I recently posted a list of Chinese character variants and the Taiwanvore blogger posted an additional pair of variants to the list in the comments section – one in very common usage in Taiwan, specifically 裡 (for Cangjie fans that is 中田土) and 裏 (卜田土女). This variant pair is quite a rare example in modern Chinese as both are in regular usage, although according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Education, 裡 is the standard character (正體) and 裏 is the variant (異體).
Continue readingAuthor Archives: ascruffyandscentladenframe
Nothing like a bit of Budaixi after a hard day at work in Wanhua 萬華街頭布袋戲
There was a big celebration going on in in Wanhua (萬華) on Saturday, with people from the local temples dressed up as gods (some of which were eating bento boxes and others sneaking a quick pee in alleys, but well-behaved all in all). As I was cycling home, I saw this Budaixi truck, playing to no one, so I stopped to have a lookey-loo and as no experience is complete without being filtered through the ‘me-machine’ (a description of smartphones in Joshua Ferris’ new book To Rise Again at a Decent Hour – a promising book that didn’t really seem to come to a satisfactory end), I filmed a bit of it. This kind of thing offers a great opportunity to study a bit of Taiwanese, although I’m not sure how useful the vocab is. Below the video is a transcript courtesy of a Pingtung friend, the “x”s mark the bits that even he couldn’t understand. Anyone with a better ear for Taiwanese welcome to comment below to fill in the gaps:
[wpvideo K0iPJVb8]
XXX的信使,到現在一點消息都沒有,我的女兒XXX,女兒不見只好對付(fight)大宋(Song Dynasty 960-1279)官兵,來去(出發)啊~~~ (015~025音樂)
Vocabulary:
使差 or 使俠? (This one isn’t clear but the meaning is 信使 or messenger) it sounds like sú kiap or gia̍p, but can’t be sure. Any help in the comments below would be appreciated. Continue reading
Devils on the Doorstep: Film Review 《鬼子來了》影評
In a phrase: A pantomime until the end, at which point it rushes to satisfy nationalistic appetites.
(Spoilers below)
This film is set in a small Chinese town called Guajia (hang up armor) under Japanese occupation during the second world war. Two prisoners are mysteriously delivered to Ma Dasan, a man who lives in the village, at knifepoint by a stranger who does not reveal his face. Ma Dasan is told to hold on to the two prisoners, a Japanese soldier and a Chinese translator, until “they” come for them and to make sure they don’t escape or die, or Ma Dasan, played by Jiang Wen, will be killed. Slapstick comedy ensues as Japanese soldiers come into the village several times and very nearly discover the prisoners, Ma Dasan is picked by the villagers to kill the two prisoners, but can’t do it so the village sends to the nearest town to hire a professional killer who also fails to carry out the task. All the while the villagers have built up somewhat of a rapport with the Japanese prisoner through the translator, who deliberately mistranslates between the two according to his own best interests. I found these slapstick elements and the “comic” mistranslations all a bit trite and pantomime-like.
The film goes some way to humanizing the Japanese soldier in captivity, as we learn that he is just a farmer like the villagers in Guajia. The slapstick comedy in the film is also divided between Japanese soldiers and the Chinese peasants – with the same actors used to play two hapless Japanese soldiers as play two of the main villagers. The resulting idea that comes across is that these are simply bumpkins playing at war – which is possibly the closest the film comes to a nuanced view of war.
