It turns out to have been a trap. In the course of reminiscing about the cheap and delicious radish peel deals Beijing street vendors used to offer, YU started her soliloquy like this:
| Guòqù Běijīng a, jiù jiùshi nèige, jiùshi, wǒ, wǒ shì mài luóbo de, | 过去北京啊，就就是那个，就是，我，我是卖萝卜的 | In the past in Beijing, uh, well, I, if I was a radish seller, |
| mài luóbo de ne, wǒ dāngshí wǒ jiù zài nèr xiāo, màide shíhòu(r), nǐ lái mǎi luóbo, dāngshí wǒ jiù gěi nǐ xiāo hǎo le. | 卖萝卜的呢，我当时我就在那儿削，卖的时候，你来买萝卜，当时我就给你削好了。 | well, a radish seller, right at the time I’d, I’d peel it right there, right when I’m selling — you come to buy a radish, I peel it for you right there on the spot. |
The English makes it look simple enough. “If I was” (”if I were” if you’re old-fashioned) clearly indicates that she was not a radish seller. In fact Beijing Sounds has her resume on file (as well as the results of the independent investigator — one can never be too careful about these things) showing that YU was a doctor her whole career — no radish peeling stints at all.
But how, asked Albert in the comments, would the translator have known to translate the IF had they not known already that she was not a radish seller?! After all, what the first phrase says is, “wǒ shì mài luóbo de” which by itself could be understood perfectly clearly to mean “I am/was a radish seller.” So couldn’t it just as well have been: “When I was a radish seller…”?
Counterfactual Conundrums
The trap set by YU was to make me think the answer to his question was clear-cut and closed-ended. To quote my own followup comment:
you point out something I was puzzled by too: there’s no “if”. Nothing at all, so far as I can figure out. Yet it is indeed an imaginary situation. I think YR Chao had something to say about this construction. I’ll try to look it up … tomorrow
[more than two weeks ago, but who's keeping track?]
YR Chao did indeed have something to say about this construction. As usual, he stated clearly and simply [p.116 of A Grammar of Spoken Chinese -- for you Gwoyeu Romatzyh fans, note that you can see that romanization in action by clicking on the link]:
A conditional clause can occur without an ‘if’-word by merely having the adverb jiù/就’then’ in the consequent clause or by having negatives in one or both clauses, depending on the sense, as: 你打电话给他，我就不用写信了 [Nǐ dǎdiànhuà gěi tā, wǒ jiù bùyòng xiě xìn le].
Quite analogous. If you take YU’s phrase, clean up the disfluencies and hesitations, and adjust for tense since she clearly indicated talking about the past, you get:
wǒ shì mài luóbo de, wǒ jiù zài nèr xiāo
word-for-word: I was radish seller, I jiù ["then" in YR Chao's terms] would peel right there
translated: If I was a radish seller I would do the peeling right there
Everything is fine if you stop right there. But what if you decide you want an extra source or a different angle. You go online and start searching and submit you come across this:
Chinese, unlike English, does not have any means for expressing counterfactual implicational statements such as “If John were to go to the library, he would see Mary” or “If John had gone to the library, he would have seen Mary” as distinct from the descriptive and straightforward implication alternatives. Chinese, in other words, has no way to express distinctly that mood which in English and other Indo-European languages invites the reader or listener to shunt aside reality considerations and consider a state of affairs known to be false for the purpose of drawing implications as to what might be or might have been if that state of affairs were true.
The paper is by Alfred H. Bloom and since the Beijing Sounds accounting department refused to approve $14 in JSTOR fees, you only get this quote from the first page, which they do provide, grudgingly (as in — the page comes as a picture, not text, so you have to retype even to get your fair use out of it).
Having just provided an example of a Mandarin phrase that clearly shunts aside reality, the editorial team might be excused for immediately throwing this paper onto the pile labeled Horseshit. Yet, yet — since the Beijing Sounds editorial policy is, after all, to presume innocence, to presume that people aren’t just, to use the vernacular, making shit up– maybe we should give it a second chance. If anyone can offer some guidance as to why Bloom’s assertions might be correct or at least interesting, the Beijing Sounds studios promise to complete a full and timely (as in: it will take a lot of time) investigation. Just as nice would be if you know more references to where this has been argued, pro/con.
