Bai vs Mao Chinese tea terms

Guys,

Please *don't* stop. Substituting personal anecdotes for anthopological study has been a great tradition since Boaz. Keep up the good work.

Seriously, I'd be more interested if somebody -- somebody **Chinese**, if you will -- would take the discussion away from Mao Ze Dong and just explain in detail the naming system common in China today, and how it differs in such places as Hong Kong and Taiwan, if indeed it does. Thanks. I'd be very interested.

Michael

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23: snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

Alex ChaihorskyulYhe.318$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com5/16/05

03: snipped-for-privacy@nowhere.com [Sasha]

Hey, Sasha, I know you. We drank tea together. One thing you *don't* do is "rest your case." BTW, when are you returning to NYC?

Michael

I have no idea but that can happen anytime. And of course for the same sad reason I was there last time - every year on Feb 17. I let you know.

And yes, I am perfectly capable of resting my case! Perfectly! Capable! Yes!

Sasha.

*Mandarin speakers* did it.

And that was not at all the conclusion of the experiment. As far as I know, the Chinese government no longer tries to educate people exclusively in pin yin.

You don't mean "being literate = being able to read aloud".

Avoid comparing the situation when you, a grown-up English speaker, tries to learn Chinese or Spanish as a foreign language and the situation of a child getting educated in his/her language.

I have worked with French children (pre-school and primary school) and I work a little with Japanese ones, of the same ages. They learn to read/write at about the same pace. The children learn the characters much more easily than I would have imagined. This afternoon, I have taken the cell phone of a 8 yr old naughty girl in order to switch it off. You should see the e-mails she writes and the speed at which she selects among already 1000 characters or more. She finds that writing alphabet is much harder, and says that *drawing* characters is funnier than writing. I'm not talking about a genius, just an average kid of the XXIth century.

Kuri

Googling on the issue got this

Mandarin was the only "dialect" of Chinese to develop a full writing form. The source says that Cantonese also had a written form, but most of the other languages didn't (calling them dialects is for political purposes only -- they've got less in common with each other than the Romance languages do, according to what I've been reading).

If one was a Mandarin-speaking Chinese, this all fit better than if one was Shanghainese speaking or Min speaking. Also, Japanese is *not* a Chinese language. It uses some Chinese characters, but the main writing system is different as the language is in a completely different language family:

Japan, like Cherokee, mostly uses a syllabary. The Chinese characters can be used ideographically (as they are when a Cantonese is reading "Chinese" characters based on Mandarin), but mostly the Japanese use a phonetic or syllabic writing technologyﾑderived from Chinese characters much in the same way that Cherokee based its syllabary on symbols used for phonemes, not syllables in the language.

The Chinese languages/dialects are not like Japanese. Japanese is more closely related to Turkish but has some features of Polynesian languages.

If she's Japanese, you haven't proven anything at all about Chinese since the Chinese languages are radically different from Japanese, but there's some sense that the characters might be easier to work in on computers than in pen and ink. They've been simplified, even in China, so that any character can be written with something like twenty strokes.

The Chinese system may be better adapted for computers than it was for metal printing technologies.

Also, if the written Chinese was Mandarin-based, people learning to read characters ideographically rather than phonetically are going to have harder going of it than people who speak the language that the written system was designed first for.

It may be that Mandarin-speaking regions had more literate people than did non-Mandarin areas (the sources I've checked mention about six or seven different languages that are not as close as Spanish, French, and Italian).

Since you're using Japanese language encoding, you're probably talking about Japanese which can use characters but which can also use a phonetic based syllabary.

Quoting from one of these sites:

The Japanese writing system consists of three different character sets: Kanji (several thousands of Chinese characters) and Hiragana and Katakana (two syllabaries of 46 characters each; together called Kana).

Using Japanese as a reference to how printing works in Chinese is less relevant than using Russian as an example of how the Cherokee syllabary works.

Michael,

Did you just **called** me?

:")

This debate should really rest, there's be no end to it! Mydnight has admitted earlier in the posts when he talked the meaning to Mao's name that he was not sure of his translation, and I have responded to his uncertainty by explaining in detail the meaning and genesis behind Mao's name. Not village teachers gave him that name, his family and elders were quite capable enough to provide that. Mydnight says he is has seen the literacy poverty in China, that is, currently now. Things were much different in the years before Mao and the cultural revolution left China in a state of soulessness, which today is still stinging from the aftermath. Ma Jian, the author who wrote a travelogue of his travels into the deep heart of China in the 1980s, said that China is a literary wasteland. In

2002 when he was interviewed, he said the same thing, and added that although Chinese today are more affluent, wealth and a rising standard of living do nothing to alleviate them culturally. On my travels I have come across Chinese holiday makers on group tours, sometimes I help them out with their language barriers, when we fell to talking, Ma Jian's words echo loudly in my head, for it is what I see before me. Everywhere they go, they bring a large pocket of China and Chinese-ness with them, and often pass up on that to embrace what other culture has to offer...wait, I'm digressing...

...The years during the cultural revolution and after, there were many intellectuals who were banished to far our rural villages for correctional works, these people stayed on after the turbulent years. Later in the 70s nad 80s there were also many young intellectuals who willing came to these rural areas to work, and believed that they could propel a change in China, and edcuate these villagers to be future leaders. These probably were the people Sasha came upon in his travels in China.

