Language, tech stuff, history, and copy on the perils of homeownership.
If you’re traveling in the San Francisco area and you like nature and photography, Point Lobos is a must-visit destination. Point Lobos State Natural Reserve offers the beauty of the Northern California coastline complete with seals, sea lions, otters, and even whales. It is also home to thousands of seabirds.
Continue reading “Point Lobos, a Northern California Nature and Photo Destination”
It’s in lesson 1 of Chinese history courses: The ancient Chinese considered themselves to be at the center of the world, and thus came the Chinese name for the country, 中国 (zhongguo), literally Middle Kingdom.
The character 中 (zhong) is simple enough to understand: a vertical line going through the center of a square.
The center-of-the-world concept hasn’t really stuck, except perhaps figuratively, though zhong is commonly used for “center” today, as in “the center of the room” and “the middle of a sentence.” Referring to the country, zhong has come to mean just “China” or “Chinese.”1
The label “kingdom” is also a little grand for modern-day thinking, since the character is attached to the Chinese names of most countries, including 美国 (Meiguo/America) and 英国 (Yingguo/England).
Other place names with locations or directions are found around China and beyond. China’s capital of course is Beijing (北京)—literally Northern Capital, with 北 for “north” and 京 meaning “capital.”
It isn’t the only capital around. Nanjing (南京), a city well south of Beijing, is literally “Southern Capital,”
and off to the east is Dongjing (东京), or Eastern Capital, a city whose Chinese characters that the Japanese pronounce Tokyo.2
A lot of people still remember Beijing and Nanjing as Peking and Nanking. No actual name change took place; it’s simply that the Chinese government in the 1950s came up with a better way to romanize Mandarin, and the told the world to start spelling things correctly.
Hop east over to Taiwan and you find more locations and directions in names.
The 北 in 北京 (Beijing) is also in the name of another Chinese capital: Taipei.
capital of Taiwan is Taipei
But the train system Liu had mapped out for the island was so good that the Japanese stuck with it. They also stuck with the new capital city Liu on the north end of the island, Taipei, 台北—台 (tai) as in Taiwan (台湾) and北(pei or bei) as in north.4
This is an important distinction since the true cultural center of Taiwanwas in the south, in the city of Tainan, or台南, which means “Tai-south.” The northern end of the island was closer to the Japanese islands and separated from the south. In fact, at the end of World War II, there was still very little development in Taipei.
And four years later the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek set up their new capital in Taipei.
But back to the place in place names, in addition to Taipei (Tai-north) and Tainan (Tai-south) is the central Taiwan city of Taichung (台中，Tai-center), the coastal town on the eastern end of the island, Taitung (台東, or Tai-east), and the little-known village along the western end of the island, Taihsi (台西).
And these are just a few of the locations that appear in Chinese place names.
So while to an outsider, Chinese appears to be an impossibly difficult language, all of this serves as one example of how simply logical it can be. And we see that place is central in many place names.
Footnotes:
1. Chinese signs are still often written right to left in some places. In Taiwan, in what might be termed a Smarter than a Fifth Grader test, a common term for junior high school,国中, is 中国 (China) backward, the 中 here meaning “middle,” as in middle school.
2. In Chinese, most foreign place names are assigned transliterated—or sound-alike—names, as in Niuyue (New York) and Sanfanshi (San Francisco). But Japanese place names, which are written in Japanese kanji (literally, “Chinese characters”), work just fine in Chinese.
3. For further reading, see “Formosa: A Study in Chinese History,” by W.G Goddard, Caves Books.
4. Chinese place names have become confusing when Romanized. Beijing, like all place names on the mainland, are now Romanized with the Pinyin spelling system, a very logical and reliable system. Older systems still have a hold in Taiwan, rendering the capital city台北 as Taipei(rather than Taibei, as it is pronounced). Similarly, Beijingwas formerly known to the world as Peking, just as Nanjingwas known as Nanking.
Names: 中国, 北京, 南京, 东京, 東京, 台湾, 台北, 台南, 台中, 台東, 台西
By John Sailors, johnsailors@storycrest.com
(C) 2012, by Story Crest Press
Mozzarella is for pizza, cheddar’s for burgers, and parmesan’s for pasta, but what the heck do you put hip-hop cheese on?
In what can well be described as a cheesy experiment, Swiss researchers recently carried out a study to see which type of music produces the tastiest cheese. High society, used to pairing cheese plates with classical music, might expect Bach to be the winner, while rock enthusiasts snacking on nachos would put their money on Hendrix. But in fact it was hip-hop that took the top spot.
One challenge to finding the right English slang dictionary is editors and publishers have different definitions of what slang is. Generally speaking, slang is informal English words and idioms, used mostly only in spoken English. Some authorities, however, define slang as language used by people of certain social classes or groups, often mainly within that group (e.g., young people, military, criminals). The collections of entries publishers put out can thus differ greatly.
Continue reading “Better Know Your Dictionaries, Part 5: Slang Dictionaries for Taboo Vocabulary”
Take is a common verb in English: few people ever have to look it up. But check out the many verbs we put together by adding on a word: take in, take out, take on, take off, take up, take down, take over, take under, take back, take aback, take along, take to, take away … These are phrasal verbs and the takeaway is they mix people up a lot.
Also phrasal verbs: look up, check out, put together, add on, and mix up. Adding complexity, many nouns come from phrasal verbs, for example takeaway.
Continue reading “Better Know Your Dictionaries, Part 4: Sizing Up Phrasal Verb Dictionaries”
So you have the dictionaries you need for spelling and definitions, but what happens when you come across a phrase like off the beaten path and wonder, “Is it path or track?” And while we’re on that track, is a person said to be from the wrong side of the track or the wrong side of the tracks? Here you need an idiom dictionary.
Thorns in Your Side
Idioms are phrases whose meanings are not clear from the words they are made up of. And they are not just scattered clichés. A solid idiom dictionary may have 10,000 or more entries including figures of speech, common similes, and phrasal verbs. A quick scan will show that most are, in fact, really common, in both formal and informal uses.
If this sounds like a pain in the neck, imagine being a non-native speaker and wondering why something that’s bothersome causes neck pain.
A homeowners group in California wants to make all lawn mowing illegal in the state, calling the practice an affront to human nature.
The group Save Homeowner Husbands believes it will easily gather enough signatures to get its measure on the ballot before the next state election.
“Pushing a lawn mower back and forth on a hot day when there’s a ballgame on TV just isn’t what humans beings were designed for,” said SHH co-founder Owen Cash. “Not male human beings, anyway. The whole thing just goes against the human grain.”
From Ralph’s Manual of Style:
According to a timeless legend, it so happened that the Angles said only who and the Saxons said both who and whom. When the Angles landed on the southeastern shores of Britain to “colonize” (loot, pillage, etc.) the island, another invading army (the Saxons) was the last thing they expected to find. It complicated things to no end.
Continue reading “Ralph’s Etymology of Whom”From Ralph’s Manual of Style:
The who-whom distinction (or is it whom-who?) is possibly the most brilliant invention copyeditors, grammarians, and English teachers have ever promoted. It has done more to elevate these occupations in social and economic status, toward, say, the stature of the doctor, the lawyer, and the accountant, than anything since the dangling participle.
Continue reading “Who vs. Whom—According to Ralph”
Noah Webster founded a dictionary tradition for American English, giving the country an American standard as opposed to the King’s English, in both word usage and spelling—his blue-backed speller books taught kids spelling for five generations. The Webster brand has long given authority to spelling decisions, even in dictionaries that often disagree with one another. So where are we now on spelling?