32 - Fallen Leaves: The Chinese Languagues

607 turns

• linkHedvig Skirgård - While we were hanging out, Daniel and I were arguing about the title for the episode.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So I want it to be called "The Chinese Dragons" because I think that's really cute.Like that the many languages are like little dragons.But Daniel is for something a bit simpler like "Chineses" or something "Chinese Languages" or something
• linkDaniel Midgley - I don't know what I like anymore
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What do you guys think?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:I don't have any preference.So it's all good to me.LAUGHTERSorry I really bad at, you know, create names.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Titles are hard!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - INTRO MUSIC
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hello and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics:the science of language.My name is Daniel Midgley.And with me now...she speaks Swedish, English, German, Samoan, and possibly some other languages, but she still gets annoyed when people ask "How many languages do you speak?" It's Hedvig Skirgård.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Thank you very much for the introduction.I have to issue a small correction.I've changed my personality.I no longer get annoyed at this question.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yay!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I actually happen to think it's a good question.I think linguists that know more languages are often better linguists.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I threw that in there a bit presumptuously because linguists often do get annoyed.But have you noticed that the tide is turning people are like, "yeah, you know what, that's not a terrible question." And people should...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's not a terrible question
• linkDaniel Midgley - No.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - and maybe it's a bit presumptuous to think that a general lay person would know that much about linguistics to know that that's a weird question.Like, of course it's a good question.Your work is about languages.Someone's interested in you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And being able to engage with that question meaningfully to a lay person is a really useful thing.And I think every linguist should have a response available.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, exactly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yep.All right.We are also joined by two very special guests.Hedvig, would you mind introducing them, please?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes, I've gotten some training in doing the names.So first of all, we have Dr.Ye Jingting who is joining us today who has just defended her PhD thesis on the typology of adjectives in the world's languages at the University of Leipzig.CLAPPING
• linkDaniel Midgley - Good job!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Hi, everyone.My name is Jingting.I do research on linguistic typology.And basically, I compare languages all over the world and doing a large scale language comparison in order to find some universal patterns behind the linguistic diversities in the world's 7000 languages.I'm a junior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution.And I work with Hedvig in the Grand Bank project.
• linkDaniel Midgley - All right
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Exactly.And we also have a second guest here.We have Wu Mei-Shin.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:Yeah
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I hope I did that okay.We practiced that before and I think I screwed it up a little bit still.I'm very sorry.My Mandarin is not what it used to be.And she's a doctoral student also at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at ...well at the Science of Human History Max Planck and the Evolutionary Anthropology Max Planck, I believe.And she works on computer-assisted language comparison, mainly in East Asia.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:Yeah.Hi, everyone.My name is Mei-Shin.The surname is Wu.So I use computer to analyze historical linguistic data.I focus on Sino-Tibetan languages.Also Hmong-Mien languages in Southeast Asia.Yeah, that's all I can say about meLAUGHTER.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No,
• linkDaniel Midgley - If you don't mind me asking, what's in your language background?Obviously, English.What else have you got?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:I speak a little bit of German.Maybe A2 level or B1, sometimes being ambitious E1.I speak Mandarin, so Taiwanese Mandarin.I speak Min language, so Taiwanese Min language, but I'm out of practice, so I probably can't speak it so fluently now.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, we're very grateful for both of you for coming on and sharing with us your breadth of experience into the various languages that we group under one umbrella, and we call Chinese.Maybe we shouldn't group them like that.So maybe during this show, you can help us by helping us figure out some of the differences and basically where the Chinese languages are going.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It'll be very interesting.I should also say this is a personal favorite topic for me.So I prepared lots of lots and lots of question for Mei-Shin and Jingting
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - and I've had to really restrain myself to constrict it.So maybe if our listeners like this, and they send in more questions, we'll do another show some other time on similar topics.For now we'll do as much as we can within the space we have.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Now, before we get to the news, our last two episodes were bonus episodes for our patrons.One was with Helen Zaltzman of "The Allusionist" podcast where she helped us answer our mailbag.And the other one, just gone was a cozy chat with Grant Barrett of "A Way with Words" where he helped me go through an entire episode of Words of the Week, and it was great!Me and him, nerding out over words.It was fun.If you are a Patron, you get to hear all of our bonus episodes depending on your level.You can also maybe join us on our Discord channel.You can get mentioned on the end of the show.Sometimes we just invite all of our Patrons regardless of level to join us to do stuff like live episodes.Or last week, we all hopped online and play Blabrecs, and it was really, really fun.And of course, our yearly mailout which goes to all of our Patrons.So if you want to help support the show, and keep us going, you can by going to Patreon and signing up as a patron we are Because Lang Pod.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And we should say Ben isn't with us this week.But we are going to do the episode nonetheless.And we're going to now go to news in the worlds of linguistics and the week gone past.
• linkDaniel Midgley - CHUCKLEThank you.Wow, that sounded very Ben-like
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I'm gonna try my best to be Ben for this episode.It's gonna be a struggle.I know it's big shoes to fill.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - ATTEMPTING BEN ACCENTHey, wait a minute.How come you always get to be Ben?I want to be Ben.I want to be the audience surrogate because I know nothing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but we really need you to be the person keeping us on track.
• linkDaniel Midgley - DISGRUNTLED NOISE
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I really really need that because I can't be Daniel.I can't do that.So I'm sorry.I'm gonna have to be Ben.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, if you're gonna be Ben, then I get to be Hedvig.No!I can't be Hedvig.I can't do it..AH!okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, No.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm just gonna have to be me
• linkHedvig Skirgård - it'll just...it'll just derail too much.We can't have a...you know we can't have a Ben and Hedvig episode.That's just not possible.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, now that you said it, I like this.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SIGHSOh...no.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I would like a vacation.Okay.But anyway, let's get to the news.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - This one.The first story comes to us from Pontus on Facebook, who says, "Hey, found a very interesting TikTok about the text to speech on TikTok.So you can type stuff, and there'll be...." now, this is a new thing..."a computerized voice that will read what you type except..." says Pantos, "the new voice has been doing weird stuff when you feed it certain kinds of nonsense." Okay.So for example, some people have been typing an H.I will now play what happens when you type H over and over again.
• linkDaniel Midgley - RECORDINGh, h, h, h, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, jajajajaaaaaaaaCD SKIP SOUND
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, that's quite enough of that.Okay, so this is where we have to put our natural language hats on and figure out what's going on.Any idea of why this might be doing this?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, first of all, I shouldn't have training data for like 'asdf', 'g, h, h, h, h h', like random stuff like that.It shouldn't have any way of predicting how to pronounce it.So it'll just try it's computer little best.LAUGHTERDo the best you can.Little mission that could.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, I think that's right.And at first, I wondered why the speech synthesizer doesn't just, you know, say it.But then I came to realize that a speech synthesizer doesn't just read sounds off the page, because the same letter, or combinations of letters could be ambiguous.And a few NLP folks have pointed out that things could go wrong at the stage where it turns the words into phonemes.But it could also go wrong when it turns the phonemes into sounds.These are all based on recorded human speech.And if the system runs into something unexpected, it can have problems putting the sound together in a sensible way.And then that's what you get.We noticed a few years ago back in our social show with kitten Joshi, that if you typed 'dog' into Google Translate over and over again, and the language was Maori, it would spit out paragraphs of this apocalyptic text of everything being destroyed and people on fire running down the street, gigantic space lizards.And the reason it was doing that probably was that for low resource languages, one text that it always has is the Bible.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Hmm Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And the Bible has some pretty apocalyptic stuff in there.So
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah
• linkDaniel Midgley - Is that what we're saying?We're saying it doesn't have anything to go on.So it's doing its best and mucking it up?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.But then there's probably something interesting about like, because it's not spinning out, you know, fire and brimstone.It's spitting out these weird sounds.There's probably some significant difference, but we don't...I think the short answer is we don't really know.But it doesn't have training data.So you're asking you to do something it's not been prepared for.
