China has banned the publication of English words. This is old news, but as it's now the most emailed story in my beloved Taipei Times, it seems worth mentioning.
One of the greatest banes of my existence is Englishified Chinese, or English words that Chinese co-opts for its own devices.
One of the problems is that the Chinese characters chosen to represent the English word are picked for sound, and meaning becomes a secondary consideration. For example, 麥當勞 (Màidāngláo), which means McDonald's, but whose individual characters are "wheat", "as", "work" or something like that. Usually when you learn a new Chinese word, you can connect the sound to the meaning to help you understand and learn new words. Here, you have no hope, and a lot of the sound words are not going to appear used for things other than sound.
Another is that they don't really sound much like the English they come from, at least to my ear. Cat and I had laughing fits in news class over 威爾 (wēi ěr), which sounds hilarious, and means Will. That means it's not so easy to guess what the Chinese refers to, to guess what the Chinese equivalent of the English you want to refer to is, or to remember.
For the longest time I had trouble recognizing my own name, Katie, as pronounced by my relatives. It is actually only recently that I figured out what they were saying: 凱麗. 凱 (kǎi), victorious in battle. 麗 (lì), as in beautiful. Which is actually pretty cool. Many Western names sound pretty stupid in Chinese, or are way too long. Additionally, transliterations across regions vary (Taiwanese and Mainland transliterations are often totally different, with Mainland Chinese ones being more true to the original English at the expense of being pronounceable and a reasonable length).
My own approach to obscure characters with unrelated meanings is generally to not spend too much time worrying about it. For class we learned some words like Shakespeare, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Ezra Pound. In general I figure I'm not going to want to talk much about Shakespeare or Ezra Pound in Chinese with anyone who won't just understand me if I just say Shakespeare. Didn't spend too much time memorizing proper nouns, and I can try to sound them out when I encounter them. They are still unavoidable in newspapers, which often do not make any special indication when employing names (no spaces or capital letters, you know), which appear all over the place.
So the CCP's approach is to increase this difficultly, enforcing a policy that means even words that Chinese people think is too much of a mouthful to say/print in Chinese are going to have to be said/printed in Chinese. Goodbye NBA, hello 国家篮球协会 or 美国职业篮球联赛 or whatever you want to call yourself.
Of course, there is also an English Chinese hybrid developing, especially among young people and in popular culture. On talk shows you will hear a lot of Chinese and then one word, like "idea". If you're not expecting it, it's hard to understand when Taiwanese or Chinese people are supposedly speaking English. Once with my cousins friends, they kept saying something I thought was tí or something like that. Turns out they were saying "T" as in "Tom boy". 她很"T" means, she is a Tom boy. Or, 她很"man", means, she's really butch. Except, man is pronounced something like "mēn" and sounds nothing like man. To "K書" means to study (書 is book), though I have no idea what the K stands for. Again, it's English, but it's not English, because I still have to learn it.
So this is also the kind of pernicious influence on the youth that communism is trying to scrub out. I don't really have anything to say about how dumb it is that hasn't been said already. First of all, when the first comparison on everyone's mind is to the French, you know you're being snotty. Let's leave aside the unnaturalness and totalitarian nature of restricting language, a resource presumably employed and created by free human beings in order to express themselves, as China has already proven with the creation and forced employment of simplified characters that this is nothing to hesitate over. (The more Chinese I learn, the more ugly and unnatural most simplified characters look, like flowers ripped from their roots, leeched of natural pigmentation and coated in quick-sanitize plastic). And for that matter, the impracticality, since who cares that most science terms and well-known acronyms and product names come from English, or at least are non-Chinese in origin, like iPod and ECFA and DNA. And CCP and PRC.
I just want to point out that all this talk of sullying the Chinese language and pernicious influences on society and "purity" is representative of an attitude that partially contributed to my not learning Chinese in the first place. That is, it is not unlike the one that led a number of Chinese in my hometown to feel threatened by my half-white presence at Chinese school. But you can just read the announcement yourself. I've provided some necessary vocabulary.
随意夹杂 - to mix and mingle as you please
非中非外 - neither Chinese nor foreign (negative connotation)
纯洁性 - quality of pureness
Happy reading.
In any case, trying to control language is old news, especially in the case of China. Cf. all previous anti-English announcements and policies, as well as their treatment of minorities. I used to find Marinetti and Mayakovsky pretty nauseating, and not just as people, but reading all this blather about not creating or inverting or employing any "non-standardized" words just makes you want to go out and destroy some syntax. And I mean that in a non-fascist way, because this isn't really about Futurism. 莎士比亞 - I mean, Shakespeare - wouldn't last 10 minutes as a reporter for the People's Daily either.
New Year's: cold lights free stuff fireworks in 3D The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time 100R❤C HAPPY 2011 EVERYBODY! school tomorrow!
Katie
