I don't mean to interrupt my intrepid investigation of my Chinese studies long. I only write to say that today I touched a student's booger. It was Gary's booger. He's new and slightly loose-hinged. Because he is exceedingly naughty one of the first days I told him to stand up and put his hands on his head. He did this until he cried that he had to go to the bathroom, so I told him, grumpily, to go. Twenty minutes later, at the very end of class, Gary slips in with this slightly bemused look upon his face, sort of like a raccoon that has just crawled out of a garbage bin. I was not happy.
Today I told the students to crowd around Ol' Uncle Joe because I was going to tell them a story. As is the case, half of the kids make a mad dash toward the front blue line, and the other half look disinterestedly at the ceiling and I'm not sure if they don't care or if they didn't understand the summons. This time Gary squirming in the front-row looked up shocked. He held his finger aloft with a mysterious golden-brown substance on the tip. "Teacher Joe!' exclaimed, and then he spoke a word that he repeated twice that I thought sounded like the Chinese for "dirty." I guess I wasn't really thinking a darn thing, but my mind didn't associate the glistening substance with anything. I thought at first he had been stabbed by a floor splinter (of which there are none in my classroom) for his face was so stammered and astonished--entreating. I bent down and tried to examine it, which in practice meant plucking it up. Only it didn't come off. Instead, a golden strand of moisture joined my finger.
Of course, it was a booger. I told him to go get a tissue--which had probably been what he was entreating me for, and I followed him. As he walked away, I heard him chuckle, bemused, and say, "Teacher Joe touched my booger." And I had.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
A Word on Chinese
Recently I have taken the opportunity at lunchtime to learn a few phrases of Taiwanese, a language I’m not necessarily interested in learning besides the fact that it is commonly used here and very distinct in utterance. I’m a little confused, but it has no written counterpart of its own. Rather, it shares the Chinese characters, using different sounds but otherwise sharing syntax. In this way, it’s rather not too hard to get the hang of—one simply has to learn a substitution of sound for any given meaning. The phrase for, “I don’t understand” for example is the same in both languages, “listen/not/understand.”
In these short language sessions with our mostly Taiwanese-speaking cook, I discovered that I rather enjoyed it more than I ever thought I would. The reason for this joy was simply that I had never expected to learn ANY Taiwanese in my stay here (rather choosing to focus entirely upon Mandarin) and that learning anything was a lot more than I had ever expected to do. Furthermore, this off-handed inclination to learn another language on the side seemed to validate, not diffuse, my capacity in Mandarin. Learning a second sound to any given meaning seemed to reconfirm the first, and push it further back into the recesses of my mind, fortifying it with one more layer of complexity, making it a stain that much harder to remove through the years that might come of not speaking any Mandarin at all.
These discoveries and considerations led me to observe more thoroughly my progress so far in picking up Chinese, my methodology, and my discoveries along the way, which have been, prior to now, taken for granted. As I would have found these things interesting from the outset, knowing little of the language, I thought it profitable to set down a general sketch of the characteristics of the language as I now find them both as a object of interest to those who may have no understanding of the language and as a record of my progress to this point, as I may look back at a later time with some curiosity as to what I thought with still such an incomplete perspective.
Most people know that Chinese characters are only obliquely pictorial in nature; that the language evolved from a system of pictures and that there are some characters that still evoke in their form the object that they represent in meaning. These forms as we now receive them are only vaguely suggestive to the ancient pictographs that they might have one time actually represented. Indeed, the vast majority of the characters have no dimension this way at all (the vast majority of words in any language having no visual correlation anyway). But in some cases, the romantic or creative mind will find suggestion in shapes 日(ri) and 月(yue) to represent, respectively, the sun and moon. And occasionally a rare word does a superb and intricate job at representing its object; 龜(guei), being a turtle.
Yet to think, because of the ancient style of the characters, that the language itself is primitive would be to vastly underestimate the importance of various language forms and the various functions they hold. Pictographs, for example, (and as my dad recently explained in a letter recalling sections from, The Spell of the Sensuous) serve a highly important function in trade nations (like China), whereby parts can agree on a common representative script while still maintaining their indigenous dialects. This is analogous in our portion of the world to the sign/hand language used by Native Americans across the country.
Similarly, written Chinese is employed for several different dialects all of which are as dissimilar to the ear as German and English. And, while not pictographs any longer, the characters do retain a nature of that past, maintaining a more intimate meaning-to-form relation than an alphabet-based language (completely divested from meaning through form). The system that I am alluding to is that of radicals. Radicals, though not visually correspondent to the world around, provide a system, stylized and exclusive, that has no real correlation in English. (The closest thing in English I feel is our etymology; seductive though I find that in how far and ancient you can make a word feel—a word otherwise whimsical and insubstantial, giving it foundation and denotive meaning—radicals and etymology are not the same, only sharing in their nature of being vestiges of the past.) For radicals, in a way, have replaced images with a more abstract method of representation (in the way that an alphabet is abstract to meaning, pertaining only to sound), but in nature and spirit work in the same way as pictographs.
Sometimes radicals seem daunting to explain, but in short, they usually begin as characters themselves (水-water 火-fire 手-hand 心-heart/mind 人-man, to name just a few of the most common), which later in simplified forms fit into other, larger, more complex characters. Often words will have two radicals or three, and sometimes radicals can be so large themselves that they dwarf the rest of the word. (A word is suggested in its size by how many pen strokes it takes to create it—most radicals being two to six, while any given word is usually around 10 to 20. The turtle (龜) for instance is an extreme instance of a large radical, sixteen strokes, and stands on its own as its own word; it stands as one of the last words in my dictionary, a collection that organizes all of its words in order of brushstrokes, beginning with the words that contain the simplest radicals to those with the most complex.)
