Subway Signs and How I Process Chinese Characters

I've noticed something odd recently about how I read signs in Chinese, in particular subway signs.

Eat Fresh

Not those Subway signs, of course, but the signs above subway stations.

Ride Fresh

Let's break this sign down. On the far left is the Beijing Subway logo, which I learned from Wikipedia is  composed of the letters B, G, and D, short for Beijing Gaosu Dianche or "Beijing High Speed Electric Vehicle." Next to that and on the top are the Chinese characters 地铁青年路站--for those who don't read Chinese, don't worry, we'll come back to this. Underneath that, in the Roman alphabet, is written QINGNIANLU Station. Obviously we know what "Station" means, but "Qingnianlu" requires some explanation. It is the name of the station written in Pinyin, a romanization system used to 'spell out' the sounds of Chinese characters using Roman letters. Finally, in the bottom right is 6号线, helpfully translated as Line 6.

So we have three writing systems on one sign: Chinese characters, Pinyin romanization, and English translation.[1] In fact, any of these three writing systems may be present in almost any combination on signs throughout China (there are even more possibilities when you get into areas of China that speak and write in other languages). I'm used to this proliferation of symbols, so that doesn't particularly confuse me. I even find it helpful when signs include Pinyin along with the Chinese characters, because that way I can check their pronunciation against my memory.

The thing is, I always naively assumed that my reading of Chinese characters and Pinyin was entirely separate: I read the characters to know the meaning, and I read the Pinyin to know the sound.[2] But this is where subway signs throw me off, because if I try to read a subway sign in this way, I can't do it. Here's why: the Chinese characters and the Pinyin don't match up. 

At least they don't match in terms of word order. The first word in Pinyin is "Qingnianlu," the name of the station. But the first two Chinese characters are 地铁 (ditie), the word for subway; the name of the station comes immediately after. Translated directly, and splitting the Chinese characters into separate words, the sign would read:

地铁  |  青年路  |  站

Subway | Qingnianlu[3] | Station

So when I read the Pinyin, Qingnianlu is the pronunciation I hear in my head. But when I look up at the Chinese characters, the first characters I see are 地铁, pronounced ditie, and my brain malfunctions. It cannot process what those two characters are or what they're doing there. Which is weird, because I should recognize those characters. The word 地铁 is not all that uncommon (it's on every subway sign, for starters), and the first character, 地, is so common and so simple that it's one of the few characters I can write by hand without pausing to think about it. I should have no trouble processing what those characters mean at the start of a subway sign. But because they don't match the pronunciation I already have in my head, all of a sudden I'm 糊涂了 (hutu le ; muddle-headed).

What I think is happening is that the Pinyin 'primes' my brain to read the characters in a certain way. If I read "Qingnianlu" in Pinyin, then I will read the Chinese characters looking to match those sounds. If I can't do that, as is the case when ditie interrupts my reading, then I get confused and effectively have to do a hard reset. This would suggest that I read Chinese characters phonetically before I process them semantically; that I 'sound out' a Chinese character in my head before (or at least at the same time as) I think about what it means.

That actually makes a lot of sense to me if true. When I started studying Chinese, I struggled to connect characters with their sounds. Written and spoken Chinese felt like two different languages.[4] Over the last 10 years, as I've become much more comfortable and fluent with the spoken language (and improved my reading as well), the two have felt much more integrated. In the past where I would recognize a familiar character but have to check on its pronunciation, or hear a familiar word but have to look up its meaning, now it feels as if all of that is stored together as an entry in a mental dictionary. So now when I see a familiar character, I often connect it just as strongly to a sound as I do to a meaning.[5]

At this point, I've trained my brain out of its momentary lapses when faced with subway signs. I know what those two characters are, and I'm no longer thrown off by their disagreement with the pronunciation in Pinyin. But the fact that I was confused in the first place, and that this confusion even persisted for a few weeks before I could really look at the signs and figure out why I was struggling to read them, gave me some insight into how my brain seems to process Chinese characters. That in itself is fascinating to me (and probably only me), but I also wonder if it might resonate with other readers of second or third languages, especially as they become more familiar with both the spoken and written forms of their languages of study.

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Footnotes

[1] I call Pinyin and English two separate writing systems here, which I'm not sure is correct, since they both use the Roman alphabet. All I really mean is that all three are different in some way: Chinese characters and Pinyin both express Chinese but differ in the symbols they use, Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet but express different languages.

[2] Actually, many Chinese characters do carry phonetic information, and you can often figure out the meaning of words from the Pinyin in the proper context. A good example of the latter is Beijing Gaosu Dianche from the beginning of this post, which someone familiar with the language and the context could figure out means "Beijing High Speed Electric Vehicle" even without the characters.

[3] I've gone through this entire post only writing the station's name in Pinyin (as the sign does), but it can also be translated into English as "Youth Street," after the name of the nearest intersecting road.

[4] There actually is an argument for this especially in other languages/dialects of Chinese such as Wu or Yue, or during earlier periods when the written form of Classical Chinese/Literary Sinitic was much further removed from the spoken language.

[5] Subjectively, I find these connections even stronger for complete words in Chinese, which are sometimes a single character but are often composed of two or more characters--for example, 地铁 (ditie ; subway).

Language - History of English Trivia

I just realized there is some syntactical ambiguity in the title of this post. To be clear, this is Trivia about the History of English, not a History of English Trivia, as might be implied in the title.

Just some interesting facts I learned taking a class on "The History of the English Language" my senior year in college (which was also the source for this much longer and more filled out post).

I learned that i and j, as well as u and v, were not distinguished in writing until the seventeenth century, so that one might write "Iack, liue, and vnder" where we would write "Jack, live, and under." And even this was just a graphical change--they weren't really considered different letters until well into the nineteenth century, as shown by the fact that dictionaries did not separate them alphabetically, so that the word "iambic" might be set between "jamb" and "jangle" in an early modern dictionary.