• linkDaniel Midgley - By the way, I have posted our second TikTok video.We've got two TikTok videos now.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Amazing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And it's about Cheer Cheese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, yes, I saw that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Cheer cheese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - This might be something Mei-Shin and Jingting don't know about.Because we are an Australian team show.There used to be a cheese in Australia known as a quite kind of racist slur
• linkDaniel Midgley - Racist cheese.ChuckleIt was slur cheese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And they have faced a lot of pressure to rename it.And now it's called Cheer Cheese like Cheers, Cheer Cheese.They just renamed it.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Cheer cheese!And this was the week that in my supermarket, I happened to be there.And this was the week that they had crossed over where some varieties still had the old racist name.And some had been replaced with the new name.So this was crossover week for Cheer Cheese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Very exciting.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yay.All right, what's next?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What is next is something I'd love for you to tell me more about because I read a bit about this.And I am excited and a little bit confused.So is it true that we can now have telepathy with guinea pigs?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, yes, it is.Language functions essentially the same.Their brains can do it, but they just simply don't.Maybe they don't want to.Yes, guinea pigs have language.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So I read a little bit about this.And can I give you my rendition, then you can tell me if it's right or wrong?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, sounds good.LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - They did a study where they played sounds to guinea pigs.And then they put electrodes inside the brains of guinea pigs and recorded the neurological signal and the auditory center.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yep.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And then they fed that into a cochlear implant into human and the human....So it didn't do the sound waves into the cochlear implant, but the neurological impulses.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And then the human reported hearing the same word that had been spoken to the guinea pig.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That is kind of the story.So it was a little bit more constrained than that.Yes, it's true, they use electrodes to wire up a guinea pig in a very invasive techniques.So you couldn't do this with humans very comfortably.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And they did capture the goings on in the brain and then piped it to a cochlear implant.What they were doing was saying one of four words, to a guinea pig.So there were four different inputs that humans had.And they said, "Alright, human, you're gonna hear this thing.You have to tell which of these four words it is." And there were a bunch of different trials, there was 'wood', and 'dime' and 'bomb' and 'goose', and other words were 'shore' and 'ditch' and 'mess' and 'jar'.So a human would say these words to a guinea pig, they would measure the guinea pigs brain goings on, and then play that through a cochlear implant to a human.And, whereas you'd expect a human to get it 25% Right by random chance, they got the right answer about 35% of the time.Better than random chance.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oookay.Better than random chance, but not...First of all, not just picking any like....it's constrained, you have to choose between four things that you know that the word is one of four things.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So it's not a random word that you just have to hear.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And it's not a sentence or anything like that.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's not a sentence.And compared to 25, it's more than chance.It's not like a lot more than chance, right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, that's right.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But it's still cool.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's still cool.And it's a start.And it could have some application for reading the thoughts of people who can't express themselves.Who have expressive disorders so that they can be understood.They can make themselves understood through maybe a speech synthesizer or something just by thinking the words.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh...That's interesting.Because I know there's already that kind of thing for spatial things, right?Isn't there like you can move your wheelchair with your mind.Isn't that already a thing?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Ah, yes, yes, there is.They've even got bionic arms that you can use to pick up an orange without squishing it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, yeah.Yeah!So we're like really close to what's his face in X-Men?Uhm..Patrick Stewart
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, exactly.Mei-Shin, Jingting, any input on this?What are your thoughts when you notice this?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:And I'm reading the paper nowLAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's a good good research instinct:reading the paper before you say anything.
• linkDaniel Midgley - SARCASTICWhy are...Why are you reading the paper?What...what is this?
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We've invited two academics on the show.They're gonna start reading papers, if we ask for opinions like~I can't say anything yet ~
• linkDaniel Midgley - You don't have to replicate itLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:I want to know like, how many guinea pig they used and then like, how many trials they repeated and yeah.All these informations on the methodology.Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dang, that's true.If it's just one guinea pig...What if you take it to a different guinea pig, and it's different.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I'm hoping, so this study was published in Nature, correct?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.So I'm hoping that they did it on more than one guinea pig.I'm hoping that Nature has some standards.But it is true.We want to know how many they did it on.It's a good point.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That is true.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But do you think in general, Jingting?Do you find this scary?This idea of mental, mental, mental to speech without articulatory organs?Or do you embrace our new, telepathic future?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Actually, I just found it very exciting to see something like this, because maybe in the future, we can just communicate without, without speaking.And that's cool.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTERAnd you know, what else you could do?You could bring in the work from MIT that we talked about a couple of years ago, where they examined the tiny, tiny jaw motions that we all do when we think about words, you know.When we think a word, and we don't say it, we still move a tiny bit.And those can be read.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We doINCREDULOUS
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, yes.Oh, yes, the team from MIT was able to distinguish, again, single words, from just using a camera to look at tiny motions in your lips and jaw when you think a word but don't say,
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I have forgotten about this study.I have forgotten about this.But this is very exciting.I'm sorry, I forgot about it.Because now I'm just like, trying to keep my jaw really still, I'm thinking about like the word monkey and the word bird, and trying to see if I do have a difference.
• linkDaniel Midgley - HUMMING WORDmonkeyLAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I can't.No.
• linkDaniel Midgley - In other news, and this one caught my attention as well.This is about song not language, but researchers have managed to reconstruct a bird's song just by monitoring its brain activity.So same kind of process.You just look at the bird's brain activity.And then you can reconstruct the song with the right pitch and the right timbre.And this could also help for people who can't communicate, it could help with vocal prostheses and speech synthesizers.So it's all happening...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's really cool.
• linkDaniel Midgley - It's all going on.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But presumably, it's still...the reason why we're doing in our guinea pigs and birds is because the procedure is quite invasive.So that needs to be less invasive, presumably?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes, very much.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And this is where I don't know much about why a less invasive procedure wouldn't work.I guess you've got to get into the sensory cortex or the motor cortex.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.I guess usually the less invasive things like EEG, electronic....oh I don't remember what it stands for...
• linkDaniel Midgley - Electroencephalogram.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - There we go.It only measures the, we call it the 'brain bark'.You call it something else?
• linkDaniel Midgley - The bark?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - The outer bit.The outer bit of the brain.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, okay, I'm calling with bark.I like that.Because I like thinking in my brain as a tree.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Or like a nut or something.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So presumably the things that are happening that are relevant are happening further inside of the brain.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hmm okay.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And therefore, you need to probably put things inside of the brain, which you don't really want to do in a human.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, not really.Okay, let's see what's next Hedvig.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Next, we have a news item that we talked about a few episodes ago, but that I wanted to see if Mei Shin and Jingting has some opinions about.This is the news from the Taipei Times, that in Taiwanese schools, children are going to be learning Hokkien, Hakka, or Taiwanese Sign Language obligatorily aside the rest of the education, which I understand is in Taiwanese Mandarin.So first, when I saw this news, it sort of said something like, "local languages will be taught".And I got excited because I thought it might include some Austronesian languages of Taiwan.But that's not the case.It's these three, but it still sounds pretty, pretty interesting.What do you guys think?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:Okay, about that.Yesterday, I actually asked a friend of mine, his children, if they learn this Hokkien, or Taiwanese Min, at school, and then...Actually, yes, they they learn it.And also in some schools in Taiwan, near the mountain side, they have this...if the students majority populations are from Aboriginal people, then they will teach these Austronesian languages.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, very cool.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:Yeah, like the songs, the dance.Also, like some basic conversations.Yeah.So we actually have that.Now, I think it's pretty good to have this.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Jingting?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, I also think that it's a very good news to hear that because if we don't protect those dialects or languages, then they will just phase out at some point.It's really a very good practice to have children to learn them at school.Because for instance, in Shanghai, like two decades ago, people just only teach Mandarin Chinese and maybe some foreign languages at school and the children, when they grow up, as...they are the same generation as I am...When they grew up, they don't speak Shanghainese fluently anymore.That's a pity.And I think this is absolutely very nice to have it at school.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, it just seemed like a great initiative.Probably, you know, like having a few lessons a week is...it could be always more.I thought it was quite interesting that there was also the option of Taiwanese Sign Language alongside these other languages.That's, that's really cool.Usually signed languages get left out of initiatives like this.
• linkDaniel Midgley - In most of the reading that I have seen, it does look like languages other than Putonghua or Mandarin, are under a lot of pressure.And Mandarin is sort of held up as this good language, the majority language, the more majoritarian language, even sometimes a civilized language.And other ones aren't.Do you think that this represents a change?Or do you feel like it's just that there are pro-language people, and then there are pro-Mandarin people, and this was a case of the pro-minority-language-people getting a win?What do you think's going on?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:If I remember correctly, in my parents' time, the government were emphasized on speaking Mandarin most of the time, and you are not allowed to speak any other languages at school.Not at my parents time.And now, I feel there's a change happening, that they say, "you should learn more, you should learn the languages that your family is speaking".And I'm really happy to see these changes.Because I also, when I was young, I practice Min languages and I practiced with my grandma.And sometimes my grandma will feel really reluctant to practice with me.And she'll be like, "Oh, you can speak Mandarin?I understand." I said, "No, no, I actually want to try." And so that's why I can sort of speak something, of course, compared with other friends of mine.I'm not really good at that but I'm still trying.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.I've also seen a change in that in mainland China.For instance, in the past, when we go on public transportation, we hear the forecast about what's the next station, and in the past, we only have like Mandarin Chinese and sometimes also English.But we don't have Shanghainese in Shanghai.But like, maybe five years ago, or so if I remember correctly, we started to have Shanghainese as well as saying next station.That's also a change.I think people have realized that it's really very valuable to have this heritage from the past.So the dialects of some local languages are very precious to keep.So that's why we see these changes.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's so good.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's interesting that it's happening in Shanghai as well, because if you're very cynical, you could think that it's happening in Taiwan, because Taiwan is trying to, you know, politically distance itself from Mainland China.But if it's happening in Shanghai, as well, that's a little bit of a different story.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:And also, we have to have some courses teaching Shanghainese at the universities.So you can go to the courses and then learn Shanghainese
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Mei Shin, were you going to say something.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:No I just thought about a very short clip that my friend sent me about this Shanghainese in the broadcast in the train.I was like, Oh, that's so cool.LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTERIt is.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, that's fantastic.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Um, let's move from from Shanghainese to Cantonese.It's a big world out there.And on our show, Because Language, we tend to talk a lot about English we tend to be a bit Anglo centric, even though we do try to discuss other languages when we get the chance.But lately Hedvig I got to have a chat with Israel Lai.He is a classical composer.He's a language learner, a YouTuber, a blogger, and he's a podcaster on the show, Rhapsody in Lingo which is all about linguistics but not in English.It's in Cantonese.And so Hedvig and I got the chance to have a chat.How did you run across Israel, Hedvig?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - He is a listener of ours.And he tweeted something about us.And I looked him up.And I found out that he had a podcast about languages and linguistics in Cantonese.And I thought, That's amazing.Because just like you said, we usually cover English, we talk in English, about linguistics.But of course, you can talk about linguistics in other languages.It seems like a no brainer, maybe.But if you look at the linguistics communication out there, it's majoritily...majoritily is my new word...
