Tourism part 1: On embracing complexity [all in series]
About Tourism, the series
Engraved into a sizable hunk of Labrador granite, on a pedestal in the executive anteroom at the Beijing Sounds Studios:
Tourist, n. One who favors packaged over live, who inches squeamishly past the teeming fauna of his own backyard — with its outrageous comedies, its epic contests, its tawdry intrigues — in order to reach the specimen cabinet at his neighbor’s place.
It’s not a promising mindset with which to start the summer travel season. Yet that’s exactly what July and August 2009 brought to the Beijing Studios staff: tourism of the first degree…
- in Shanghai and Nanjing: a tagalong (follow-the-spouse type) business trip with a steady diet of meandering street-walking and cold-hotel-pool swimming
- in Xi’an and surrounding Shaanxi² province, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall: excursions with Grandfather and Grandmother Beijing Sounds visiting China for the first time
This series, then, takes the optimistic and contrarian view that there might, in fact — counter to all past experience, deeply-held biases, and scientifically-derived hypotheses — be some reason to haul the microphone outside the boundaries* of this fine capital city and open up one’s ears to the sounds beyond.
Reason #1: Biang biang miàn
The young syz was a bit of a spelling and grammar fascist, quite unlike the huckster of namby-pamby descriptive linguistics that you find running the Beijing Sounds Studios today. There’s something soothingly absolute about spelling, just as there is about hanzi-writing: it’s right, or it’s wrong (or so you think before you have the misfortune of experience). And also not unlike hanzi-learning for Chinese, spelling acquisition for previously unknown English words can go on forever, providing endless titillation for the binary mind.
Granted, English spelling has some limitations that hanzi does not. For one, it has an absolute prohibition against the invention of new letters, a cranky and artificial barrier that users of hanzi thankfully do not have to deal with. Even the esteemed Dr. Seuss was not able to overthrow this capricious, reactionary, antidisestablishmentarian regime.
English spelling also provides some vague circumscription regarding the sounds that a particular letter is allowed to represent. C, for example, can only be /k/ or /s/ (or occasionally /sh/, or, with some coercion from American tongues, /zh/, or, for aficionados, even /th/ if it’s a foreign borrowing from Spain-Spanish and you’re trying to sound international). Moreover, it serves up an /s/ only if followed by “i” or “e”, unless you’re associated with an emperor.
Hanzi supporters have tried to argue that this anti-proletarian rule does not apply to their party at all. They claim, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty: “when I use a character it makes whatever sound I choose it to make, neither more nor less”. But in practice they are quite wrong. Hanzi, too, are limited in the sounds they are allowed to represent. The following elegant system of pronunciation rules applies in roughly the order given, with some recombination just to keep it spicy:
| Hanzi Pronunciation Rules** | |
| 6 | The hanzi represents the sound of the phonetic component of the character |
| 5 | The hanzi represents the sound of the phonetic component of the character, but with some tone other than the one you’ve guessed |
| 4 | The hanzi represents the sound of the phonetic component of the character, but with a different initial consonant than the one you’ve guessed |
| 3 | The hanzi represents the sound of the phonetic component of the character, but the phonetic component is not the one you guessed |
| 2 | The hanzi represents the sound of the phonetic component of the character, but it’s using the other sound that the phonetic component made back in 684BC |
| 1 | The hanzi represents precisely the sound — and meaning — used by its creator (which of course is what allows readers of modern Mandarin to readily partake of wisdom from ancient texts) factoring in 500-2000+ years of phonetic, semantic and cultural change |
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In short, there are limitations on hanzi pronunciation just as there are with English letters. But endless permutation and spawning? Both systems offer this in spades: English with letters, and Hanzi with character components. Thus in the same way some Puldyer Legg comes up with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, some Dòu Nǐwánr (窦你玩) comes up with…
[As is now usual, the transcript below is available on this page with audio synchronized to text. UPDATE: Thanks QPH for corrections to transcript]
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Talk about the common people taking back their writing system! “We’ll invent one so topsy-turvy that even the Unicode people won’t make a place for it.” The ironic appeal of Biang is that it’s far better known than thousands of “standard” characters that are included with your fonts. And its beauty is especially poignant because it violates Mandarin’s phonemic norms, which would normally allow no such sound as “biang.”
