APPARENTLY THE BlogChina system is being upgraded, and they're in the process of testing how well the migration will proceed. Little things have already started to happen - posts are all listed under the "Life" category, for example.

The new test system has some nice features (freely editable CSS files, for one thing), but others aren't so hot. One of the reasons I chose BlogChina over BlogCN was that the text display here wraps English text correctly; the BlogCN processing software puts non-breaking spaces between every word, making things impossible to read. Well, the new system appears to be taking a step backward (in fact, many of the features are nearly identical to those at BlogCN), so it remains to be seen whether I will have to find another solution.

And since the test system has dropped two of my posts, I probably won't be updating for a while. Check the RSS to hear when things change.

UPDATE: The categories are back, and there's a bit more info on the update, so I've decided it's safe to continue posting. That, and I have a few more chapters of Journey to the West translated, so why not put them up, eh?

IN REPORTS ABOUT the death of the pope, the mainland Chinese media refers to John Paul II as 约翰·保罗二世, using the standard phonetics Yuēhàn for John and Bǎoluó for Paul. Within the Chinese Catholic Church, however, the former Pope was known as 若望保禄二世, in which John is transliterated as Ruòwàng, and Paul as Bǎolù, following the Catholic tradition for apostolic names.

    John has three common transliterations. 约翰 is used in the Protestant church for the Evangelist and the Baptist, and it is the most common form in everyday use (约翰·穆勒 is John Stuart Mill, for example). 若望 is used in the Catholic church for the Evangelist, saints, popes, and practically everyone except John the Baptist, who gets called 若翰, Ruòhàn.

    In general, the Chinese transliterations of western names follow the Protestant model, since Protestant missionaries arrived with the influx of western culture during the 19th century. The earlier Catholic forms did not gain much currency, although they are still used within the Catholic church itself.

    To make things more confusing, the roster of saints' names was revised, giving every Catholic saint an older, closer approximation, and a newer form that is limited to two characters per word. St. Thomas Aquinas was originally called 圣多玛斯·阿奎那, but this has been revised to the much pithier 圣道茂. These new names are not much used, at least in my experience.

    One interesting Protestant transliteration that was not widely adopted is 阿拉法 (ālāfǎ) for alpha ("I am the alpha and the omega..."). Here, the choice was made to keep the [l] sound at the cost of introducing an extra syllable. The standard form is 阿尔法 (ā'ěrfǎ), which follows the convention of using an "er" element to represent a syllable-ending [l] sound. To my ears it sounds more natural; 阿拉法 calls up late Palestinian leader Arafat (阿拉法特).

Addendum: The Beijing News runs its coverage of the Pope's death under the headline 《罗马教皇保罗二世去世》, or "Pope Paul II Passes Away," 534 years too late.

爱责仁德 = 投降?

I PICKED UP an old collection of Cordwainer Smith storis (The Best of Cordwainer Smith) the other day, and ran across the following anecdote in the forward, by J.J. Pierce:

While in Korea, Linebarger masterminded the surrender of thousands of Chinese troops who considered it shameful to give up their arms. He drafted leaflets explaining how the soldiers could surrender by shouting the Chinese words for 'love,' 'duty,' 'humanity,' and 'virtue'--words that happened, when pronounced in that order, to sound like 'I surrender' in English. He considered this act to be the single most worthwhile thing he had done in his life.

Linebarger here is Paul Linebarger, the real name of Cordwainer Smith. The Chinese words mentioned are probably 爱责仁德, pronounced "ài zé rén dé," a fair approximation of the English. I'd like to see a copy of the original pamphlet.

Linebarger spent part of his childhood in China and was godson to Sun Yatsen, who gave him his Chinese name. This is given in most places as Lin Bah Loh, with the gloss "Forest of Incandescent Bliss". He later used this as a pseudonym in the form "Felix C. Forrest". I can't find the characters given anywhere, but I'd assume his name was 林白乐, Lín Báilè. When mentioned in Chinese these days, his name is given exclusively in a phonetic approximation: 考德维那·史密斯 (only an approximation because "Cordwainer" ought to have the pronunciation 考德那).

As far as I am aware, his science fiction has not yet been translated into Chinese.