When the villagers draw up a contract with the prisoner, stating that they will return him to his unit in exchange for food for the village, we are presented with the “baddy” of the piece – the unit commander, who is the incarnation of the Chinese (and Western) impression of Japan’s wartime ideology. In a climactic scene in which the unit commander “reveals his true colors” the whole village is slain and burned to the ground while Ma Dasan is fetching his wife Yuer from her mother’s house to get their share of the reward for returning the soldier. While the scenes are not quite as graphic as the bayoneted fetus in Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, there is the murder of the elderly village head, a woman and a young boy and the human side to the Japanese soldier in the village we saw before disappears. The cherry on the cake is when the unit commander stops the Japanese soldier who was taken prisoner from committing seppuku by announcing that he has already received notice that the war was over, but had let his soldiers perpetrate this massacre before telling them. This seemed to be an attempt to fan the flames of Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment and lacked the breadth of nuance of films like The Railway Man which tries to contrast war mentality with post-war mentality, or like the Human Condition (《人間の条件》) film trilogy. In the Railway Man, a man confronts the Japanese translator that was party to his torture long after the war is over and they eventually come to be friends. Human Condition on the other hand documents one man’s journey from enthusiasm and seeing the colonial project as a humane civilizing mission which has been tainted by violent and corrupt officers on the ground to a realization that the problem is with the entire idea of colonialism itself (see more here).
I didn’t feel that this film achieved its goal in this sense, given that this is what Jiang has stated he was aiming to achieve. There are hints that it was trying to, however, for example, as the villagers of Guajia are being killed, there is a broadcast from the Emperor of Japan, announcing Japan’s decision to lay down arms and making reference to the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Another interesting aspect of the film was the portrayal of the Kuomintang (KMT) or Nationalist army. Ma Dasan returns to the local city where the Japanese soldiers are being held in detention after the war and he goes on a rampage with an axe, killing many prisoners. The KMT leader then makes an impassioned speech about how much he too has suffered and compares this to the suffering of Japanese people themselves. When Ma Dasan is executed by Japanese troops on order of the KMT he honks like a donkey when asked for final words. This denouement sets the stage for the Communist takeover of China – as the Kuomintang are seen to be simply pawns of the Allied Forces and overly friendly to the Japanese. That the film portrays the KMT in government during the victory over Japan (albeit as puppets of the allies) and the lack of overt anti-Japanese sentiment among the villagers, who are also portrayed for the most part as ignorant bumpkins, may be why the film was banned.
Overall this film is watchable in the same gung-ho way as many older Western movies on German prisoner of war camps. There is no deeper level of analysis here and it is a bit of a crowd-pleaser.
Score: 2.5/5
I found this Chinese language review from a mainland Chinese viewer online: http://i.mtime.com/liyang5201314/blog/2762633/
When shit flows out of my eyes 流目屎 lâu-ba̍k-sái
One of the more amusing literal translations from Taiwanese is the phrase for crying – lâu-ba̍k-sái, which literally means “flow eye shit.” It’s only really amusing as a foreign language speaker though, as for Taiwanese it’s obviously normal. 不甘/毋甘 (m-kam) is the phrase for 捨不得 in Taiwanese. So the phrase in the Taiwanese song above (愛人的目屎 by 黃克林) means “I can’t bear to see you cry”
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Wanted dead or alive – mysterious character 目+忽
Someone recommended Shi Zhecun (施蟄存) a writer and translator from the 新感覺派 or New Sensationalist Movement in Shanghai in the thirties and forties. I remember looking at some of these writers in a class on Modernism with Lee Ou-fan (李歐梵), and they’re quite cool for the time. While reading I came across a character as shown in blue below:
I’ve tried looking it up and typing it to no avail – Continue reading
Various Variants – Antiquated or Alternate versions of Chinese Characters
I started a collection of variants some time ago on Google Docs, but I gradually forgot about it – would be happy to hear from anyone about variants they have discovered in their language learning process.
