The Past, the House of Skype, Chinese Etymology, and the Hudson Valley
You turn increasingly to the past, as you age, because it's your own: as the witnesses drop away, it becomes more and more your private preserve. Fewer and fewer people can dispute your version of it. Or care to.
Of course, the more exclusively yours that country becomes, the lonelier it becomes. Nobody new can really go there with you, however polite and obliging they may be.
No. I'm not going to linger in the past. Not a winning game.
It is terribly frustrating, not being able to express myself in the spoken word. I hate it. I'm so stupid. I was on the phone with a stranger, discussing poems, and in fifteen minutes I couldn't express a single sophisticated thought. Approximations, little grunts of approval or disapproval, a tiny tiny repertoire of sentences and phrases. I drop to the level of a kindergartner. What is that?
A plague on the house of Skype. I hate them. Destroying the world in which I can communicate, in which I'm fluent, even.
Oh well. It was a nice moment. I'm glad I was here for it.
Chinese, of all languages, must teem with false etymologies. Every time you write a new word down, you have to guess at its etymology, by choosing among the hundreds of written characters that can represent those syllables. So you'll pick something plausible, and almost certainly wrong, and at once a new semantic history is grafted onto the word. I can't imagine how historical linguists try to do their stuff, with Chinese. Every literate Chinese for thirty centuries has been industriously laying false trails for them.
There comes a moment, when you've left New Haven, and you've been driving west a few hours -- driving through the rolling bumps of New England: little hillocks, which the natives inexplicably call "mountains," and which are every bit as claustrophobia-inducing as the buildings of the cities, because they're all about the same size, and you can never get up, never get your head above the water and get a look at the lay of the land -- there comes a moment when you come up to a ridge over the Hudson Valley, and you can see the great river spread out below you. A vista. And your heart leaps up, because suddenly, suddenly you think it might really be possible that somewhere there is still open country, wild land, places nobody owns or fences. Maybe Oregon is still there. Maybe you can go home.
Showing posts with label Chinese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chinese. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
You Sir Name?
Having so much fun with Chinese. It's a swaggering, arrogant written language. It makes no concessions to human weakness. It's been, for thousands of years, the tool and the proving ground of intellectual elites. It prides itself on being difficult. One of the most striking things about it is its economy. Information is conveyed by one thing and only one thing. For example, there is an ending signifying the plural, but you mustn't use it if you've specified a number. It's "ten horse," not "ten horses." You've already established the number -- why cave in to human frailty and repeat that information by signalling the plural again? That would be a syllable wasted! If someone has not been paying attention, let them pay the price! There's a Strunk & White zeal for omitting needless words, in written Chinese. Such a striking contrast to Indo-European prolixity.
To ask someone their name, you say "nín guì xìng?" Which can translate to a flowery English "what is your respected surname, sir?" But it feels nothing like that. It feels more like "you sir name?" Three single syllables, shot one by one. If you missed the gist of it, too bad.
There is certainly an unpleasant side to this, but it must have been fruitful ground for the writing of poetry. I've picked up my primer of Tu Fu again. My God. If he were the only Chinese poet, it would be worth learning the language to read him.
Having so much fun with Chinese. It's a swaggering, arrogant written language. It makes no concessions to human weakness. It's been, for thousands of years, the tool and the proving ground of intellectual elites. It prides itself on being difficult. One of the most striking things about it is its economy. Information is conveyed by one thing and only one thing. For example, there is an ending signifying the plural, but you mustn't use it if you've specified a number. It's "ten horse," not "ten horses." You've already established the number -- why cave in to human frailty and repeat that information by signalling the plural again? That would be a syllable wasted! If someone has not been paying attention, let them pay the price! There's a Strunk & White zeal for omitting needless words, in written Chinese. Such a striking contrast to Indo-European prolixity.
To ask someone their name, you say "nín guì xìng?" Which can translate to a flowery English "what is your respected surname, sir?" But it feels nothing like that. It feels more like "you sir name?" Three single syllables, shot one by one. If you missed the gist of it, too bad.