Mydnight mentioned that if one were to ask 3 Chinese on the interpretation of Mao's name, there will be 3 different interpretations. I don't think so Mydnight, unless these 3 people do not know who Mao is. Mao Ze Dong to many Chinese is still a hero, and the man who brought China into the new era. We were taught his sayings as mottos, and we grew up with the stories of his long march.

The Naming of Names. There isn't much difference between the Chinese in China, Taiwan, Hongkong, Singapore or Malaysia, though some will tell you that there is a subtle difference in the 'nuance' - you can mostly tell if a person is from China, Taiwan, Hongkong or South East Asia by the characters of their name. I tried to speculate on some names I come across, and I don't think it really works...

...however, there is a telling difference between names of today and in the past. Parents, I find, have become unimaginative in giving their children Chinese names, while in the past, names were given for a number of reasons - they could be a hope for the child to grow up healthy, strong, or famous; they could be in remembrance of an ancestor who passed on; they could be names of heroes, leaders, etc; they could even be wordplay...I can only demonstrate to you better in Chinese, so I'll leave it as that here, or one day, when I get the chance to meet up with Michael in NYC.

Danny

Pardon me, I just reread my post and the grammar is atrocious!

:"P

Danny

Danny,

Relax. It's the internet. Grammar ought to be atrocious on the internet. Seriously, the only grammar failures that count are those that render meaning unclear.

Michael

samarkand4289bfe5$ snipped-for-privacy@news.starhub.net.sg5/17/05 05: snipped-for-privacy@uk2.net

....

Kuri (speechless)

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What most likely leaves Kuri speechless is the fact that -- to my knowledge

-- although Japanese has two distinct syllabary sets, it does not "mostly" use them. they serve for particles, other odd uses, and the other set for foreign words.

Michael

Thanks.

At the risk of driving you from aphasia to catatonia, I'm suddenly reminded of an article about the Japanese manga (adult comic book) industry that ran in the _New York Times_ a couple of years ago, I think. The author said that one reason for the popularity of manga was that lots of adults in Japan are only partially literate, in that they haven't mastered several thousand Kanji characters. Is there any truth to this?

/Lew

But comparing Japanese with Chinese is like comparing Turkish with Cherokee.

A friend worked for a Japanese company that insisted on all its employees learning Japanese. Japanese *can* read letters written in romanji, even, since that's what my friend used to communicate with his masters. There's no good equivalent for the Chinese languages.

I've got a net acquaintance who's been living over there for a number of years

Michael,

That tue. But no when me engish read like Ja Ja Binks' talk, no? :")

2 more days to the opening of The Revenge of the Sith! Yeah! It's finally over!

Danny

Sasha was talking about traveling in China in the 1960s -- when the Chinese were still taking lessons from the Russians (one of my fellow students at SUNY-Albany had learned Russian before the Cultural Revolution and a couple of other Chinese graduate students at Albany could speak Russian better than they could speak English when they first came over). From my friend's comments about the Cultural Revolution, it was nasty, but nothing like the Russians under Stalin for pure brutality.

Also, it's nice for us to be sentimental about traditional cultures, but China by the late 19th Century wasn't a free country (Opium War with Britain, American armed protection of missionaries, the failure of the Boxer rebellion, etc.). By the 20th, the most important coastal cities were under foreign control. Traditional culture failed to develop the skills necessary to make China prosperous in trade with the West.

Those of us in the United States couldn't drink Chinese teas until after Nixon normalized diplomatic relations with China, though I suspect Hong Kong imported Chinese teas and relabeled them earlier. I was drinking Keemun in the early 70s.

Flame war sign.

Some of this is reminding me of people who visit one city in the American South and decide that they know more about it than someone who lived in various places both rural and urban for 20 or 30 years.

Everyone is talking about parts as though they were the whole. My guess is that any empire as large as China, with parts that were separate nations longer than Britain's parts were, isn't going to be all one thing.

Mydnight is particularly interested in tea; Sasha appeared to have learned about pu'er from people here, not from his past in China.

One of the things that makes this group interesting is hearing from people who are traveling in tea-producing regions -- India, Africa, China. If the guy in Japan would send some observations of tea-growing there, I would appreciate it better than all the Janking and Old China handing.

It's fairly obvious that the traditions in China went away for a while and may be back for the export market more than they are being revived for local consumption. Having someone on the ground observing is useful. If the Taiwanese maintained their cultural traditions better than Mandarin and Cantonese speaking areas, then that's data worth knowing for a tea-drinking American.

Quick Googling gets this

And this:

I recently (1999?) heard from an officer in the military that textbooks for enlisted men learning how to drive were supplied with furigana on every single kanji in the text. According to the officer, this was because a number of soldiers would otherwise be unable to read them.

Just to add to this; the Mandarian dialect, considered "the standard language" in China and is the Northern dialect. Just to let you know how difficult communication is between the North and the South, in the past many people in the North considered most Southerners as "illiterate" because they could not speak Mandarian. And, you are right about the general literacy level in the Northern Mandarian speaking areas.

It's about language history and change. The further away you get from the "standard", the more change you will have.