When radicals are combined to words, often times I notice that the sound is not changed (or only changed slightly) and yet meaning is specifically turned to the quality of the radical. For example, 泡 (pao4) with three dashes upon the left as the “water” radical has the meaning, “bubble.” The word 炮 is phonetically identical yet has instead of the “water” radical the “fire” radical, changing the meaning and visual representation to “fire-cracker.” (Note, too, the word’s onamonapea that fits for both meanings.) A third manipulation, with the “hand” radical in place of the “fire” radical, changes the sound (bao4) and meaning, “hug.” In short, radicals may act as visual clues within the written aspect of Chinese that suggest its meaning (clues that may not be present in the oral Chinese). These clues may betray a cultural prejudice of meaning; by what radicals compose which words, one may be able to attempt to identify what characteristics seem most relevant to any object or idea’s identity. In this way, radicals are like English etymology. Yet because they portray a visual system exclusive to the written script (that is not represented in sound) I find them entirely different in nature.
In these short language sessions with our mostly Taiwanese-speaking cook, I discovered that I rather enjoyed it more than I ever thought I would. The reason for this joy was simply that I had never expected to learn ANY Taiwanese in my stay here (rather choosing to focus entirely upon Mandarin) and that learning anything was a lot more than I had ever expected to do. Furthermore, this off-handed inclination to learn another language on the side seemed to validate, not diffuse, my capacity in Mandarin. Learning a second sound to any given meaning seemed to reconfirm the first, and push it further back into the recesses of my mind, fortifying it with one more layer of complexity, making it a stain that much harder to remove through the years that might come of not speaking any Mandarin at all.
These discoveries and considerations led me to observe more thoroughly my progress so far in picking up Chinese, my methodology, and my discoveries along the way, which have been, prior to now, taken for granted. As I would have found these things interesting from the outset, knowing little of the language, I thought it profitable to set down a general sketch of the characteristics of the language as I now find them both as a object of interest to those who may have no understanding of the language and as a record of my progress to this point, as I may look back at a later time with some curiosity as to what I thought with still such an incomplete perspective.
Most people know that Chinese characters are only obliquely pictorial in nature; that the language evolved from a system of pictures and that there are some characters that still evoke in their form the object that they represent in meaning. These forms as we now receive them are only vaguely suggestive to the ancient pictographs that they might have one time actually represented. Indeed, the vast majority of the characters have no dimension this way at all (the vast majority of words in any language having no visual correlation anyway). But in some cases, the romantic or creative mind will find suggestion in shapes 日(ri) and 月(yue) to represent, respectively, the sun and moon. And occasionally a rare word does a superb and intricate job at representing its object; 龜(guei), being a turtle.
Yet to think, because of the ancient style of the characters, that the language itself is primitive would be to vastly underestimate the importance of various language forms and the various functions they hold. Pictographs, for example, (and as my dad recently explained in a letter recalling sections from, The Spell of the Sensuous) serve a highly important function in trade nations (like China), whereby parts can agree on a common representative script while still maintaining their indigenous dialects. This is analogous in our portion of the world to the sign/hand language used by Native Americans across the country.
Similarly, written Chinese is employed for several different dialects all of which are as dissimilar to the ear as German and English. And, while not pictographs any longer, the characters do retain a nature of that past, maintaining a more intimate meaning-to-form relation than an alphabet-based language (completely divested from meaning through form). The system that I am alluding to is that of radicals. Radicals, though not visually correspondent to the world around, provide a system, stylized and exclusive, that has no real correlation in English. (The closest thing in English I feel is our etymology; seductive though I find that in how far and ancient you can make a word feel—a word otherwise whimsical and insubstantial, giving it foundation and denotive meaning—radicals and etymology are not the same, only sharing in their nature of being vestiges of the past.) For radicals, in a way, have replaced images with a more abstract method of representation (in the way that an alphabet is abstract to meaning, pertaining only to sound), but in nature and spirit work in the same way as pictographs.
Sometimes radicals seem daunting to explain, but in short, they usually begin as characters themselves (水-water 火-fire 手-hand 心-heart/mind 人-man, to name just a few of the most common), which later in simplified forms fit into other, larger, more complex characters. Often words will have two radicals or three, and sometimes radicals can be so large themselves that they dwarf the rest of the word. (A word is suggested in its size by how many pen strokes it takes to create it—most radicals being two to six, while any given word is usually around 10 to 20. The turtle (龜) for instance is an extreme instance of a large radical, sixteen strokes, and stands on its own as its own word; it stands as one of the last words in my dictionary, a collection that organizes all of its words in order of brushstrokes, beginning with the words that contain the simplest radicals to those with the most complex.)
When radicals are combined to words, often times I notice that the sound is not changed (or only changed slightly) and yet meaning is specifically turned to the quality of the radical. For example, 泡 (pao4) with three dashes upon the left as the “water” radical has the meaning, “bubble.” The word 炮 is phonetically identical yet has instead of the “water” radical the “fire” radical, changing the meaning and visual representation to “fire-cracker.” (Note, too, the word’s onamonapea that fits for both meanings.) A third manipulation, with the “hand” radical in place of the “fire” radical, changes the sound (bao4) and meaning, “hug.” In short, radicals may act as visual clues within the written aspect of Chinese that suggest its meaning (clues that may not be present in the oral Chinese). These clues may betray a cultural prejudice of meaning; by what radicals compose which words, one may be able to attempt to identify what characteristics seem most relevant to any object or idea’s identity. In this way, radicals are like English etymology. Yet because they portray a visual system exclusive to the written script (that is not represented in sound) I find them entirely different in nature.
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