• linkDaniel Midgley - I love it
• linkHedvig Skirgård - in English.So yeah, I thought it's really interesting to have a little chat with Israel.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Israel.Thanks for joining us.
• linkIsrael Lai - Thanks for having me.I'm very excited.LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, and because we should say the reason we know about this podcast also, because I understand that Israel is also a listener of this podcast.Is that correct?
• linkIsrael Lai - Oh, yeah.Basically, all of our hosts are a big fan of BL in general.
• linkDaniel MidgleyHedvig Skirgård - EXCITED SOUNDS
• linkIsrael Lai - So in a certain way, our podcast is sort of partly modeled after yours.So yeah!So we have a lot in common, I'd say,
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, that's really cool.I really wish I could listen to your podcast, because as I understand it, the podcast is not in English.Is that correct?
• linkIsrael Lai - Yes.So we're doing a podcast about language and linguistics, in Cantonese, which...I came up with the idea because I thought it was something that probably not many people have done yet.There are lots podcasts in Cantonese about other topics, politics.There are podcasts about language learning, but not one about sort of study of language specifically.So that's why I wanted to...you know explore that area a bit.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, fill the gap.
• linkIsrael Lai - Exactly.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Tell us about your language background.You are a speaker of Cantonese, obviously.But what else?
• linkIsrael Lai - Oh, yeah.So like everyone in Hong Kong I grew up speaking Cantonese, English, and a bit of Mandarin.I studied some French in school.But then, starting from university, I started teaching myself languages.So actually, I'm more of a language learner than a linguist.I'm not really trained in acoustics, relatively speaking.But since then, I've studied around I don't know, 10 languages.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh cool!
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah, so that's my thing.
• linkDaniel Midgley - No big deal.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's very cool.Well, we found, with our show, that not being trained in linguistics is not always a bad thing.It can be great to have different sort of angles on the topics and news that we discuss.So I think, I think you shouldn't see it as a disadvantage.It can be a great advantage, especially if you have that kind of like passion and interest for the topic.
• linkIsrael Lai - Oh, definitely.So my perspective is definitely coming from the side of, you know, language learning.And that's what made me interested in linguistics in the first place.And then I did a bit of linguistics when I was doing my exchange in Sweden.And so that's basically all of it.But then my other hosts are more well versed in linguistics.One of them, Samuel, studied linguistics in university.Now he's doing natural language processing.He's actually the one who sent a recording to you guys, last year about Cantonese and Mandarin, if you remember.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeeesssss.That's right.Yeah, that's right.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.And tell us about your other co-host.
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah, sure.As I said, Sam is the one who is, you know, the most knowledgeable in this regard, I'd say.I'm the...kind of like the Ben in this show.But I'm taking the role of Daniel.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay!A Ben-Daniel merger.Interesting.
• linkIsrael Lai - Whereas Kenneth is, well he's the only one in Hong Kong now, and he's not a linguist either, but he's...compared to me is more interested in sort of comparison between languages.He is more knowledgeable in a wider variety of languages that he doesn't speak.So he's more of a linguist.He's also a con-langer, which is quite interesting.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ohhh!
• linkIsrael Lai - So that's why we're able to cover a larger variety of topics.Like we did some conlang ones.We did some music.So yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.So what kind of topics do you talk about on your show?More specifically, language and linguistics is a very broad topic, eh.
• linkIsrael Lai - LAUGHTERYeah, exactly.Um, so we we do do a bit of everything really.Usually, we have one main topic each episode we talk about.So it's sort of like the "let's educate our audience" kind of thing, but a bit of discussion as well.And well, as I said, the reason I started this show was because I saw that you guys have a great show.And then I thought, well, your show is a very, you know, English-centric one.You talk about things that are happening in the English world, mostly.And then I thought, well, what are we talking about something that's more relevant, to a Cantonese speaking audience.So for example, some things about the Sinitic family or Asian languages, sometimes we talk about language news as well that are happening in Hong Kong or sort of in like the Sino-sphere or whatever.For example, this month, we did a pride month episode, which I'd say it's quite brave, because I mean, compared to the English speaking world, Hong Kong is a relatively conservative place.So we do cover a large variety of things.We covered things about, you know, terminology we use in Cantonese to talk about these minorities.So that those different language in certain ways...Oh, fun fact, BL actually means something like that in Cantonese, or in Asia in general.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, what does it mean?
• linkIsrael Lai - It means I think, boy love or something?So it's the name of the genre of gay erotica or not necessarily or television or something.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - InterestingLAUGHTER
• linkIsrael Lai - So congrats for getting on BLs.Like...Ah okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Jump on it.Awesome.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's so interesting.And I think that's really important what you said that I mean, we're a show in English.So we'll talk about like, oh, what about this development in English, or someone writes a book about the history of something in English etymology or something?And we'll cover that.But obviously, that's not as interesting to a Cantonese audience that they might have a completely different topics that are interesting.What are some other differences you think you found about what it's like to cover linguistics?And perhaps your audience expectations and assumptions about language?
• linkIsrael Lai - Oh, that's a very good question.I think our audience have a lot of different assumptions about languages.Especially there's, I'd say more politics involved in sort of our side of the world.I mean, there's a lot of politics in English as well, as you talk about frequently.But for us, it's more the, you know, the actual politics politics.So there are a lot of assumptions about, you know, which language is superior, or a lot of confusion about the actual history of languages, and so on.So our first episode was actually just mythbuster.We wanted to get everything out of the way.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What are some of them?
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm curious.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's hear some.
• linkIsrael Lai - Wow.Okay.So one common one is saying that Cantonese is the same as middle Chinese.And so when you say...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh okay.
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah, when you say old Chinese poems in Cantonese, they rhyme better than Mandarin, which is true.But obviously, Cantonese came from middle Chinese.So that's a different thing altogether.And then someone will say Mandarin is actually part of the nomadic languages.And the reality is that, well, they are influenced by those tribes, but in the end, they are also a descendant of Chinese.So these are the things that many people will talk about a lot, especially when I go on Facebook and see people talk about languages.But then yeah, people actually go and look up the actual history of things.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow
• linkDaniel Midgley - What's so interesting is that so much of it is about language history and language relatedness.We tend to deal with a lot of issues surrounding language prescriptivism, like people...Well, not even so much, really, but some.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - They're not all this way but we think that they are well behaved when it comes to prescriptivism.Usually....
• linkDaniel Midgley - They kind of got the message.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - or if not we sort of deprogram them.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkIsrael Lai - I think our audience is a relatively linguistically conscious one.So it's...some of them are actual linguists, so they would be descriptivists...but at the same time, we do deal with a lot of prescriptivism as well.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkIsrael Lai - So for example, my other goal for creating the podcast was to create language learning materials for Cantonese learners, because it's really...the situation is really dire in that regard.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - SURPRISEDReally?
• linkIsrael Lai - Because...Well, I can refer you back to that recording that Samul sent.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh yes.
• linkIsrael Lai - So because everything that's spoken in Cantonese is written in Mandarin.So learners have a lot of trouble just getting the input that they need.So I am the one who is responsible for creating transcript for every episode.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's a big task.
• linkIsrael Lai - And we...Yeah.We have a lot of problems because Cantonese is very, not standardized.So I have to very carefully pick what words to use.And then the language model that produces our rough transcript is also problematic in some ways.So I have to do a lot of fixing.Yeah, for example, sometimes we have the same character for two different grammatical particles.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkIsrael Lai - So yeah, there's a lot of debate how to write it because we have a very relatively new convention of writing things in Cantonese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow, I realized that we were gonna have a short chat.But we obviously have a lot more to talk about.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I do have one more question, though.A long time ago, back in the Talk the Talk days, we talked to Zoe Lam, a PhD student in Canada, who reckoned that Cantonese was under immense pressure, and that it was not endangered, but in danger of becoming endangered.What's your view on that?Do you feel like it's healthy?Or it sounds like since you're making teaching materials, you feel like it needs some promoting?Would that be right?
