I just heard that they’ve added Uyghur to their collection of languages. Here’s an example.

I worry a little about using the blue Uyghur flag, only because I’d hate to see them get blocked in China. But then, it’s not like they have any better options.

Ah, well, I don’t actually know what it would be called. Arabish in Arabic is called “Arabeezy”, “-eezy” being the last half of the word for English. Anyway…

It snuck up on me really. I was in the kitchen, trying to de-gunk the range, when I saw on my shelf a box of 王守义 brand 十三香. It’s a spice mix, containing 13 in total, 10 of which I’m sure are anise. But then written down the side of the package, I saw something that made me do a double take.

التوابل من الانواع الثلاثة عشر

That’s not Uyghur. It’s straight up Arabic. In full it would be

‎الْتَّوَّابِل مِن الانْوَاع الْثَّلاثَة عَشَر
āl-taūaābil min āl-ānūaāʿ āl-ṯalāṯaʰ ʿašar

Except, and I could be wrong because it’s been a while, it’s not right. I couldn’t put my finger on it but something seemed wrong about it. What they’re trying to say could be one of two things. One, the simpler, would be “thirteen kinds of spices¹”. The other, which matches the text better, is “spices from thirteen kinds²”. Either way, it begs the question:

Why Arabic?

As far as I know it’s only a language in China when used for liturgical purposes. Qur’anic reading can be done in Arabic, but the sermon must be in Mandarin. No one here speaks it natively, if they ever did. Uyghurs don’t usually learn it, and Hui are native Mandarin speakers.

The package says 清真, meaning halal/kosher, which any Uyghur would be able to read. Actually, there’s a small nanwalla in my neighbourhood who has حلال (halal) with an arrow painted on the wall near his shop. I always assumed it was for tourists. That doesn’t seem to be the case with 王守义. It’s not the kind of thing I picture a Saudi tourist picking up at the local 家乐福 (Carrefour).

A mistake in English is funny. A mistake in Arabic, a highly inflected language, may render it almost unreadable.

Should this be chalked up as another case of just showing off?

1. ثَلَاثَة عَشَر أَنْوَاع مِن الْتَّوَابِل
2. ‎الْتَّوَّابِل مِن الانْوَاع ثَّلاثَة عَشَر

Behind Yu Gardens lies central Shanghai’s oldest mosque, built in 1870 in Qing Dynasty style. The congregation was started by Nanjing Hui Muslims who migrated to Shanghai. When the area was heavily Hui, the mosque was a center of cultural life. In the early 1900s, a primary school, the Shanghai Islamic Board of Directors and the Muslim Business Society were all based there.

Haven’t been to Fuyou in a while. It was the very first place I went on my own on my very first day in China. Fortunately someone there spoke Arabic. I couldn’t even muster “ni hao” back then.

As a letter in itself, ë isn’t terribly common. I know Albanian uses it as a distinct letter representing [ə] so that “mirë” meaning ‘good’ is /mirə/. A quick check of Wikipedia shows that it also occurs as a letter in Kashubian languages spoken in Poland. But I’ve never seen it in Uyghur.

Of course, ULY specifies it as é and so this is perhaps just a variation done by someone whose keyboard was better equipped to type umlauts than acute accents, but then unless it was an Albanian keyboard that seems unlikely. And the same site does use é in an image that’s part of the navigation bar.

Has anyone else seen this before? I’m looking for other examples but in the mean time if you know of one leave a comment and let me know.

At first I didn’t notice the name. My friend lives right by Qingzhen Lu, and while visiting today I did a quick Google Maps search for bookstores in the area.

The best part of Islamic Street is what you’ll find there. It’s a healthy mix of not just bookstores but Christian bookstores and questionable massage parlours. Not to mention one dog store. That’s right. Islamic Street is home to specialty stores of another religion, state-sanctioned prostitution, and haraam puppies.

I’m sure further west you’ll find at least one halal restaurant. I guess it’s consistent though, considering the mosque in Changzhou has a Muslim run bar on the second floor.

查看大图

In the end, it got me thinking of Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the system of Romanisation created by YR Chao and Lin Yutang, a while before pinyin. In GR, all tones are marked in the spelling itself, so for example “hai” in all four tones would be spelled hai, hair, hae and hay.