Strokes (Original) | Standard Form Character | Variant | pinyin | 倉頡碼 | Unicode | Note |
3 | 以 | 㠯 | yi3 | unknown | u382f | Classical only |
5 | 冉 | 冄 | ran3 | 月一一 | u5184 | |
8 | 姐 | 姊 | jie3 | 女中x竹 | u59ca | |
10 | 挽 | 輓 | wan3 | 十十弓日山 | u8f13 | |
10 | 笑 | 咲 | xiao4 | 口廿大 | u54b2 | |
10 | 鬥 | 鬭、鬬、閗 | dou4 | 中弓口一中、中弓月一中、中弓卜十 | U9B2D, u9b2c, u9597 | found in 齊物論 |
12 | 普 | 暜 | pu3 | 卜廿日 | u669c | |
13 | 群 | 羣 | qun2 | 尸口廿手 | u7fa3 | |
14 | 褒 | 闁 | bao1 | 日弓日弓 | u95c1 | |
15 | 鋪 | 舖 | pu4 | 人口戈十月 | u8216 | 4th tone 鋪 only – both written 鋪 in classical, later 舍 replaced 金 as it reflected the noun’s meaning more accurately |
15 | 璇 | 璿 | xuan2 | 一土卜月山 | u74bf | |
17 | 斂 | 歛 | lian3 | 人人弓人 | u6b5b |
Comment below!
Guide to Taiwanese tones – pitch reference 台語語調
Was flicking through some notes yesterday and found this handy pitch guide for the different tones in Taiwanese – handy in the sense that it may be of use to some people other than pitch deaf me. The first line is the character; the second line is the romanization; the third line is the linguistic description of the kind of tone it is in Chinese along with the number commonly attributed to the tone in superscript (note that fourth tone changes when it ends in a glottal stop or with p t or k); the fifth line represents how the tone changes when used before the final character in a clause. Continue reading
Sing to speak Taiwanese: Verse 2 ‘The hustle and bustle is all a dream’ 會唱就會講台語:〈繁華攏是夢〉第二段
This is a continuation of this post on a popular Taiwanese language song called ‘The hustle bustle is all a dream’. This time I’m going to look at Verse 2 of the song featured below – this is the version by Jiang Hui (江蕙) – a favourite of middle-aged Taiwanese women, and it’s a good one to whip out at KTV:
《天注定》影評 A Touch of Sin Review
A Touch of Sin is a film by Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯). I’ve only seen Platform (《站台》) by him before, so am unfamiliar with the majority of his work. The Chinese title of the film differs from the English title, in that the Chinese means literally, “fate appointed by the heavens,” whereas the English title has a more Christian ring to it, although I read that it is apparently a nod to the English title of a martial arts film called A Touch of Zen (《俠女》).
LKK/老扣扣/洛可可/老硞硞 láu kho̍k-kho̍k Out of touch/ fuddy duddy
LKK/老扣扣/洛可可/老硞硞 láu kho̍k-kho̍k (audio available here) Out of touch/ fuddy duddy
This is an adjectival phrase that most commonly appears using the roman letters LKK . It means old and out of touch and has the sense of being behind the times or of an older order. Surprisingly the roman letters often appear in news articles and novels as opposed to the Chinese characters. This took me by surprise as I thought that using roman letters was usually something quite informal – like the 火星文 that features widely on BBS.
When I asked my coworkers for examples, one of them cited Andy Lau’s attempts at street dancing as LKK.
I also found the following examples on the internet:
為了不讓自己顯得LKK,我決定在生活中多學習新世代用語 (I have decided to learn phrases used by the younger generation, so as not to not appear so out of touch)
from the Liberty Times in which it is used as an adjective.
這屆海峽兩岸圖書交易會將邀請知名作詞人方文山、製作人王偉忠等人出席相關活動,吸引年輕人參加,讓圖交會不再「LKK」。 (Renowned lyricist Vincent Fang and TV producer Wang Wei-Chung, among others, will attend this year’s Cross-strait Book Fair, in order to get young people to attend and to prevent the book fair from being out of touch with the younger generation.)
from CNA, in which it’s used as an adjective.
And this rather more current example from ET Today:
網評/得網路者得天下 屁孩成就國民黨LKK的慘敗 (Social media: Whoever rules the internet, rules the world; the brat generation succeed in defeating the out of touch KMT)
In this last example I had to rearrange the words in the translation, but essentially LKK is an adjective here too, describing it as an “out of touch crushing defeat”.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Photo credit: Politics & 2P