• linkIsrael Lai - Yes, I would agree.But I would say that it's currently very healthy, because lots of people speak and use it in their everyday lives.But I do agree that it's under threat in a way because of, you know, the politics involved in our education system.And as well, currently, the huge wave of immigrants.So obviously, we might, in the end, lose our language in certain domains.But at least for now, I think we are in a good place.And if we managed to, you know, get more recognition for the fact that Cantonese is a language, then we...I think we're golden.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Well, it is kind of jarring in a way to talk about Cantonese being endangered when it has so many speakers.
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah, so that's why...really it's not endangered for now.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but I think...
• linkIsrael Lai - It's just under threat.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - you still have a good point that it's still in a different kind of position.Political wise, politics wise.It's not the same as other like, I mean, you've been to Sweden.Swedish is not an endangered language.But it's also a much smaller language by number of speakers than Cantonese.But it is the language of the government and the newspapers, and it has a standard writing system.And, you know...
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah that's why we're trying to write more Cantonese now.So there is a new, one year old, literary magazine in Cantonese work that encourages people to write in Cantonese.Which is actually a very new thing.So we tried to preserve it in a way...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's really cool.
• linkIsrael Lai - MmHmm!
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm sorry, I'm having a little trouble here.Because my impression is...knowing nothing...was that Cantonese retained an older writing system whereas it was Mandarin that did all the modernization?In what way is Cantonese kind of a new or not quite yet standardized writing system?
• linkIsrael Lai - Okay, so I don't know how much time we have for this.But...
• linkIsrael Lai - LAUGHTER
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah, you're thinking of the script.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I am.
• linkIsrael Lai - So in Chinese there are two scripts:the traditional script and simplified script, which is what you described.But the writing language is a different story.So they are independent things.So traditionally, we write in sort of a version of Mandarin, even though we're speaking Cantonese.So that's a diglossic situation.And we have a century old history of writing bits and pieces of Cantonese.So actually, we're better off than other smaller Sinitic languages, but we feel very weird when we write something poetic or something formal in Cantonese.So that's what we're trying to change.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Hmm.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, it's really fun talking to you.We were going to talk about some of these topics as well in the rest of the show
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So it's funny maybe we should have you guys on some time to talk more about your show?All three of you at some point?
• linkIsrael Lai - GASPOh fingers crossed.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah I think that I would like that.I would like that very much.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah!
• linkDaniel Midgley - OkayLAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So um...Oh, God now I'm still talking on the recording?I should say something that's better at finishing up.LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Shall I do the thing or...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You can do the thing.
• linkIsrael Lai - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - We've been talking to Israel Lai ,the composer, language learner, YouTuber, blogger and podcaster of Rhapsody in Lingo.Israel, how can people find you and find out about what you're doing?
• linkIsrael Lai - Well, I'm on Rhapsody in Lingo basically, everywhere.So Lingo as in L-I-N-G-O, and the podcast is officially called a Cantonese name, but you can also find us through that English name.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes!Can you please pronounce the Cantonese name?
• linkIsrael Lai - 我係邊個
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So ying shan...hmmmmm?
• linkIsrael Lai - CORRECTIONS
• linkHedvig Skirgård - can sung.
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah.Not bad.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, no, no, no, I want to do it.Please can you do it one more time for me?
• linkIsrael Lai - So Ying
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So Ying
• linkIsrael Lai - Kwan sang
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Kwang sung.Kwan...no was the last consonant
• linkIsrael Lai - Vowel?Oh consonant?That's aŋ.That a...uh...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh its the velar nasalŋ
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah.Yeah.And we have theʊin Cantonese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - sʊ jiŋ kɑn sʊŋ..Hmmm I did the tones wrong.
• linkIsrael Lai - sʊ̌ŋ
• linkHedvig Skirgård - sʊ̌ŋ
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah, yeah, there you go.Yeah cause you have theʊin Swedish
• linkHedvig Skirgård - sʊ jiŋ kɑn sʊŋ
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm just standing back watching.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I did take two years of Mandarin in high school and I know something about tones but it's all sort of...it's whenever I meet someone who has a Chinese name I try really hard, but then they pronounce it English without the tones and then I'm lost.
• linkIsrael Lai - Oh!Sorry about that.We do have a lot of vowels that aren't in Mandarin.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, that's...that's...I'm Swedish.That should be easier
• linkIsrael Lai - Exactly.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Anyway, thank you very much for coming on the show and giving me a chance to practice some tones.We look forward to maybe having you on some other time again for a longer time.
• linkIsrael Lai - Yeah come see me on YouTube?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes, we will.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We'll have some links on our blog Becauselanguage.com.Thanks, Israel.
• linkIsrael Lai - Thank you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Talking to Israel Lai of the podcast Rhapsody in Lingo.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Have you guys heard that idea that Cantonese is like, older or more conservative?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.Yeah.And actually, people think that Southern Chinese dialects are more archaic than the Mandarin moralities.But the most archaic one is actually Min dialect instead of Cantonese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Israel mentioned that he thought that it might be true that Cantonese might be, not endangered, but in danger of becoming endangered soon.And when I've asked this to Cantonese speakers, they're like, "no, that's ridiculous.Don't be silly.Cantonese has a lot of has a lot of speakers." And it does.But Shanghainese used to have a lot of speakers too.But when the pressure gets on it to drop a language and to shift to another language, that can change really fast.Do you have any impressions of what's going on with Cantonese?Should we be concerned?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:I don't think it will disappear.LAUGHTERBecause Cantonese is really different from Shanghainese.Cantonese is spoken not only in Guangdong Province, but also in Hong Kong and also overseas, and those people have...yeah, or around the world.And those people, they really have a very strong association or affiliation with this culture, and this language and they don't want to shift at all.And even nowadays, in Guangdong Province, if you come across any people or any people in the street, or you speak to them, they will reply in Cantonese.They won't reply in Mandarin Chinese at all.LAUGHTER.So I don't really think it is in danger.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is that your impression as well, Mei Shin?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:About Cantonese?I am not very familiar with that situation.But actually, long time ago, I read....So I watched a YouTube video and a person said that he's very worried about Taiwanese.Taiwanese Min language being endangered.But I was thinking "No, that's that's really bizarre.You say that...because that lots of people speaking Taiwanese Min language".and he start talking the whole video in Min language and use a lot of words that are kind of...old, I will say.And I was like, Oh, that's really not...I'm not really familiar with these words.So probably Min language is, or especially Min language in Taiwan, is on the verge of you know, disapearing, probably.Like the proper one.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Because it is a bit of a different situation in a way.Usually when we talk about endangered languages, we talk about very small populations.Some people say that in order to be endangered...or like that 20,000 is...if you're below 20,000 speakers, that's like a critical point.But there's also the question of transmission and official status.So even if you have a lot of speakers, if you're maybe not used in the school, maybe not used to newspapers or on television channels, if...Israel also talked about, he transcribes every episode, and sometimes he's a bit unsure of how to transcribe certain words or their options.And also for the linguistic lingo, they're finding themselves having to create terms in Cantonese to talk about linguistics.And all these things are sort of expressions of it not having the same status as Mandarin.And if all the Cantonese speaking families send their kids to Mandarin speaking schools, you know, it could actually happen, but it's probably further away than for the small languages that we might be talking about in places like Australia or New Guinea or Indonesia.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:But that's also the case with German actually, for instance.If we talk about linguistics, in German, we have to use a lot of English terms.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:That's just because that’s the way we communicate in English, mostly in the international community, but the German wouldn't really disappear.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, that example might be not a sign of endangerment.That's a sign of endangerment in, as a linguistics language.It's the same with the Swedish.I'm very pleased whenever I read Germanic linguistics literature, it has some of the same words as Swedish, like sustantiv for noun.So I can understand German linguistics somewhat.Yay!LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:YayLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yay.That's Rhapsody and Lingo.You can listen to that by doing a search for Rhapsody in Lingo.Thanks to Israel Lai for that chat,