What about using the additional vowels used in the Uyghur variant of the Arabic script to include a bit of tonality into xiao’erjin? I’ve often thought the script (xrj) could use a bit fewer harakat (diacritics) and more long vowels for the sake of legibility and speed of writing. Why not have tones be included?

Of course if you did away with diacritics then there’d be no reason not to use diacritics to mark tone as is done in pinyin and 注音符号.

Who knows. Maybe xiao’erjin could make a comeback. Highly unlikely given the official status of pinyin and the pervasiveness of English education in China, but a guy can dream.

How are you supposed to represent tones in Xiao’erjing? It doesn’t seem like you can. Wouldn’t that make Xiao’erjing an extremely unsatisfactory way of writing Chinese, if you can’t even express fully how it sounds?

I’d like to answer with a little more detail here than I did in my emailed response to the sender.

Basically, yes, tones aren’t marked in xiao’erjin (from here on out referred to as “xrj”). The one exception to this is that there is a letter to represent /s/ when beginning a syllable in the entering tones (阳入, 阴入). So in a sense it’s not really marking tone so much as the fact that the syllable ends in a stop of some sort. This is still the case in Cantonese and Wu, however Mandarin has lost the entering tone. So really, for modern Mandarin, this particular letter would not be used.

If it were, it would look a little like this:
ښ
without the lower dot, that is.

That got me thinking of ways you could do tones in xrj that wouldn’t cause legibility issues. It’s already so diacritic heavy that adding another little dash to mark a second tone would be a bit of overkill.

But probably for most people using xrj when it was still in use, a lack of tones was probably not such a big deal. Context would have been a great help, and even if tones were included, this was well before Modern Standard Mandarin. And since xrj was itself never really standardised, for all we know some uses did have a way to mark tone.

I think mostly it wasn’t such a major issue. That said, expect a future post that offers a possible solution.

The Id Kah mosque is one of the oldest and largest in all of China, dating all the way back to 1442. It was severely damaged during China’s Cultural Revolution but purportedly restored multiple times by the local government and declared a protected monument. The pictures below were taken almost two decades before the CCP came to power and created the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

Unfortunately you’ll need a proxy to see the post/blog. Which is too bad because there’s usually great stuff there. Take a look.

Arabic-language flashcards don’t fly with TSA

I’ve often wondered what sort of flags I’ve raised over the years travelling between the Middle East, China and America, often with multiple Arabic or Uyghur language texts in town, many of them religious in nature. In my undergrad years I spent a good many credit hours on Mideast theological philosophy, and not a boarding pass left my hand without a Qur’an tucked into my carry on.

I’d be lying if I said I ever felt like it would be a problem in America. China, however, is another story. Not a year ago I asked an acquaintance in Ürümchi to send me an Arabic-Uyghur dictionary (which he did and for which I’m eternally grateful. It’s been an excellent resource) through China Post. A small part of me was expecting it to simply not arrive, “lost” like so many pair of knock-off kicks.

But fortunately I’ve yet to encounter any difficulty in moving about the country despite my less-than-perfect destinations in the eyes of the State. Though I have on multiple occasions gotten that vibe from a handful of Imams and scholars with whom I’ve spoken over the years. More often than not it happens shortly after the conversation drops to a whisper.

I’ve posted before on the legal status of religious freedoms here in China. I’ve not, however, spent much time actively seeking out any specific limitations on linguistic religious freedoms, specifically how likely someone would be to getting targeted for searches based on strictly language-based factors. I don’t mean the right to speak Mongolian instead of Mandarin at home, but more on the right to drag 30 kilos of Uyghur-language Qur’ans with you onto a plane. I feel a future project coming on.

From Jabal al-Lughat:

It includes a copy of al-Hilali’s Berber-Arabic lexicon. The Lmuhub Ulaḥbib library of Bejaia has also put a number of works online, including an 18th/19th century manuscript on theology in Kabyle: العقيدة السنوسية. Both collections are also of interest for their many Arabic books, but the Berber ones are particularly significant due to the serious paucity of materials for the study of precolonial Berber writing traditions.

I’ve been drifting away from China in my posts of late, but fear not; it’s a temporary thing.