ONE OF THE candidates for recognition as the earliest piece of modern Chinese fiction is One Day 《一日》 by Chen Hengzhe (陈衡哲). Published in US Foreign Students Quarterly 《留美学生季报》 in the summer of 1917, this short story predates Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman by one year. Chen, who was at the time studying in the US in the first class of the same Qinghua program Shen Youqian was part of, describes one day in the life of students at a women's college.

   I was unable to find a copy online, so I have uploaded a version typed from a facsimile edition of the 1928 printing. Apart from using simplified characters and regularizing the third-person pronouns, most of the other printing irregularities remain (both 么 and 吗 are used, as are 吧 and 罢). Be aware of possible input errors.

   Hu Shi, editor of the Quarterly and admirer of Chen's poetry, writes in his forward to her short story collection Raindrops, "When we were still discussing the question of New Literature, Sophie had already started writing literature in the vernacular. One Day then is the earliest piece to come out of the first period of the discussions of literary revolution." Lacking the social commentary and pure shock value of Diary of a Madman, Chen's One Day was far less influential than Lu Xun's story and is now frequently overlooked. Then, of course, there is the subject matter (American college life), the main characters (American students), and the author herself (a woman), all of which would make for a rather less spectacular start to modern Chinese literature. In an introduction to the story, Chen writes that "it has neither structure nor goal, so it can only be called a kind of description, not a story." These words have been accepted at face value, although Lu Xun's alternative is not strictly a story, either.

   The piece itself is a simple read; it has been translated in Writing Women in Modern China: An Anthology of Women's Literature from the Early Twentieth-Century, edited by Amy D. Dooling and Kristina M. Torgeson (I have not read this version), so I will not do so here. Notable, however, is a scene in which one of the school's Chinese exchange students finds herself in a situation many westerners in China will recognize:

(Note: Chen is writing English dialogue in Chinese, and all of the names but Zhang's are translated phonetically from English. Retranslating back into English is non-trivial, especially given the fall in popularity of many of the names of that era (Eunice?). So if anyone can suggest name that corresponds to 贝田 better than "Patience", please let me know.)

   The scene continues in a familiar way, with a request for Chinese instruction. Ms. Zhang responds by teaching Emily a few sentences of Shanghainese (which Emily butchers horribly); I cannot decide if this is out of spite, or if it really is her native tongue:

爱米立："请你教我几句中国说话，好吗？"
张："很好。比如你见了人，你就说，'侬好拉否？'"
爱米立："这个很容易，'侬豪拉否'。还有呢？"
张："他就说，'蛮好，谢谢侬'。"
爱米立："'妹豪，茶茶侬'，对吗？"
张笑："差不多了。"
爱米立跳起，高声说："我会说中国话了，你们听哪，'侬豪拉妹豪茶茶侬'。"

   Chen Hengzhe went on to write several more short stories, new-form poetry (including a response to Diary of a Madman called They Say I've Gone Crazy), and dozens of essays. She also wrote a history of the West from a feminist perspective （《西洋史》） as well as several volumes of literary histories. In addition to One Day, several of her essays and a delightful fable called The West Wind have been translated into English.

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE against the chart below. These are all common words; most of them fall in the basic set for primary school learners (no. 14 is a bit more obscure, so I've provided a compound). Answers are provided at the end of the article, although individual characters will be discussed in the text.

So, how'd you do? Not too great, huh? I put this quiz together and I still have trouble with some of them. If the winds of history had blown in a slightly different direction, however, every last one of them would be recognizable on sight.

   The first round of simplification of Chinese characters is well-documented. Put into practice in 1956 and 1964, it caused the break between the mainland's writing system and that of the overseas community. Less well known is the second round of simplification, a draft of which was published in 1977, but which was repealed in 1986. There are several books in print that discuss this plan, but any reference to it on the web takes the form of the second half of the previous sentence. Since I have not been able to find a full list online, I've taken the liberty of scanning in the relevant pages from 第二次汉字简化方案 (the quality's not so great because the pamphlet is non-circulating - I had to scan a rather poor photocopy).