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You should go listen to it if you can understand Cantonese.Or if you just enjoy hearing…Or if you like hearing Cantonese, you can also listen to it.Yeah, I'm sorry about that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I know, and I can't go listen and that kind of bothers me.So it makes me want to support them on Patreon.So that as a stretch goal, they could translate their episodes into English becauseSARCASTIC VOICEwhy should not everything be in English so I can understand it.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - TEASINGWhy should it not be accessible to me?Yeah
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTERI must be a part of every conversation!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We can google translate the transcripts into English and see if we...see if they do a topic we find interesting and then ask them to come on the show or something.Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, you know what, I am definitely doing that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - TRANSITIONAL MUSIC
• linkDaniel Midgley - We're talking to Wu Mei-Shin and Ye Jingting, talking about the ins and outs of what some people called Chinese, which is actually a massive group of languages, some related and some not.I've always had trouble getting my head around this.So I'm really grateful to you two, for coming on the show, and talking us through it.Thanks very much for being here.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Thank you very much for inviting us.And when we talk about Chinese actually we talk about a lot of Chinese dialects or dialect groups.In China, we normally always say that we have 7 or 10 different dialect groups.For instance, the Wu dialect is actually not a language or a dialect but a group of different dialects.For instance, they have differences in tones or other aspects.Just to take an example, if we say Shanghainese, Shanghainese has only five tones, but just a very small town, which is near Shanghai, like with one hour drive, or so you can arrive that town.That town's name is Wuzhen.And in this town, they speak Wu dialect, which has 10 tones.There's actually huge differences in even in the Wu dialect itself.So actually, there is a huge universe thing, I would say.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:And regarding other Chinese dialects, for instance, in Cantonese, we also see these kind of varieties in tones.In Cantonese, standard Cantonese, we have different tones as other varieties of Cantonese.Normally, we say that variation is between six to nine or so.So they're really different.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow, okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah and that brings us to the first question, which is, how many things are we talking about here?Because if we look at, for example, Glottolog, which is catalog of languages, there's a group there called modern and middle Chinese.And if you exclude middle Chinese, which is an ancient language, it has about 18 languages as it lists as mutually unintelligible.And then each of those languages, if you click on them, has a whole heap of dialects.So it's, it's, it's a lot.And I know that there are different policies like the the Ethnologue catalog, and the Glottolog makes different distinctions.And I know that within Mainland China, people make different distinctions.And this can sometimes become political as well.Because you know, what people say:a language is a dialect with a navy and an army.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Ah Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's power to say that something is a dialect or language.And then linguists come in and say, "oh, but we have this great thing called mutual intelligibility." And if you, if you can understand each other, you are the same language, but maybe people understand each other because they are multilingual.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Daniel
• linkHedvig Skirgård - It's tricky.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Hedvig
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Can you just get....Can I just get my footing here and just run through some of the languages that we've already talked about?We've talked about 普通话 (pútōng huà) or Mandarin.We've talked about Cantonese.We've talked about Shanghainese.We talked about Hokkien, and that's just four...what else are we talking about?What are some other languages that I would know that we're talking about here?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Hakka language?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And then Min we talked about
• linkDaniel Midgley - Min, yeah that came up .Yep.Okay, good
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:...and also Ganzhou dialect, which is spoken Jiangxi province, Gan.LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.Okay.So those are the main ones?Any more we should throw in?We're not going to talk about all of these in depth, but I just want to get the lay of the land here.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:It's a lot actually.So yeah, you have a Xiang dialect.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:yeah.So Xiang as in like X-I-A-N-G, for example Glottolog lists as a language.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah YeahLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Now if I'm a speaker of Xiang, what other languages but I also probably speak?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Maybe Mandarin Chinese.And also...some of them maybe also speak kind of Southwestern Mandarin but not not everyone I think.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So you do have a situation where pretty much a lot a whole bunch of people are walking around speaking two or three languages, maybe on a daily basis.Would that'd be right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting
• linkDaniel Midgley - I think most of the people in China would speak the dialect Mandarin Chinese, so two.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Daniel
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, basically two.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:...and it's also normal for people to speak....in Guangdong Province, for instance, it's normal for people to speak Hakka dialect and Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.And it's very normal to speak three languages, then.Yeah, that's the case.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.And if we go the other way around, maybe...so like in mainland China, the largest language overall is Mandarin.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, that's correct.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And then it's also known as pútōng huà or hànyǔ , or zhōngwén.Lots of words.Are all of these referring to the same thing?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:I think hànyǔ does not refer to pútōng huà.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, we can also say, hànyǔ fāngyán which means Chinese dialects.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, because Han is ethnic.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Ethnic, uh huh.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Ooh, okay.And then we have places like Shanghai and Hong Kong, that are a bit special, maybe.And so what do people speak mostly in Shanghai?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Most of the people actually nowadays they all speak Mandarin Chinese as well, and some of the older generations speak more Shanghainese.But the younger generation speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, and they don't really speak so fluently Shanghainese anymore, unfortunately.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Why the change?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - right?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, because in school, you have to learn Mandarin Chinese and if you can have maybe better scores if you speak very good Mandarin Chinese and the teacher will like other students who speak better and and also because there is a huge difference between Shanghainese and Mandarin Chinese now.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - What are some differences between Shanghainese and Mandarin specifically?
• linkDaniel Midgley - You mentioned tones.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:The tones and also for instance, pronouns are different.For instance, ni is the pronoun for 'you' in Mandarin Chinese, but if you say it in Shanghainese, it would be 'no'.And wǒ is for first pronoun, and ngu is the first pronoun in Shanghainese.It is a totally different
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh...Wow, can I ask you to say, "You're listening to Because Language" in Mandarin and then in Shanghainese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Uh Yeah.LAUGHTERI will try my best.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes,
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Nǐ zài tīng yīnwèi yǔyán ???This is Mandarin Chinese.And in Shanghainese, it would be more or less like ???.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That was great.Thank you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - You went up in general pitch like a lot.LAUGHTERDid you notice?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:YeahLAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Besides the words being different, you also just...your overall pitch just went up like...you sounded, yeah, higher, overall.That's really interesting.Thank you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Some of those words sounded the same.Which words were the ones that pretty much were the same in both, or did I get that wrong?Are they just totally different.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:I think they're very different but Yīnwèi, Yīnwi (???).So that's 'because'.That's very similar.However, for instance, ???is 'no', in Shanghainese.And 'now' it is ???in Mandarin Chinese spelling Shanghainese, it will be ???.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh that's quite different.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So lexically, really quite different, in tone quite different, in the way that you sort of, I want to say perform the language quite different.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - What's kind of the same between those two?What does carry over?and Mei Shin and feel free to jump in here.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:However the words, I would say that they come from the same ancestor.So they were more similar in the past, but then it's this split at some point in the history and actually, Southern Chinese dialects, although there are a lot of differences then maybe we can see more similarities among them.I can also try to speak the same sentence with Cantonese and Hakka dialect.And then maybe you can see more differences.First Cantonese:???.and then Hakka dialect.It's like:???.LAUGHTERThese are more similar.Yeah.So ???So the podcast is also kind of similar in those Southern Chinese dialects.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Is podcast a loanword?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, that is.Yeah.Because you don't really say that in the local language.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - and maybe, and Mei-Shin, I know that you speak some some Min.You said earlier that you're not as fluent as maybe you like to be.But do you know how to say a sentence like, "You're listening to Because Language.A podcast about linguistics" in Min?,
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:I can try the first half.???And today, ???
