Why turkey?

The wild turkey (Meleagris gallopa) is native to North America and was a staple in the Native American diet. In the early part of the 16th century, it was introduced to Europe by the Spaniards via Turkey (hence the name of the bird). Incidentally, Native Americans referred to the bird as "peru".

When the early Pilgrim settlers arrived in 1620, they were introduced to turkey by the Wampanoag tribe. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621 at the request of Governor William Bradford, and the Native Americans were the invited guests of honor. However, since deer meat and wild fowl were very plentiful (as well as duck, goose, lobster, seal, eel and cod) during this time, historians believe those two meats were most likely eaten in lieu of turkey.

Some believe that Queen Elizabeth of 16th century England was eating roast goose during a harvest festival, when she received word that the Spanish Armada had sunk on its way to attack England. She was so delighted that she ordered a second goose to celebrate. Goose was often cooked as a celebratory food for the British. When the Pilgrims came to America from England, turkey was much more readily available than goose and replaced the goose as the meal to eat during the harvest.

Turkey facts:

-Male turkeys are called "toms" and female turkeys are known as "hens".
-A mature turkey has over 3,000 feathers.
-Wild turkeys can run up to 55 miles an hour.
-The heads and necks of turkeys change to blue when mating.

Due to the efforts of Sarah Josepha Dale, on October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that Thanksgiving would be an official holiday in the United States. The proclamation declared the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. 

Why Chinglish Exists

 

In mid August, while researching articles to tweet as a daily part of my job, I read an article announcing that “Shanghai says days of 'Chinglish' are numbered”. The official definition of Chinglish is a variety of spoken or written English that is influenced by the Chinese language.

 

In 2009, Shanghai began the crackdown on the embarrassing, often inappropriate and nonsensical text which appears on signs, on menus and the like. The campaign to eradicate "Chinglish" was also launched in the run-up to Shanghai's 2010 World Expo. Students were sent out to “clean up” the translations. While Shanghai’s translations are better than before, 15% percent of the translations are still terrible.

 

Every morning, while working on my social media management portion of my job, I always comb the Internet for horribly bad Chinese into English translations and wonder how these quirky translations make it onto public signs. Why aren’t they edited by a native English speaker? Simple to do, right? 

My guess is that use of a translation company or localization vendor just isn’t cost-effective for a small business and since the Chinese read the Chinese characters and understand them and most likely do not read the English, it is not important to the business owners to get the English perfect.

Translation vanity may also come into play. Having worked in the localization industry for over 16 years, I often see that translators are not very happy with changed translation. Granted, a lot of changes are preferential and just a different way of saying the same thing with a different choice of words. Perhaps, these translations have been questioned for years but were left as is because the translator “says it is correct”? Perhaps, the feeling of “we can translate it and we don’t need foreigners to assist us” exists? Saving face could be another possibility.

Chinglish may also exist due to the use of online, free, machine translation. If you need to find out the gist of an article or an email that a foreign friend has sent you, it is OK to use machine translation but if you are going to use the translation on an official sign, a menu and the like, it’s a very bad idea.

Some of the translations are also overly “flowery” almost “poetic” English. There are just a few Chinese characters and many, many English words. 

After spending the past year studying Mandarin myself, I do see just how structurally, tonally and dramatically different Chinese is from English, so this can also add to the lack of proper translations. Both are exceedingly difficult languages to master. Both languages are highly idiomatic. When I read a paragraph in Chinese aloud to my instructor, she always me to now translate into English, Chinese-style. This means literally translate, as so: “I not go to teacher’s house 9PM dinner”. Literal translations from Chinese have given us English phrases, such as “long time no see” and “no can do.”

While I am very glad that China is cleaning up their English translations, I will say I will miss them. Reading them is the happiest part of my mornings! And I am sure the Chinese get quite a chuckle out of our bad Chinese tattoos.

The Endangered Languages Project

Language experts estimate that only 50% of the languages spoken today will still be spoken in 2100.  Languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. The Endangered Languages Project is an online resource to research, record, access and share information about endangered languages. It also encourages and supports working to document and fortify these threatened languages.

When a language is threatened, the loss of valuable scientific, social and cultural information is also threatened, very comparable to the loss of a species.  Every time a language dies, we lose quite a bit: the understanding of how humans relate to the world; scientific and medical knowledge; the expression of a community’s life and a vast cultural heritage. 

With the Endangered Languages Project, contributors can upload relevant information about dying languages to the website and reach many different people on many different levels.

While Google oversaw the development and launch of this project (and with its technology, recruited the services of organizations and individuals working to prevent language endangerment in various ways), but the goal, long term, is for it to be led by true linguists and leaders in the field of language conservation and preservation. The project will soon transition to others groups at Eastern Michigan University.  