How does it taste? You would have to ask. In a moment of callous disloyalty, the tourist turncoats who snapped this photo left behind the faithful Biang and its scrubby-looking restaurateur to pay our respects to ròujiāmó (肉夹馍)…
…another local specialty, as LY mentioned above. Tasty. Like a pulled-pork sandwich without the sauce but with better bread. Worth leaving Beijing for? Probably not by itself. The editor will have to amass the evidence in the Tourism series before making such a weighty decision.
—————
*Nitpickers may note that some consider the Forbidden City, and perhaps even bits of the Great Wall, to be within the boundaries of greater Beijing. But as the studio director commented after what was his second-in-ten-years trips to both places: “Thank God they’re not within any part of Beijing I’m familiar with.”
**The scientific accuracy of the Hanzi Pronunciation Rules (HPR) has not been validated by independent research and is thus NOT subject to the usual money back guarantee applicable to Beijing Sounds subscriber fees as detailed in the Constitution.
¹ The proposal here is that YU and LY’s direct echoes of zhàoxiàng (照相 = take a picture) constitute speech acts as discussed in other posts. They don’t literally say “okay” and “go ahead,” but these are the kinds of phrases that a native AmE speaker would use in the same situation. Therefore, to native ears it doesn’t sound at all repetitive or unusual when they say zhàoxiàng in Mandarin, whereas if they both said “take a picture” in English they might be given a loony look.
² First, don’t ask why the footer numbering is out of order — lazy junior editors! Second, what’s up with the anti-Pinyin spelling of Shaanxi?! No, it’s not some abhorent dropping of a disambiguating apostrophe; rather it’s the sordid tale of diacritic lethargy and the struggle to differentiate Shǎnxī (陕西) from neighboring Shānxī (山西) province in romanized texts. It’s told well by Wikipedia. Maybe we can inspire Pinyin.info to do a position paper on it someday.
And for good measure: a coupla links if you want to know more about Biang than the practically nothing you’ve been given here.
- http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4e11923701000cz4.html
- http://www.scufz.org/article.aspx?id=2264
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Comments 4
is the roujiamo really not common in beijing? i’ve just relocated to shanghai, where my friends tell me they have some trouble finding it, but back in changzhou, not one hour west on the train, they’re readily available. i’d hate to think changzhou is doing better than both shanghai and beijing in any sort of culinary manner.
back on topic, i remember reading about biang biang noodles a while back as i was wasting time by trying to find the most complex character ever created. i must say as a designer that it’s by far one of the least aesthetically pleasing ones i’ve ever seen.
Posted 02 Sep 2009 at 11:48 am ¶I’ve already ranted about Shanxi, er, Shaanxi. But that’s one of the many pages on my site that, for some mysterious reason, Google doesn’t index.
Posted 03 Sep 2009 at 3:18 pm ¶http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biang_Biang_Noodles
I see there is a traditional character version as well. And WP has it as biáng. The mnemonic they give is interesting too.
Posted 04 Sep 2009 at 2:27 am ¶After reading the comments, I’ve got to say that this was hopelessly under-researched. Heads are going to fly and careers are going to be destroyed here at the studios.
@Pinyin.info — your article is a great exposition on Shaanxi and I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t even checked on your site, so I can’t blame Google for not indexing. Regarding Pinyin dabblers’ persistent inability to use diacritics, even where they’re desperately needed, can’t you just hear YR Chao chuckling about the virtues of his system? Sure you don’t want to change to gwoyeuromatzyh.info?
@Kellen, there’s probably plenty of roujiamo in Beijing. The problem goes back to the YU kitchen, which is so consistently piled with tasty fare that I rarely get to peruse the small eateries that would be sure to have it.
@Randy — and even more embarrassing, I hadn’t even considered that Wikipedia would have an entry. I’m curious about its assertion without comment that the pronunciation is biang2. As I noted in the recording above, YU pretty clearly used tone 1 — and she lived in the area for 10 years. PBS made it tone 4, but that doesn’t count for much since I doubt she’d ever heard it before. Should have recorded more…
Posted 04 Sep 2009 at 11:38 am ¶Post a Comment