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
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!
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
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:
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 (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
I’ve noticed certain interesting irregularities in Chinese fonts. The book I’m reading at the minute (《馬橋詞典》; the edition was originally published by 聯經出版社/Linking Books) in Feb. 2011, and this copy is the second printing) uses the form of the character 感 seen in the top line of the image below, as opposed to the one on the bottom. The character on the top line has a 丿that encloses the entire character, as opposed to the one on the bottom line in which the heart radical at the bottom is separate.
I’ve noticed similar differences in other characters before and was curious if anyone else had spotted any other slight differences that come to mind. Also curious if this is influenced by historic instances of difference in the way the character can be written.
The interesting thing for me as a Cangjie user is that it should technically change the way the character is written in Cangjie, as instead of 戈口心 it should follow the example of 威 (戈丿一女) and be written 戈丿一心, although obviously this is just a font.
Which form do you come across the most in the books you are reading? What are the names of the different fonts that use this form?
The phrase “melter” in Belfast slang refers to someone who prattles on endlessly without seemingly ever saying anything that means anything, hence the phrase, “I’m going to go over there now, you’re melting my head!” Taiwanese has a similar sentiment manifested in the phrase “有的沒的”, meaning “Something and nothing/nonsense/trivialities” which can be used in both Mandarin (you3de5mei2de5) and Taiwanese (ū ê bô ê – audio available here).
The handy thing about this phrase is that you can use the Taiwanese in Mandarin and in Taiwanese, or you can just use the Mandarin if you can’t recall the Taiwanese.
It can be used as a noun or an adjective and I’ve included an example below:
你不要在那邊講那些[有的沒的/ū ê bô ê], 無聊死了！
I wish you’d stop going on about all this crap, it’s so dull!
The ū ê bô ê in question can either be something trivial, or in some contexts gossip, but expresses the speaker’s opinion that they are above gossip.
These are various examples I’ve found on the internet:
看看一堆有的沒的是非問題
有的沒的聊了幾句便睡 *Note – in this phrase 有的沒的 is used as an adverb with the 地 omitted.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Chiang Wei-shui is featured on this 10 yuan piece, the central bank issued it in 2010 in memory of him ( http://www.cbc.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=36863&ctNode=752&mp=2 ) read more about him here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Wei-shui
Warning: there is adult content in this post.
This is Li Ang’s much anticipated follow up to her 1997 book Everybody sticks it in the Beigang Incense Burner (《北港香爐人人插》), which I’ve yet to read. At first glance it is an irreverent look at the misogynistic self-aggrandizement that characterizes the generation of democracy campaigners who rose to fame after being imprisoned in the martial law era in Taiwan, some of whom later formed the Democratic Progressive Party and went into government under former president Chen Shui-bian. The book also deals with the symptomatic nature of the way the February 28 incident and the White Terror continue to manifest themselves in the political arena. Although this might seem a rather obscure or outdated theme, it can give us an insight into the background of the political mindset in today’s Taiwan, particularly in light of the recent Sunflower Movement and the problems in governance that it has highlighted. The attempt to smear the participants of the Sunflower Movement in March and April as violent rioters, for example, is reminiscent of the Kuomintang’s rhetoric against democracy protesters during the 1980s and 1990s that features in the book.
The book centres around the life of Chen Junying (陳俊英) from his youth as a dissident during the Martial Law era, to his slow drift into irrelevance as a retired politician living in the US in his later years. Li Ang goes to great pains in the introduction, stating several times that the character isn’t based on any one person in particular – her protestations are so frequent however that it’s almost as if she’s prompting us to take this denial with a pinch of salt.
Chen feels owed by Taiwanese society and Taiwanese women in particular and he has a mantra that recurs throughout the book which rationalizes his misogynistic behavior:
(My translation) He was forever the one being let down, it wasn’t just the Taiwanese people who owed him, didn’t Taiwanese women owe him too‽ So it was natural for him to sleep with a good number of women when he came out of jail.
The book can be read as a satire up to a point and parts of it are quite funny, recalling the satirical bite of Wang Chen-ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You /《玫瑰玫瑰我愛你》, like the protagonist’s assumption that he will ejaculate more than other men because of the years he spent in prison, and because he thinks so much of his own masculinity:
(My Translation) She discovered that Chen Junying was excessively liberal with toilet paper after making love. When he climaxed, he didn’t leave that much ejaculate in her (his sperm wasn’t particularly greater in volume than other men, nor did it smell fishier), and not much of it would drip out of her vagina after they’d finished, so one or two sheets of toilet paper would have been enough to absorb it all. He would grab a handful of tissue from the box, however, and pass her a pile, watching her as she meticulously wiped herself clean of any trace until all of the tissue was used up.
In the same vein, Chen takes a very chauvinistic attitude during sex, as, despite being reviled as a dissident by many women in his youth, he still finds time to grumble about the only girl who is willing to get together with him, and treats her with scorn, viewing her status as the product of a “mixed marriage” between a mainland soldier and an aborigine as below his – with a lot of his fellow dissidents using the phrase 「無魚蝦也好」 (bô hî, hê mā ho – If there’s no fish, you can make do with shrimp) to tease him
Continue reading