Some of the endangered languages include Aragonese (a type of Catalan spoken in Eastern Aragon), Koro (spoken in the northeast mountains of India), Navajo and Southwestern Ojibwa (spoken in parts of the US and Canada).

Shanghainese

The Shanghai language or Shanghainese (上海閒話) is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai and the surrounding region.

Considered part of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages and similar to other Wu Chinese dialects, Shanghainese is not easily understandable by Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. 

In the 1890s, due to Shanghai’s blossoming economy, Shanghainese had become an increasingly growing dialect of Wu Chinese. It continued to grow into the 1930s. In 1950, Mandarin became the official language of China.

With approximately 14 million speakers, Shanghainese contains only two tones (high and low) where Mandarin (which is what makes the Mandarin language extremely difficult) contains four different tones. Unlike Shanghainese, both Mandarin and Cantonese are both tonal contour languages where the distinguishing feature of the tones is their shifts in pitch such as rising, falling, dipping, or level. For example, if you say ma with the first tone, it means “mother” but if you say ma with the fourth tone, it means “horse”.

From 1992, Shanghainese use was discouraged in schools and so many children native to Shanghai can no longer speak Shanghainese. Shanghai's emergence as a cosmopolitan city further promoted Mandarin as the official language of business and services.

It is now thought that very few people under 60 years old can speak the original Shanghai dialect and many attempts are being made to preserve the language. Professor Qian Nairong is promoting the Shanghainese language and he has recently reminded people that, "the popularization of Mandarin doesn’t equal the ban of dialects. It doesn’t make Mandarin a more civilized language either. Promoting dialects is not a narrow-minded localism, as it has been labeled by some netizens.”

Here are some Shanghainese phrases (from Omniglot);

English	上海闲话 (Shanghainese)
Welcome	欢迎 (hueugnin)
Hello	侬好 (nong23 hao34) 大家好！(dâka-hô!) - hello everybody 饭吃过伐？ (ve23 qik3 gu5 va1?) - "have you eaten?" (common greeting)
How are you? Reply	侬好伐? (nong23 hao34 va?) 侬过得还好伐？ (non kûteq re-hôva?)
	我蛮好，谢谢 (ngû mhehô, jâja) 蛮好。侬呢？ (me51 hao34. nong2 nak4?)
Long time no see	长远勿看见侬 (ssang2 yyu4 vak2 koe5 ji3 nong1)
What's your name? My name is ...	请问尊姓大名？ (chînmen tzenxin-dâmin) 请问侬信啥？ (chînmen nong2 xin sa?)
	我信 ... (ngû xin ...) 我叫 ... (ngû ciô ..

The United States Foreign Service Institute and its language categorization

According to its official Facebook page, the U.S. Department of State: Foreign Service Institute “develops the men and women our nation requires to fulfill our leadership role in the world affairs and to defend U.S. interests.”

The FSI was founded on March 13, 1947, in compliance with the Foreign Service Act of 1946 passed by Congress. The Director of the Foreign Service Institute is equivalent in rank to an Assistant Secretary of State, and is appointed by the current Secretary of State.

United States Federal Government's primary training institution for officers and support personnel of the U.S. foreign affairs community, the FSI prepares American diplomats and other professionals to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests overseas and in Washington.

At the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center, the FSI provides more than 600 courses in approximately 70 foreign languages to more than 100,000 enrollees a year from the State Department and more than 40 other government agencies and the military service branches.

Organized like a university, it consists of five schools: The School of Language Studies, the School of Applied Information Technology, The School of Leadership and Management, The School of Professional and Area Studies and The Transition Center. 

The FSI has sorted non-English languages into three categories based on the average time it takes an English speaker to achieve general proficiency/fluency in the language.

Category I languages : These languages are the most similar to English and the least difficult to learn, requiring anywhere from 23-24 weeks to learn (Spanish) to 30-36 weeks to learn (German).

Examples are:

French, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Danish, Catalan, Dutch, Norwegian, German

Category II languages: These languages contain significant linguistic or culture differences from English requiring 44 or more weeks to learn.

Examples are:

Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Polish, Russian, Finnish (which is one of the more difficult Category II languages)

Category III languages: These languages are considered the most difficult languages to learn, requiring about 88 weeks of study with about half of that time studying in-country.

These languages are:
Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Taiwanese and Wu.

Chicken Feet, Bubble Tea and Durian: Adventures in Chinatown

A couple of weekends ago, I accompanied my Mandarin teacher and several of her students from other classes to Chinatown in Boston. Having lived in and around Boston for 28 years, I had been to Chinatown every so often but never really spent too much time there.

