polloi, the financial crisis should be viewed as an opportunity to shutter the less convenient Minnesota operation (original announcement here) and use the cash from that closing to expand Beijing operations.

So it is that CEO syz finds himself putting keyboard to laptop at 5:43 a.m. on what promises to be a fine Beijing Cinco de Mayo Abril [thanks Albert, for pulling me back to the right month] in beautiful suburban Shangdi. Operation Consolidation is three days old now and already things are falling into place. Lead voice artist, PBS, led a discovery excursion yesterday into 北京体育大学 (Běijīng Tǐyù Dàxué = Beijing Sport University) which, although it led to no significant recordings (and her pay has been docked accordingly) did net the location of a swimming pool that has potential to be used for the only perk that means anything to this executive: lap swimming.

And the day before, Yuèmǔ U. opened its doors once again! In fine YU tradition this was no mere ceremonial opening; it was right down to business from the minute the first student started asking about scissors:

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YU: Jiǎnzi?
剪子？
Scissors?

SYZ: Jiǎnzi.
剪子
Scissors.

YU: Chúfáng!
厨房!
In the kitchen!

SYZ [remembering]: Duì duì duì
对对对
Oh yeah.

YU: Duì. Yòngwán le* hái fànghui yuánlái de dìfangr, jiù lǎo néng zhǎozháo.
对。用完了还放回原来的地方儿，就老能找着。
Right. And when you’re finished put them back where they go so we can always find them.

It’s been so long since the last proper visit to YU that some students might have forgotten a cardinal rule of the institution: never pass up a didactic opportunity. In the original post, for example, there were admonitions to drink slower, stay close to the adult in charge, not take a scarf you might lose, and generally be good — all in a nine-second monologue. While some might find the pedagogical approach a bit — how should we put this — abrasive, to this student’s ears it was in fact rather soothing. In a world of storied companies and entire institutions melting away like so much cotton candy, it’s nice to know there’s still good advice and good Beijing-R / érhuàyīn** to be found on the YU campus.

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*So in writing the Pinyin, is it supposed to be “yòngwán le” or “yòng wán le”or “yòng wánle” or “yòngwánle”? In general, despite BJS’s stated support for Pinyin in blogs about Chinese, the editors have been too lazy to try to figure out what the convention is beyond mere intuition. But this time we’ve got Pinyin.info’s recent release from Yin Binyong’s Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography to help us out.

As best I can make out with my very poor grasp of Mandarin grammar, the first rule in play is that of verb-complement constructions (p.298). What Yin says is that you can write verb + complement together or separate on the basis of the number of syllables. In our case, a one-syllable verb + one-syllable complement are written together (p.300).

Then you add in the -le rule from p.277, “If the verb and its complement are written as a unit, then -le is written as a unit with them.” Voila! That appears to give us: “yòngwánle”

But hang on! There’s an example at the top of p.306 (in the pdf that you can download from pinyin.info) that seems to be an exact parallel but is written as “yǎnwán le”. What gives? It seems to be following the rule (p.278) that le “appearing at the end of a sentence or clause is to be written by itself”.

Since it seems plausible that our instance here is the end of a clause, I’ll go with separate le. It might be wrong, but you can’t say it’s entirely unconstitutional.

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**Check out that dìfangr, which BTW seems to conform to rule #3, “an indication of the small, fine, familiar” as laid out by BJS readers in earlier posts

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