[UPDATE: Since I now have the entire article and have discovered that the aforementioned $14 would have bought me only a couple additional paragraphs, I've taken the liberty of pasting the final paragraphs of the very short article below. Again, you can see the first page on the link above, and the rest of the article below. Sorry JSTOR and Bloom for depriving you of rightfully earned revenues. Please contact Beijing Sounds in-house counsel for discussion of revenue-sharing opportunities.
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Comments 22
Li and Thompson (1981) have a section (23.1.3) entitled “The Semantics of Conditionals.” The gist of their discussion is that Mandarin makes no grammatical distinctions between different types of conditionals, instead interpretation relies heavily on context. They give the example sentence:
Posted 11 Jan 2010 at 11:43 am ¶Rúguǒ nǐ kàndào wǒ mèimei, nǐ yídìng zhīdào tā huáiyùn le.
This one sentence, depending on context, can be understood variously as:
1) If you see my younger sister, you’ll certainly know she is pregnant.
2) If you saw my younger sister, you’d know she’s pregnant (I could imagine your seeing her).
3) If you had seen my younger sister, you would have known that she was pregnant (you didn’t she her).
In short, context is the deciding factor, just as in your example with YU. Though they don’t go into details regarding the necessity of ‘if’ or ‘then’ words, my read is that even without any form of either ‘if’ (e.g. yàoshi) or ‘then’ (e.g. jiù), context would be enough to correctly understand a (counterfactual) conditional statement and the sentence could still be well-formed Chinese. All of this seems basically right to me.
I would guess Bloom is saying the same thing as Li and Thompson, namely, there are no Chinese grammatical structures that clearly indicate a counter-factual condition. I would be very surprised if he were asserting that Chinese language doesn’t have a way to communicate a counter-factual condition.
Chinese could hardly be called a language if it had no conditional or counterfactual constructions. Why are there so many words for “if” in Chinese?: 如，如果，要是，…的话，etc.
Posted 11 Jan 2010 at 11:54 am ¶My university has access to the journal. Email me.
Posted 11 Jan 2010 at 1:29 pm ¶The example given of the Hong Kong survey makes things a bit clearer.
Chinese does have something like the right construction, but 你打电话给他，我就不用写信了 is very similar to someone giving directions, “Go to the crossroads and you’ll see the post office on your right.”
Or to put it another way, Chinese doesn’t have a marker specially for the subjunctive, and the JSTOR paper suggests this affects how its speakers deal with counterfactuals.
As another example, English doesn’t have an optative marker, but you can express sentiments in English that in another language (let’s say Turkish) would use the optative mood.
Posted 11 Jan 2010 at 2:01 pm ¶Did Bloom ever learn Chinese?
And get a load of this:
Posted 11 Jan 2010 at 9:29 pm ¶“…while Westerners consistently find the logic of Mao’s writings more accessible than that of more traditional Chinese works, the opposite is true of the Chinese themselves.”
@all: see update above for remainder of article text
Posted 12 Jan 2010 at 5:33 am ¶Having seen the update, I’m very tempted to shout loudly enough to shock my neighbours:
“BULLSHIT!”
Then I would like to echo Hanmeng’s question.
I note that syz, ze and Randy have all provided examples of structures and words suggesting a counterfactual or conditional mood. Of course, context is necessary for properly interpreting the use of these structures and words, but they demonstrably do exist.
“There is no way in Chinese, for example, to specifically signal a shift from discussion of particulars (a kangaroo, the kangaroo over there, all kangaroos) to discussion of the generic kangaroo (”the” kangaroo)”
Which explains why I was watching a documentary about wolves last night which discussed wolves in both specific and generic terms without having to switch into English or any other Indo-European language.
(oh wait, I seem to recall Victor Mair claiming that Sinitic is Indo-European….)
“…-a disinclination which seems to be reflected as well in traditional Chinese cultural proclivities away from theory construction in science, philosophy, and religion towards more practical, reality-centred approaches to scientific, social and moral questions”
Ah, so that explains Daoism.
Actually, I think Hanmeng’s question needs to be expanded: Just who is this Bloom character and how much expertise does he possess in matters of Chinese language and culture? I’m far from expert myself, but the excerpts provided do not inspire confidence in me.