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow that sounded quite different
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:I find a really interesting is because Taiwan is very used to code-switching so we sometimes don't really forcefully translate English to Chinese or to Mandarin.So sometimes we will just say podcasts.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, since we're talking about loan words, maybe we could explore that a little bit.I know that in some languages, like French or even Iranian, there's a feeling like English is encroaching on the vocabulary, or there's some resistance to loan words.In other languages, they happily take on loan words, and it's no problem.What's the situation with say Mandarin or the languages that you're familiar with?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:I think when Mandarin Chinese take loan words, they're normally make it Chinese word.So they're just a very literal words that are just taken from other languages.For instance, we only have maybe chocolate, and it is translated in Chinese liketʃôu ku lí.This sounds quite similar.But for other things.For instance, computer will say ???which is translated by meaning.So we don't really hear the English word anymore.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And is that different in Taiwan?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:In Taiwan, some more recent borrowings, we just we don't translate it, like I said, but in the language, you can notice a lot of words that are coming from Japan.So because of the colonization history, for example, 'soap'sopin Japan, it's it should be 'soap'sop.And in Min language we call thesabun, because we heard itsopand then we cannot pronouncesopso we just saysabun.And tomato.In Japan, Japanese is also 'tomato'tomɑto.And, in Min languages just call ittomɑto.Yeah.CHUCKLE
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I know that in Taiwan, I also heard lots of different language names.I heard Hoklo, Holo, Taiwanese Hakkien, Minnan, and Southern Min.And some of those are the same maybe and some of them are different.I was wondering Mei-Shin if...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:Because Taiwan's history is a little bit complicated.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:So before...so that's a Ching Dynasty, or maybe even earlier, there are several waves of Han Chinese moving to Taiwan.So they are mostly coming from Hokkien province.So Fujian Province.So there are...also there are some other provinces as well.But then Taiwanese Min actually, you can say is composed of four different Chinese dialects....so Min dialects.Sorry actually three, Quanzhang is two, and I remembered another one.Sorry, I forgot the name.Yeah, but I know Quan and Zhang are really two big groups in Taiwan and in different geography and locations.And so because it's an island, so somehow people move around and then kind of nowadays, just all mixed together.And they even we say, all mixed together.We still love each other.Your pronunciation.Like we say 'egg' is ???nʊŋin my in my city, in other city, they say ???nuí.So we just laugh like~ha ha ha, you don't really know how to speak 'egg' properly~LAUGHTERActually, that's not their fault.It's just, yeah, different Min dialect.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:And also to answer your question about the distinction between Hoklo, Holo, and Min or Southern Min
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Actually Hoklo and Holo name the people.It's in Min dialect.I don't speak the language but more or less, it's like, Hokkien is like, Fujian in Mandarin Chinese, referring to the province.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ahh...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:And if they say people, then it's like, Hok-lo, because it just pronounces like that, too.So Fujian people, it means just the people from this province.So Hoklo and Holo, they refer to the same thing.So people from the Fujian Province.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow, it's so...yeah.I'm sorry, we don't have a time to tease all of this out.I'm sure people have written multiple books on this.So I know that Mei-Shin you are working in sort of historical linguistics, computationally supported historical linguistics, and the Sinitic family is not my area of expertise.But I have heard rumors about something called the "Fallen Leaves Theory".I was wondering if you could maybe summarize that for us.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:So about Sino-Tibetan or Tibeto-Burman, this labelings about languages in China and also the neighboring countries.So, there are many, many labels that are proposed.And each label is that they just basically refer to who is the origin of these whole language families.And there are so many phylogenies have been proposed.Until van Driem, he proposed these fallen leaves models.Basically what it means is like...so he used the analogy or like metaphor.So like, can we just admit that we really don't have enough information to infer a whole phylogeny.These are the groups that we agree with.Let's just imagine these are the leaves are falling alongside of Himalayan.So like, here and there are a little bit groups.And so he proposed like 80 groups, I remember.And when I was studying Sino-Tibetan language families.I was actually quite interested in this model.Because that's the fact...that it's very hard to infer the final tree because the whole languages in China, they have so many language contacts in the history and these contexts may slowly blur out these vertical transmissions.So now, of course, three groups, they have published three different studies using Bayesian analysis to say that like, "okay, we say Northern China origins" and now, kind of fallen leaves, to people's, minds, they will say, these people, they more support this Himalayan origin.So like the languages develop nearby Himalayan or you can say, Sichuan Province, and then they migrate east and then radiate to north and then south.So that's all these informations.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Okay, because...yeah, like you were saying people sometimes say, Sino-Tibetan family.So obviously, Tibetan is part of that.And that's quite far west.And when people say Tibeto-Burman, they also include the languages of Myanmar as well.So it's a very large family.I really like this metaphor.So it's sort of like, we don't know what the final language tree is.But we can we can look at the leaves, because the leaves...is the idea that they sort of overlay each other, which is like, mimicking the contact.So there's too much contact between the languages to say, what is the proper tree?Because maybe, you know, maybe there isn't one, maybe it's all networks or something.People also say wave model...
• linkDaniel Midgley - The wave model.I was thinking of that.Hmm.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, but yeah, like the fallen leaves metaphor.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, I like this metaphor as well.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:But I have to say that, although I really, really liked this metaphor, but there are also some drawbacks about this model.Because, in fact, people really can categorize "Oh, there are some groups that are more closer to each other than to other languages, right".Than to other Tibeto-Burman, or Sino-Tibetan languages.So somehow these fallen leaves is in a way saying, "No, your your findings is not really relevant." Like, we just say we agree on these little groups, and we don't really accept these larger, you know, a little bit more upper layers of relationship.So that's why people don't really like this.I cannot say this so definite, so more like, not so many people agree with this model.But I do think that this metaphor has some sort of meaning there.It's just, we need more.I think that van Driem really had to say more clear what he thinks is that we need more information:More fieldwork, more language data to confirm.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And maybe...
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, we need to move on to writing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTERyeah.Oh, writing means I get to talk about the word for Swedish in Mandarin.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, what is the word for Swedish in Mandarin?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yes, it's one of the things I remember from it.So there's lots of different ways of...but so when people in the Sinosphere first heard about Swedish people, it was Cantonese people.And they wrote down two signs that sort of sound like Swe-den or something like this.And then they sent a letter.This is the story I got told in Chinese class in high school.And then they sent a letter to the Emperor.And he pronounced itRuìdiǎn.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.CHUCKLE
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Which now is the name for...so if you pronounce it in the language that it was first written in sounds like Sweden, because it was like European, Dutch and English people.But if you pronounce it up north, it sounds completely different.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So it must mean that this writing system, you can communicate sort of meaning, but not necessarily sounds, which is fascinating to me.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah!Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - The only thing that I knew about Chinese languages, and this is probably wrong was that they were pronounced differently.But anybody could just walk up to a bit of written text, and read it in their own language and understand it.It would just sound different.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Is that true?
• linkDaniel Midgley - But that's probably wrong, isn't it?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:That's partially true, I would say.Because, even though people who speak different dialects can't really understand each other if they speak to each other.But if we look at the written Chinese, we can understand each other.That's actually also the case, even if we go to Japan, and then we see some Chinese characters, and then we can understand more or less that.But if we don't learn Japanese, then we can't really speak to the Japanese people.For instance, taking the example 'library' is written the same in Japanese and in Chinese.Or more or less the same.And if we look at the written Japanese 'library', we can understand in a minute.So what it means, without learningLAUGHTER.So that's also the case with Chinese dialects.And if you write something down to the other person who doesn't speak Mandarin Chinese, he can understand you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But what about things like word order, or grammatical words, because even if some nouns and some verbs are the same, even if you can read signs, like, "Oh, that's the library, or that's a water fountain." When you get into more complicated text, where you...when you said those sentences, sometimes there were words that were different, and they might have different signs.So some of the grammar must be missing, must be different in the writing as well.No?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:That's true.That's true.I would say that, for instance, there are many more classifiers in southern varieties of Chinese.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh really?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:But in the written system.Maybe sometimes we just leave it out.SoLAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Maybe we need to say what a classifier is, briefly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - They are incarnations of your worst nightmare.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Nooo.No they're lovely.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.I also think they're lovely.LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - From my meager study of Japanese, I remembered that it's a particle that you have to add to a number, especially a number, depending on what kind of object it is.So from Japanese, if it was cylindrical, it was 'hon'.So if you want to say that you got one piece of spaghetti, like hard spaghetti, you can't just say it's 'one spaghetti', you have to say it's 'one hon ippon spaghetti', because 'hon' is the classifier for cylindrical objects.It's kind of like an English I can't say 'one fruit', I have to say a piece of fruit.So piece is kind of functioning as a classifier for fruit kind of.That's the closest thing I can find in English,
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I remember the most common onegʊ'gu' ?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Ah yeah!'gu' is the most common one.And actually, it is also used as a relativizer, or attributivizer which...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh my God.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:...it's like, regarding the word order, I would also say that, even if sometimes you get the word order wrong, you can still understand it more or less.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ah okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Because sometimes, for instance, as a foreigner, as a second language speaker of English, sometimes I also get to the word order wrong.Or in German, for instance.In German, we have...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh yes very easy.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:we have the subclause.It is just so easy to get the subclause order wrong, because you always have the verb comes last.But sometimes just speak German in the normal word order for the sub clause, they can also understand.So I think it's not a big deal there.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So you're saying that, even though there are some grammatical differences, because the semantics is so much maintained in the writing system, you can understand text, even if the grammar is a bit different from the different languages and dialects.But then I was gonna ask Mei-Shin as well, because I know that in Taiwan, people maintain the traditional writing characters more often than these simplified ones.And is it difficult for Taiwanese people to read mainland text?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:You need some time, but not long.LAUGHTERFor me, I can understand.So because there were times where I was really fascinated by China's...so novels in China's word style or something.And I just...so I spend like, one hour to get used to the whole writing system.And I more or less can understand.But really, when I read texts from Cantonese...Oh my god, that's like an alien!LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Really?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:Yeah, I totally...I cannot understand at all.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wow.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's interesting.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:That's true.That's true.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Wow, that's really fascinating.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:That's true, because Cantonese has a different set of characters that are different from Mandarin, from the traditional or simplified written Chinese, because Cantonese characters are just used to to write down the Cantonese.LAUGHTERIt is just different.But there is also another difference.The Cantonese characters are not really standardized.Sometimes they just pick up some characters to write down the dialect.But it is not standardized, and not like the traditional written Chinese and simplified Chinese characters.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's similar to what Israel Lai was saying about the transcript.He said that sometimes he was unsure of what, you know what to write, because it's not standardized.So that's really interesting, because sometimes you come across the misconception in the West, that there's one Chinese script.And if you write something in the Chinese scripts, you have suddenly served all of the Sinosphere communities at the same time, but you're telling us now that while some of the languages and dialects maybe can be mutually intelligible in the script, not all of them can.So like yeah.Mei-Shin if you can't read the Cantonese texts, then you know, obviously it doesn't work.Even if we think you know, if you're a Westerner and I looked at a Cantonese texts and a mandarin text, maybe I would say, "Oh, they look similar" but they're not.I learned ...I actually didn't know that Cantonese was that different in the text as well.Thank you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - In fact, our friend arisvemo on discord has asked "other than the simplified/traditional split, do any other languages use a different writing system?Is traditional exclusive to Cantonese at this point?Is it only Cantonese that uses traditional script?"