There is certainly an unpleasant side to this, but it must have been fruitful ground for the writing of poetry. I've picked up my primer of Tu Fu again. My God. If he were the only Chinese poet, it would be worth learning the language to read him.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Bitten Again
Yes, I've been bitten by the China bug again. Every few years an overwhelming desire to be able to read and write Chinese characters comes over me, and I learn a couple hundred Chinese words, and drill myself endlessly on a couple hundred characters. Then I realize that I'm never going to be proficient in Chinese in this life and give it up, and move on to scrape the rust off one of the languages that I actually do know well enough to read reasonably easily. But Chinese continues to tease and haunt. The characters are so wonderful. The poetry is so old, and so good. Or so I hear. You never really know, with translation, do you? But the dream of being able to read Tu Fu and Li Po in Chinese never really dies.
I love Chinese characters in spite of myself. There's a lot of mystical nonsense still batted around about Chinese, and the nature of the writing system is often badly misrepresented, even by people who ought to know better. People put about the idea that there's a character for every word, which is nonsense. Such a writing system would be beyond most people's capacity to learn in a lifetime. Learn 50,000 symbols, or even 10,000? Even people who have a bump for that sort of thing would find that a tall order. Chinese writing is actually a diffuse, inefficient, and redundant syllabary, with semantic or phonetic hints jumbled in at random. Characters represent syllables, not words. (Except, of course, that some syllables are words. In Chinese, which doesn't have a lot of syllables, most syllables are also words: but of course, most words are not -- and don't let anyone convince you that they are -- single-syllable.) It would have been much better for Chinese literacy if the language radicals had won out, in the 1950s, and an alphabet, or a logical syllabary (in which one syllable gets one and only one representation) had been adopted at the time of the revolution. But I'm selfishly glad they didn't. I love Chinese writing: it's baroque and illogical and inefficient and supremely un-modern.
I expect I'll spin out on it eventually, again, and be ignominiously driven from the field again. But I'm having a great time.
(No, I haven't abandoned the 18th Century and classical music. More on that anon.)
Yes, I've been bitten by the China bug again. Every few years an overwhelming desire to be able to read and write Chinese characters comes over me, and I learn a couple hundred Chinese words, and drill myself endlessly on a couple hundred characters. Then I realize that I'm never going to be proficient in Chinese in this life and give it up, and move on to scrape the rust off one of the languages that I actually do know well enough to read reasonably easily. But Chinese continues to tease and haunt. The characters are so wonderful. The poetry is so old, and so good. Or so I hear. You never really know, with translation, do you? But the dream of being able to read Tu Fu and Li Po in Chinese never really dies.
I love Chinese characters in spite of myself. There's a lot of mystical nonsense still batted around about Chinese, and the nature of the writing system is often badly misrepresented, even by people who ought to know better. People put about the idea that there's a character for every word, which is nonsense. Such a writing system would be beyond most people's capacity to learn in a lifetime. Learn 50,000 symbols, or even 10,000? Even people who have a bump for that sort of thing would find that a tall order. Chinese writing is actually a diffuse, inefficient, and redundant syllabary, with semantic or phonetic hints jumbled in at random. Characters represent syllables, not words. (Except, of course, that some syllables are words. In Chinese, which doesn't have a lot of syllables, most syllables are also words: but of course, most words are not -- and don't let anyone convince you that they are -- single-syllable.) It would have been much better for Chinese literacy if the language radicals had won out, in the 1950s, and an alphabet, or a logical syllabary (in which one syllable gets one and only one representation) had been adopted at the time of the revolution. But I'm selfishly glad they didn't. I love Chinese writing: it's baroque and illogical and inefficient and supremely un-modern.
I expect I'll spin out on it eventually, again, and be ignominiously driven from the field again. But I'm having a great time.
(No, I haven't abandoned the 18th Century and classical music. More on that anon.)
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