And lastly, I would like to thank Beijing Sounds for the opportunity for a good morning rant.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 10:49 am ¶“Of course, context is necessary for properly interpreting the use of these structures and words, but they demonstrably do exist.”
The fact that context is needed means that there is not a distinct, specific tag for the subjunctive and similar moods.
The wider cultural suggestions are weak, but the central assertion is true.
Certain readers seem to be inferring a criticism of Mandarin as a language from this, but every language has some holes in it when looked at from inside another one.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 10:57 am ¶As a minor example, English can’t say 这里有车 without specifying if there are one or more.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 11:00 am ¶Tom, the trouble is that Bloom doesn’t say “there is not a distinct, specific tag for the subjunctive and similar moods”. He says Chinese “does not have any means for expressing counterfactual implicational statements … as distinct from the descriptive and straightforward implication alternatives.”
That’s a non-trivial distinction that even a well-informed linguistics buff (let alone a professor at a highly regarded academic institution) should be able to make.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 11:02 am ¶He is, in fact, making the first statement — it’s the same as the second.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 11:13 am ¶The key is “as distinct from”, which he is using to mean specifically the words used to formulate a sentence. However, I agree he should have rewritten it to avoid ambiguity.
Tom, if I can convince you the two statements are not equivalent I’m going to write a whole post on this. Fascinating stuff.
Bloom’s statement about “does not have means to make distinct” is wrong in this important way: it implies that any such utterance in Mandarin could be treated as ambiguous. Some statements certainly can be ambiguous, as shown above. But something like “假设我有自行车，我就骑车去商店” [if I had a bike I would ride it to the store] can *only* be understood to mean that I don’t have a bike.
This is not at all to be “defensive” about Mandarin. In fact, if I were going to be defensive [=> I am not
], it should be about English, because the “incapacity” as it were, lies with English rather than with Mandarin in this case. Specifically, English is “incapable” of the ambiguous statement. It forces declaration of factuality.
Maybe this is what Bloom intended to write. But again, that’s not what he wrote.
As an aside, I’m going to try harder from here on out to give Bloom the benefit of the doubt. Not to avoid saying that he’s wrong where he’s wrong, but in the general spirit that it’s too easy to make an enemy out of someone who in all likelihood should be an ally. Will probe that further if I ever get to the post that I’m threatening.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 11:54 am ¶In my experience, 假设 expresses the indicative conditional rather than the counterfactual conditional. Not that I have systematically quizzed anyone about this, I admit.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 12:07 pm ¶It could certainly cover both, of course, but the fuzziness is there — you definitely don’t have a bike, but if I give you a bike right now will you ride it to the store, or were you just talking about what would have happened if you’d had one yesterday?
Searching around on JSTOR, I found a response to Bloom entitled, “On the Linguistic Shaping of Thought: Another Response to Alfred Bloom” by Donna Lardiere. She explains, “[Bloom] claimed that because the Chinese language lacks an equivalent grammatical marker, Chinese speakers do not develop the corresponding cognitive schema and thus process counterfactuals “less naturally” (I98I:22) than English speakers.” She goes on to state that this claim is verifiably wrong. This seems to lend support to Tom’s reading of Bloom’s sentences, though clearly not to Bloom’s wider point about language and thought.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 1:22 pm ¶Tom, and now ze piling on –
Fair enough. That’s definitely what Bloom meant. Now that I finally get back to reading the article, I see he actually talks about the Chinese “lack of a linguistic marking of the counterfactual.”
So there can be no mistaking what he meant — if you read the whole article. On pain of sounding like a sore loser, I still maintain that his original thesis statement does NOT say that. It says something significantly and importantly different. But protestations aside, I hereby self-flagellate for not having read the rest of the paper more carefully.
BTW Tom, even though you haven’t said you’re persuaded that the two statements are different, I may yet produce that followup article. Breathlessly await announcement…
Oh, and about the 假设, all two of my available consultants say it’s clearly counterfactual, so I’m leaning that way.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 1:58 pm ¶The real issue with the abstract, and one that renders it pretty useless, is the excluded middle. Bloom jumps straight from his survey results to “it’s to do with the Chinese language” and thence to “it must be because of Chinese grammar” without considering the many other possibilities.