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:In Min dialect, they also have their own words, but not so much nowadays.Like they don't really write it down.They use Chinese to...like Chinese characters to write it and people know like, "okay, we can read it in Min language." Yeah.So it used to have some words.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And these are basically just simplified and traditional, or is there a third thing?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:The standard thing are just these two:simplified and traditional.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:They're also...in the history, we also have other character systems.But that was used in the past.And there is a huge literature on that.And there is a long history on Chinese characters and how it develops from the ancient article, scripts, and then to other different scripts in the past.So they're all kind of different, but you can still see the trace.How it evolves into the forms of today.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I was told by my Mandarin teacher that while there could be about 80,000 unique Chinese characters, many of them are so so rare.Maybe they only occur in one last name that's really archaic.And that in order to read a newspaper, I would need to learn between 3000 and 5000 characters.Does that?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, that's true.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:Yeah, I think that's right.Yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Because often when people say, "AH!There 80,000 Chinese characters", it sounds like a lot, but then maybe it's not that much.Actually.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:No, it's not that much.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Let's get to some questions from listeners on our discord channel.PharaohKatt asks, "In Pinyin, what sound does 'x' make?I'm trying to hear it.And sometimes I hears.And other timesʃ.My best guess is a combination of the two that is unfamiliar to my sound set.What is x sound like?"
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:So 'x' in Pinyin?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:'x' in Pinyin soundsçi
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:çi.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Okay, I'm gonna try to do it.Is itsí?Orsi?
• linkDaniel Midgley - EVERYONE TRIES
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Let's take some word as an example.For instance, 'west' isçí çí
• linkDaniel Midgley - siʂiOh, you're gonna lay that tongue twister, aren't you...four is four and 10 is 10.And 14 is 14 and 40 is 40.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:çí
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I have to say that when I was learning Mandarin Chinese, the hardest thing was actually not the tones.It was these fricatives because in the Pinyin, you have 'x', and then you have 's', 'sh', 'c', 'ch' and 'j'.And they're all sound a little bit similar to the foreign ear.They're much harder than the tones.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So for the for the 'x', I'm getting somewhere betweensandʃ...kind ofʂ.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:It's more like a middle of 'ancient'.LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, it's it's actually an important...because it's in the last name of the president of China.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yes it is.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah.Yeah.çi.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, I'll work on that.Let's see.Eugenie gave us a comment via email at hello@becauselanguage.com because we once answered a question about whether a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong could pass as a Mandarin speaker if they needed to.If it were somehow politically expedient for them to for the moment sound Mandarin.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - This came up because I was listening to an ABC show where a protester in Hong Kong said that after the protest when police came, if she spoke Mandarin, then they didn't think she was a protester.And she could go home in peace.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - So Eugenie says, "I have some doubts about whether or not many Hong Kong-ers can successfully pass themselves off as people from Mainland China purely through language, as most locals will have a pretty distinct Cantonese accent whenever speaking Mandarin.And it can take years of proficient speaking and instruction to get the standard Beijing accent down pat.So unless a Hong Kong-er or speaks Mandarin on a regular basis, perhaps due to work or schooling, verisimilitude and the relative ease of code switching may not come naturally." What do you think?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, actually, the accent is really quite resistant in not only in Hong Kong people, but also for other people in southern China who speaks a southern Chinese dialect.And actually, I can hearLAUGHTER.The minute when I hear somebody from the south I know who speaks Cantonese or Min dialect or Shanghainese as a first language.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But it should be possible to...I'm assuming that because this protester was able to fool the police...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:It is possible but do you need some time.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - If you...also maybe if you have that kind of motivation.LAUGHTERMaybe you apply yourself a bit more Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I feel like we've just scratched the surface.And I think there's room for more shows on this.But I think we should probably end our discussion here Ye Jingting and Wu Mei-Shin, thank you so much for coming and talking with us on Because Language today.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Thank you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:Thank you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - TRANSITIONAL MUSIC
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We're gonna move on to our favorite segment:Words of the Week.Any words that we find that are breaking, that are trending, that are significant, or just on our minds.And we have asked Mei-Shin and Jingting to bring us some words from the Sinosphere.What you got for us?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:I can start.Maybe it's not the word of this week, but it was quite popular among Taiwanese is the backlog.
• linkDaniel Midgley - backlog.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:So when the COVID-19 situations was kind of, let's say, blooming in Taiwan.And we had one year to prepare, but the government was kind of focusing on the border, but not with this, this PCR test, or this something kind of test.And so when all these infection cases reported, the government doesn't have time to test all these.So they just report that the day that they can...the test number on that day, and then eventually, there are more cases than them.So then they had to, at the end of the week, they report a new case, that's back in about the whole week.So that's called backlog.And so people kind of just use it everywhere.Like, "oh, yeah, I cook 10 dishes a day and something" and then suddenly, like, "Oh, no, no, I correct myself.It's 11 dishes.I do a backlog."LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ohhhh!I like that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So kind of a retroactive update.Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:It's a mathematical term I guess.LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, that's funny.So people can say it about anything.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah, yeah.I've got a backlog of work here.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - But can you say, you know, I drew 10 drawings yesterday, and I made one more today.And now it's 11 yesterday, like I sent it back.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:You can use it.Basically, everything just joke around.If you want to joke around some kind of numbers, you just use it.LAUGHTERYeah.But the thing is, these popular terms that fade away really quickly.So maybe it was really popular these two weeks, three weeks, and then suddenly no one use it at all.LAUGHTERSo yeah, it's just these two weeks probably.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah yeah that's how it goes.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - We're very familiar with that here at the Words of the Week, it happens a lot.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, yes.Jingting, did you have one for us?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Actually, I have three Chinese words for you.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow
• linkDaniel Midgley - I'm ready.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:The first is nèijuǎn, which means 'involution'.It just means a very competitive lifestyle in China, that for instance, you have your children learning piano, and then you found that your neighbor also has their children learning pianoLAUGHTER....
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:and everyone learns piano and then in the end, everyone can play like lalala.In the end, it just brings nothing because everyone is like, struggling very hard in the same direction.And then in the end, everyone is good, but no one is good.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ooh.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, so involution or nèijuǎn.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:That's why there is another word, which depicts another kind of lifestyle, tǎng píng.
• linkDaniel Midgley - tǎng píng.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:which means literally 'laying flat' in Chinese.
• linkDaniel Midgley - CHUCKLEokay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:And these are that "I don't want to struggle anymore.I don't want to work hard anymore, because it doesn't make any sense." And another, a third word is the hòulàng, which means 'behind wave' literally.It just means a wave or a tide in a river that coming behind.And we have like a Chinese saying, cháng jiāng hòu làng tuī qián làng.This sentence means in the Yangtze River, we have some wave in the behind, and then it will push the wave in the front and then make them on the beach and silence forever.So hòulàng is actually the new generation.I mean, not to really silence forever, but the new generation will replace the older generation and then take dominance of the era.That that's actually what it means that so we say some younger people We say that they are hòulàng.And then they will dominance of the world in the future
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ah I like that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So we've got nèijuǎn, which is the idea that society is moving really fast but it's not really getting us anywhere.We're working like animals and it's not helping.And there's 'laying flat' which is...uh which was that again?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - That's to not compete.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah to not compete with anyone.I just stay at home and lay flat on my bed and doing nothing and because anyway, I won't get anywhere.So I at least I can have a rest.Enjoy my last day
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:We have that in Taiwan.Yeah.We have now in Taiwan.Tǎng píng.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, I'm tǎng píng.I feel like I'm gonna do the bare minimum to get by.
• linkDaniel Midgley - I feel like I want tǎng píng.LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:we also have a saying in Taiwan like it was ???.So where so you have to say where you fail, you stand up.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:It is to stand up from the same point.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:Yeah, but then now we say ???tǎng píng.LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:If you fall somewhere you just lay thereLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:You just lay thereLAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Ah I like this!
• linkDaniel Midgley - It seems like a lot of young people feel at least in the West that capitalism hasn't really gotten us anywhere.That the prospects for success are not great.And so that there's there's no need to kill yourself over things.And so there's no need to work yourself to the bone.So tǎng píng is that reaction to that.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah tǎng píng.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:If I may the words I said about the backlog in Taiwan is called ???.???
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, okay.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:So ???.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Quay Quay?
• linkDaniel Midgley - This is great.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:CORRECTS PRONUNCIATION
• linkDaniel Midgley - Hedvig, have you got one for us?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh, yes, I also have a Sinos-y related word, which is "red tourism".So as, I believe Mei-Shin and Jingting are aware, but maybe not everyone else, this year is the 100 year anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party.And they have been doing a lot of celebrations in honor of this 100 year anniversary.And people are going to specific places that were important in the Cultural Revolution, or places that were important to the party, and sort of doing tourism in the Chinese Communist Party history.And people are calling this "red tourism", which also has the advantage of being domestic.Which in this kind of panini is a good idea perhaps.