   The characters in the quiz all come from that draft. Some of them may be familiar - the first three, in fact, are quite common on rough, hand-lettered signs despite government campaigns urging standard characters. "早歺" can be seen on the door of a shack selling breakfast buns, "禁止仃车" spray-painted on a metal garage door proclaims "No Parking", and 亍 points out roads on sketched maps. Each of these characters has an older meaning and pronunciation that is simply overlooked in this folk usage: 歺 is a variant of 歹 "evil", 仃 is used in 伶仃, "solitary", and 亍 is used in 彳亍, "walk slowly". Number ten, also a folk simplification, is more widely accepted (visited Hong Kong recently?), since its base meaning, "chew" is similar to the borrowed meaning, "mouth".

   Other characters resurrect historical usage. 厶 is an ancient form of 私, "private", and 坣 is an ancient variant of 堂, "hall". 迊 is an ancient variant of 币, "coin", but here it takes its inspiration from a calligraphic form of 迎, "greet" (this usage is quite common on banners). Character 27 is based on a script form of 真, and character 28 is a regularized script form of 青.

   Characters that somehow escaped simplification under applicable rules during the first round are addressed here. The script form of 這 became regularized as 这 in 1956, so here the framers understand that 言 simplifies t文, and reduce 信 to 伩. Likewise, 套 contains 長, which was previously simplified to 长, so the secondary result is character 19.

   The 1977 plan is much more ruthless in its phonetic substitutions, eliminating wholesale those components that no longer have a phonetic relationship with modern Chinese pronunciation. Compare character 32, with 干 (gān) as a phonetic, against the original, 感 (gǎn), phonetic 咸 (xián). Or number four, 辺 (dào), phonetic 刀 (dāo), against 道, phonetic 首 (shǒu).

   Where the first simplification was basically a reduction of strokes, this round turns its attention to needless semantic components. The "radicals" in Chinese characters often have little relationship to the current meaning, anyway, so when the meaning of a certain sound is evident from context, why not do away with useless strokes? Thus 葫猢蝴糊 (hú) all reduce to the phonetic component 胡, and 菜蔡 (cài) reduce to a single character with a simplified phonetic [艹才] (see the second character of 14). Note that not all characters with identical pronunciation are so conflated; 湖, "lake", retains its original form, probably because the semantic component 氵 "water" is closely related to the meaning.

   Some results defy explanation. Character 18 is a simplification of 部, through what tortured logic I cannot fathom. And the prize for most obscure goes to character 20, whose traditional form is 器. The glyph itself only occurs one other place, as part of 临, the simplified form of 臨. There is perhaps a chain through 吅, but it remains one ugly character.

   Of course, ugly is relative. The entire Unicode Ideograph Extension is immense (check out the 方正超大字符集; it includes both A and B), and when I open up a character browser I often lose my way, sidetracked by the marvelous, strange, and incomprehensible. Some of the characters I can guess at - some are ancient seal forms recast in modern angular strokes, others are taken from handwritten variants. Finding alternative characters for my name is a great time-waster.

   The goal of all this is to allow scholars of Chinese to discuss historical tetragraphs in print without resorting to the ugly graphical representations I used in the quiz. Apparently this means that the slip of the woodblock-carver's chisel gets a slot, as does the effort made by a calligrapher who had just a bit too much to drink. And there is someone somewhere who will not be satisfied until there is space enough for the entire 千寿图, 万福图, and 亿操图. In a fine slice of irony, the "Four Dragons" character, cited in a footnote in John DeFrancis as an extreme example of why the current written form of Chinese is needlessly difficult and unlikely to work well in a computerized age, has been granted a slot at the far end of extension B.

   Scholars using Unicode will find themselves able to discuss the length and breadth of China's Glorious Five-Thousand Years of history, and yet there is one period about which they must remain silent: the vast majority of the characters in the 1977 simplification draft are simply not present. The first sixteen characters in the quiz are all present in a full Unicode font, although 13-16 are in the Extension space. The remaining sixteen I pieced together with eudcedit.

   The sinograph section of Unicode has always been a hotbed of political controversy, mostly in the form of nationalism on the part of Japan and the traditional-simplified struggle among China and her outlying regions. I suspect our situation here is much the same, whether through active efforts to exclude the characters, or a simple indifference. With electronic composition and transmission, scanning and indexing integral parts of current-day research, this decade-long orthographic experiment is as if it had never even existed.

   Or perhaps not entirely. A friend of mine who was in school during the proposed second simplification still uses many of these forms in her casual writing, and I'm sure she's not the only one.