Assuming Chinese-language respondents struggled with counterfactual propositions more than the anglophones — and there’s no reason for Bloom to falsify that, so why not — it does not necessarily follow that this is a product of grammar.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 2:05 pm ¶Although the bilingual group are a useful indicator, the effects of using one language over another are not limited to the vocabulary of that language, as demonstrated by code-switching.
Ideally, one would have a control group formed of, say, monoglot francophones to look at this, as well as comparing speakers of the same language but with different educational backgrounds. Etc. etc.
Tom, if you would read the article I cited by Lardiere, you would find she’s basically saying what you are: Bloom’s results don’t necessarily point to the influence of grammar. She backs it up with results from a study of Arabic speakers–who have a grammatical structure for expressing counterfactuals–but still seem less inclined to accept counterfactuals.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 2:24 pm ¶Sorry I’m a bit late but “there is not a distinct, specific tag for the subjunctive and similar moods” is not the same thing as saying it “does not have any means for expressing counterfactual implicational statements … as distinct from the descriptive and straightforward implication alternatives.” There are means beyond a specific syllable tacked on to the sentence. Context, assuming the context actaully made things clear, would be one of those means.
Anyway the point I wanted to bring up that got me to stop lurking in the first place is this: What is the social context of the Mandarin and English speakers to whom he’s referring? I think it would be safe to say that Americans in general are more likely to speak in counterfactual terms than citizens of the PRC, in large part due to their respective beliefs that counterfactual situations may exist. How many little American kids were told they could be president one day? How many PRC kids were told the same?
I don’t mean to be political or to sound in any way anti-PRC and pro-USA. I just think attempting to ascribe these differences to the language when evidence to the contrary (both in the form of Lardiere’s Arabic and the multiple counterexamples brought up so far above) is pretty solid discounts Bloom in my eyes. And that’s ignoring his likely ignorance of Mandarin, which admittedly is hard to do.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 2:35 pm ¶Ah, sorry. As I read on in Lardiere I see that’s what she’s saying too. And that Taiwanese newspapers were used. Had I finished reading before I commented I would have known (ooh look. counterfatualness). And back to the shadows I go.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 2:42 pm ¶This is actually a pretty famous paper in linguistics – famous for all the wrong reasons. Bloom’s research was badly flawed, mainly because he gave badly translated counterfactual stories to the Chinese subjects, and well-written English stories to the American subjects. A Hong Kong academic managed to get results precisely the opposite of Bloom’s by taking well-written counterfactual Chinese stories, and having them badly translated into English.
Posted 13 Jan 2010 at 10:48 pm ¶http://buxiebuxing.livejournal.com/10795.html
How exciting to tune in so late and see all the discussion my ignorance spawned. I guess the moral of the story is:
- ignore all the “jiushi”s before the real sentence starts (the real sentence is “wǒ shì mài luóbo de, wǒ jiù zài nèr xiāo”)
That’s definitely an “if” statement. Which one (If I am / If I were / If I had been), must remain a mystery without context, which we have, so it’s not a mystery.
Posted 16 Jan 2010 at 2:16 am ¶I come from a country whose native language is not english.
In regards to this “if”… My native language also doesn’t have such 3 types of ‘if’ conditional as the one you have been talking about:
1st, if I go to the cinema, I will definately meet her.
2nd, if I were you, I wouldn’t come up with such an idea.
3rd, if you had been there, I would let you to meet my boyfriend.
And so, in replace to those, we just merely add the words that are suitable depending on the contexts.
In chinese, ru guo, jia shi, jia ru, can be used to form the if conditional.
Jia shi, or jia ru, can be used to form the second type of ‘if’ conditional, while ru guo can be used to form the first type of ‘if’ conditional. The third type of ‘if’ conditional, it refers to an event happens in the past, so we could add the timing words to give the indication that the event is already over, na shi hou, ru guo wo shi ni, shuo bu ding wo yao shuo zhen hua de….or na tian, ru guo/jia shi/jia ru ni shi wo de tong wu, wo ken ding neng bang ni de…
Hope this helps, and sorry …, I don’t type the pin yin correctly since the gadget I use doesn’t support chinese (han zi) and pin yin with tone’s marks…
Posted 24 May 2010 at 1:36 am ¶This is just my opinion, since my native language doesn’t have such an ‘if’ conditional, and neither does chinese. Correct me I’m wrong, I’m not an expert in linguistic; and neither English and Chinese is my native language…