We arrived at the China Pearl (one of the larger restaurants that has been in business since 1960) for Dim Sum at 11AM. Dim Sum literally means “a bit of the heart”. I had normally thought of Dim Sum as a selection of fried Chinese appetizers. We did not order one fried item although many were passed around. There were steamed dumplings filled with shrimp and bamboo called har gau, many types of baozi (steamed buns-one of the first words we learned in Mandarin was “baozi”) and jiaozi (steamed dumplings of many varieties) and chrysanthemum tea (júhuā chá) was served.  Then, the chicken feet (ji jiao) arrived.

Have fully intended to immerse myself in the Chinese experience all day (most of the shopkeepers speak very little/broken English to add to the authentic experience); I decided to try the chicken feet. They are also eaten in Peru, Mexico and South Africa, to name just a few. Surprisingly, they were quite flavorful but a bit gelatinous. The biggest surprise of the day was to see that the Chinese use jalapeno peppers (Mòxīgē làjiāo) and cilantro in their cooking. That was a very pleasant surprise as those are my two favorites!

The Chinese bakeries reminded me of bakeries found during one of my several trips to Japan, where you commonly see corn, cake and other oddities (for Americans) baked into the bread.

Then it was on to try bubble tea. I had no idea what this was but knew it was very popular in Taiwan. The bubbles are actually small balls of tapioca placed at the bottom of fruit or milk-based tea drink. You are given a large straw and with every sip of your cold tea, two-three of these “bubbles” end up in your mouth. Soft and chewy and not all that pleasant. I tried a pineapple green bubble tea but I saw a sign for durian bubble tea and almost, ALMOST tried it. Durian is a large, spiny, very foul-smelling fruit that is an acquired taste. I will try durian one day but that day was not the day.

Next it was on to a very large, all-Asian supermarket in Quincy (a small city south of Boston). This place is amazing. Rows and rows of Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Taiwanese foods, clothes, house wares, school supplies, etc. Heavenly! There was also a large Asian bakery section selling a variety of desserts and steamed buns and a mini-Chinese takeout section selling authentic Chinese cuisine. Buddhas and Kuan Yins were beckoning to me everywhere! I ended up leaving with very cool bracelet with the prayers for the Buddha written in Cantonese on it and a Kuan Yin hanging protector for my car.

Back to Chinatown after that for an authentic Chinese dinner at Jade Garden. Yes, this was the eating tour of Chinatown! We were served platters of stuffed lobster, beef and vegetables and my personal, favorite, salt and pepper squid. Imagine a lightly breaded calamari (rings and tentacles) lightly sprinkled with salt and pepper with a layer of jalapeno peppers.I will go back just to have this dish again.

All the sights, sounds, smells felt like I was in Beijing for the day. While we didn’t do much conversing in Mandarin (although a lot of Cantonese was spoken by those around us), we did a lot of socializing, learning, talking about why we are studying Mandarin and laughing. I realized that language learning isn't just about learning the words, tones and sounds; it's about learning and absorbing the culture, the food and the customs.

A truly enjoyable experience!

Japan, China, Taiwan and the battle for the Senkaku islands

Earlier this week, I had read that 14 Chinese activists were arrested for placing a Chinese flag on the Senkaku islands. Not fully understanding what this debate was all about, I decided to do some research.

Known as Senkaku in Japanese, Diaoyu in Mandarin and Diaoyutai in Cantonese, there is an archipelago of eight islands being claimed by China, Japan and Taiwan. This archipelago is currently uninhabited and controlled by Japan and is located in the East China Sea (northeast of Taiwan and west of Okinawa). These islands are commonly thought to sit atop oil deposits, and are surrounded by rich fishing grounds. 

The Chinese claim that these islands were discovered during the Ming Dynasty; the Japanese claim that they discovered them in the late 1800s. Japan annexed the islands then in 1895 after winning the First Sino-Japanese War. China feels it was forced to sign the post-war treaty which handed the islands over to the Japanese.

In 1900, a brief attempt to make the island functionable by housing a bonito plant quickly failed; the islands remain vacant.

After World War II, the Senkaku islands were temporarily controlled by the United States. However, China does not recognize this Treaty of San Francisco.

In 1972, the Japanese regained control of the archipelago.

Earlier this year, Tokyo’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara raised three million with the help of private investors to purchase three of the islands. This has reignited the dispute.

Time magazine recently published a report which concluded that Japan needs to “resolve the ownership dispute over a tiny group of islands or risk an honest-to-goodness shooting war with China”. A former prime minister of Japan also said that “Where China sees an unrepentant Japan clinging to a legacy of colonial expansion, Japan sees an arrogant and erratic China once again bullying its smaller neighbors”.

The idea of war between China and Japan in this day and age seems unthinkable but the bigger question is, if it happens, will America get involved?