• linkDaniel Midgley - That's interesting.Is this use of 'red' coming back into vogue?Because I remember that calling anything from China red, I mean, it was only popular among political regressives.Back in the 70s and 80s, there was like one regressive Congressman, referring to "Red China".It was Jesse Helms, and it was really out of fashion.Do you think that the use of red is coming back?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:I think so.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I was just gonna say as well that I got this term from the South China Morning Post, which is a Chinese based newspaper and they're using the term and this was also recommended, by the way by aristemo on discord as well.So I appreciate you helping us with Words of the Week, but I think because it's like this is not...I don't know I think Mei-Shin and Jingting might know better, but this is like red as in communist, not red as in Chinese, if that makes sense.It does.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:Yeah, red is the color of the Communist Party.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah Okay.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So it's, it's very...yeah, communist specific.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:It's very Communist Party, and actually Hóngsè lǚyóu or red tourism already existed in the past.And there were always people doing these kinds of tourism.This kind of red journey, and then just to see the important places.It's just because this is a 100 year celebration of the Communist Party.So it becomes popular again, because of the time point.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Well, I have one more word of the week, and it is...okay so Australia has one of the lowest COVID vaccination rates of any country in the OEC.Health professionals are ready, people are ready to get vaccinated, but the problem is supply.Because, in part, our Prime Minister Scott Morrison declined to buy lots of doses of Pfizer last year.So when this became a political problem for the Prime Minister, he sort of said, "Okay, fine.Everybody can get AstraZeneca.Just go to your doctor.Just go get it.Even if you're young, even if it's risky for you, it's okay.It's cool.I'll sign off on it." So now health professionals are wondering what to do.It's kind of been a bit of a botch in Australia.And so this is why Pharmacy Guild of Australia Victorian Branch President Anthony Tassome has condemned the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Australia as not a rollout, but a stroll out.It's a really slow walk, and it doesn't seem to be going very quickly at all.So...
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:That's funny.
• linkDaniel Midgley - We'll see if that one catches on.YeahLAUGHTERhih-larious.Yeah, it makes the prospects of future travel look pretty dim.I feel like we've been very fortunate in Australia to have kept things at the low level that they've been at.But it would be really, really nice to have the vaccine situation ramping up and it's just not at this stage.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So it's stroll out.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Definitely.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Okay, so nèijuǎn or 'involution', tǎng píng or 'laying flat', hòu làng 'rear wave' and then we've also got 'red tourism' and 'stroll out'.Our Words of the Week.Let's get to some comments.Sydney sent us an email Hello@becauselanguage.com.He gave us a correction in Episode 26 one of our guests thought that Taiwanese Chinese was a bit of a creole or like creole.It's not a creole.A creole is a very specialized language situation that only happens in contact.It's not the same as a contact language or just any situation where languages are changing, because they're in contact with each other.Thanks to Sydney for pulling us up on that one.Sydney says related to Chinese, "I thought it was curious that you didn't bring up written Chinese when talking about the lack of spaces in the conversation about Latin.Latin didn't used to have spaces.And we made a comment about feeling sorry for the old Celtic monks who had to deal with spaces, but some of us like well over a billion have to read texts like this every day." So that was an interesting point, spaces in writing.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So thanks to Sydney for that comment.There are situations where it can be ambiguous if you place characters next to each other, and there aren't spaces.Is that right?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:So Chinese reading without spaces?Oh, we don't use spaces.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Does that make it hard?
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:Ah, well, boundaries is such a huge topic, isn't it?
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah, no it is!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Yeah we could talk about that for a while!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I think...yeah, I think we set us up for a couple of Sino shows for a while.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Oh, man.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - In my...when you learn Chinese characters as a foreigner, you get texts with spaces put in for you.To help you.But I know that later, that might not be the case.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:So the thing is, for example, 'weather reports' tiān qì i bào ???.You can say tiānqì is one word, ibào is one word, but you can also say also say tiān qì i bào is one big word, right?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - MmHm
• linkDaniel Midgley - Right.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:I mean, people probably don't agree with it.LAUGHTERYeah.So I just feel like what boundaries here is a little bit, I don't know, heavy to to mention.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeaah..
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wu Mei-Shin:We do learn how to break words into phrases.But yeah.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Dr.Ye Jingting:But we don't need spaces for that.LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.I mean, even the English term 'weather report' people write it with a space.Hey, I don't think that's good.Yeah.LAUGHTER
• linkDaniel Midgley - Finally, this one comes from Jeff on our discord channel.We had had a discussion about what do you call it when you go phlbtttRASPBERRY SOUND.That's called a raspberry.By the way, why raspberry?
• linkHedvig Skirgård - So this is like when you when you put your mouth towards something and you go phblttltltRASPBERRY SOUND...like that.RASPBERRY SOUND.Or when you goRASPBERRY SOUNDwith your mouth?i guess maybe it's like bubbles?and raspberries have bubbles?
• linkDaniel Midgley - No, it's not that.Why is it called the raspberry?If you goRASPBERRY SOUND.Here's the answer.You're not gonna believe it.It's rhyming slang.Raspberry tart, which rhymes with...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - heart.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Fart.Because it's a fart noise.
• linkDaniel Midgley - LAUGHTER
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Oh yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And I didn't mention that at the time.So then we had a big discussion about well is it ...this is our discussion with Helen Zaltzman ...this is a raspberry if you goRASPBERRY SOUND.But if you put your mouth up to somebody's tummyRASPBERRY SOUND, or your arm and do that, is that also a raspberry and some people do call it a raspberry.Other people call it a buzzer.Other people call it a zurbit.- C'mere and I'll give you a zurbit.This is the term that I'm using.But we also wondered what happens if you do it to a cat.And Hedvig you...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - I did it
• linkDaniel Midgley - Bravely did this.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - My cats are my....Well, I have two cats.One of them is very easy to do it on.I uploaded it to our Instagram I believe.You can see it.It's very easy to do...you just do it on your cat.
• linkDaniel Midgley - And then cat claws your face off.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - No, she just skitters away disapprovingly.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Which she did in the video.Let's listen now to Hedvig blowing on the cat known as...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Cement
• linkDaniel Midgley - Cement.
• linkDaniel Midgley - RASPBERRY SOUND ON CAT'S BELLY
• linkDaniel Midgley - But what if the pet is one of those hairless ones?Well, it turns out that Jeff on our discord channel says "I have a Mexican hairless dog, ???I'm trying my best on that Nahuatl pronunciation.And he loves getting a raspberry." Let's hear that now.
• linkAli - "Hey, guys, this is Ali.And I'm going to be raspberry on his face.Your face.Ah!RASPBERRY SOUND"
• linkDaniel Midgley - That sounds a lot like you'd expect.
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah
• linkDaniel Midgley - He says also...Also when he does the dog shake thing, it sounds just like somebody furiously clapping wet leather together.Because I guess that's exactly what's happening...
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Yeah.Yeah.
• linkDaniel Midgley - So we appreciate your zurbits on pets.If you would like to send us your zurbits on your pets, especially hairless pets, we will always be up for them.Ye Jingting and Wu Mei-Shin, thank you so much for joining us on Because Language today.It's been a real pleasure to have you.Thank you for sharing your knowledge.There's a lot there.We'd love to have you back.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:Thank you for inviting us.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Thank you very much for inviting us.
• linkDaniel Midgley - TRANSITIONAL MUSIC
• linkHedvig Skirgård - And if you enjoyed that and want to get in touch with us and tell us some more interesting questions.We did have more questions that we didn't get to today but you can get in touch with us at Hello@becauselanguage.com or Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok, Clubhouse and Substack and on all of those places, we are Because Lang Pod, and we especially appreciate if you send us sound files of you going raspberries on your pets.That sounds lovely to send those in.And we can't do this show without all of our lovely supporters on Patreon.And today, for example, we had several words and questions sent in by our lovely members on Discord.We'd like to make a special thanks to all of our supporters.Their support also makes it possible for us to provide transcripts done by Maya Klein, which means that you can search our episodes to find out what we talked about in the past.So shout out to our top patrons.They are Dustin, Termy, Chris B., Chris L., Matt, Whitney, Damien, JoAnna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Shane, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, and Dave H.Thank you to all of you.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Special shout out to our newest patron Andy from Logophilius and also to Dustin @storiessandman, who, as always, has been telling the world about us and lots of other great linguistic pods.Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who's a member of Ryan Beno, and of Didion's Bible.You can preorder the new Didion's Bible release, 'No Caveat'.It's on their Bandcamp page now.No, this isn't a conflict of interest.We just liked them and want to promote their stuff.Thank you for listening.We'll catch you next time.Because Language.We did it!
• linkDaniel Midgley - Dr.Ye Jingting:Phew.
• linkDaniel Midgley - Wu Mei-Shin:Yay!
• linkHedvig Skirgård - Wow thank you guys so much.