Also, pseudo-antique signs with names such as "Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe" are simply prey to a typographical error--'Ye' was never used (in pronunciation anyway) as a substitute for "The". English in the early modern time still used the letter þ (called a 'thorn') to indicate a "th" sound, but Continental type fonts didn't have such a symbol, so a "y" was substituted, with a superscript "e" above it to indicate that it was standing in for þ and should be read "The." We've since misinterpreted the “y” with a superscript “e” as being pronounced "Ye", but with no historical accuracy.

Finally, people complain about the practice of using the plural "they" to stand in for the singular "he or she" when the gender isn't specified, but there are precedents for this. Our modern usage of "you" for both the singular and plural is a drastic simplification of the Middle English pronoun, where "you" only referred to people in the plural (and even more specifically, if you were referring to them as the object rather than subject of the sentence).[a] The singular for second-person was properly "thou" or "thee" (subject or object, respectively). Even in Early Modern English we maintained the distinction, though we started using "Ye" and "You" (still plural) as more respectful forms of the singular "Thou" and "Thee." You can see the distinction in Shakespeare. But eventually we just started using "you" for all second-person forms, singular and plural, subject and object. It seems possible at least that the plural "They," which in speaking we already use for the singular "he or she," could undergo a similar transformation.

I don't have the book with me at the moment, but I'm certain all of these bits and pieces are found in John Algeo's excellent History and Development of the English Language, which I've referenced below.

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Notes

[a] The subject of the sentence would be "Ye." 
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References

Algeo, John. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 6th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2010) 

Language -- Translation Mishaps

This is a literal translation of a conversation I had just the other night.

me:               Do you have any cigarettes?
shopowner:  Sure.
me:               ...
                    Oh, no, I mean the cigarettes you can eat.
shopowner:  ... you mean salt?
me:               Yeah!
shopowner:  Yeah, we have that too.

(Note: cigarettes [yan *high tone*] and salt [yan *rising tone*, though also *falling tone* in Kaifeng dialect] are near homonyms in Chinese.)

Language -- Childer Books

I saw something recently on John Allison's strangely delightful webcomic, Scary Go Round, that blew my mind in a nerdy, linguistically trivial way. It was a page in his then-current story, Murder She Writes, a murder mystery (as the title suggests) set in an isolated lodge in the Welsh mountains[1]. I have excerpted the relevant panel below:

Murder She Writes [a]

What I would draw your attention to is the character on the far left and especially her dialogue. That character is Charlotte Grote, a main protagonist of the story and in the larger Scary Go Round universe. She's your average, pre-teen sleuth who loves to solve mysteries. Sometimes she's a bit daft.

But what is she talking about? "The kings of childer-books?" What are childer-books?

As might be evident from the similarity of words (it is even more apparent in the context of the story), "childer-books" is another term for children books, or the even more common (at least to my experience) "children's books." Charlotte, or Lottie for short, comes from the fictional town of Tackleford, in West Yorkshire, England. And in some dialects in Northern England, childer is in fact the accepted plural of child, in place of the otherwise standard "children." But what interests me here is not just John Allison's accurate use of modern dialect (though that is noteworthy in itself), but the history behind that specific piece of dialect. Childer as a plural form of child is unusual in modern usage, in that it is restricted to that specific geographical region, and it is not applied, so far as I know, to any other nouns--for example, we do not say "bather" to mean more than one bath, we say "baths" (though our pronunciation of that word may differ depending on where we are from). But historically speaking, childer is not strange at all--in fact, it is more "regular" than the current standard form of children.

Beowulf is good Ol' English [b]

This goes back all the way to Old English, the language spoken on the British Isles by their Germanic occupants (or invaders) from 449 to 1100 CE. This language was significantly different, in form and appearance, from our own; it is not the language used in Shakespeare or the King James Bible, both decidedly Modern English works. It is the English used, most famously, in the alliterative poem Beowulf sometime around 1000 CE, and also used by Ælfric the Grammarian in his religious and prose writings earlier that century as well as the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People about 730 CE. As for the differences, the writing style of Old English was distinct from Modern English, both when specialized lore-masters still used the Germanic runes now called "Futhorc" from the first six letters of that alphabet, and even later when the Roman alphabet was introduced, because early English writers learned the Insular script from Irish Christians rather than the Italian style (you can see a sample of the Insular script in the fragment of the poem Beowulf pictured above). The vocabulary of Old English would also appear alien to most Modern English readers, even though a significant portion of our own word-stock is drawn from it. To illustrate this, the first few lines from Beowulf, transcribed into our modern script,* are given below with a translation.

*The letter æ is called ash and pronounced as the "a" in that same word. The letters þ and ð, called thorn and eth, are pronounced as the "th" in thin and this respectively.

Hwæt, wē Gār-Dena                     in gēardagum,
Lo! we of Spear-Danes                in old days,

þēodcyniga                                    þrym gefrūnon,
of the people's kings,                   glory have heard,

hū ðā æþelingas                            ellen fremedon!
how the princes                           courage accomplished![c]

Old English has some very apparent differences, then, from Middle English (Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales), Early Modern English (Shakespeare, Hamlet, Henry IV), and Late Modern English (anything written in the last 200 years).  But it is still in fact the same language, and there is an equally apparent continuity running all the way from Old to Late Modern English. The survival in dialect of "childer," rare as it is, is one of those marks of continuity.

This is because Old English had more ways of declining its nouns than modern English does. To 'decline' a noun means to change (or 'inflect') the noun based on its part of speech. For example, in Latin, the word for "girl" would be written puella if it were the subject of a sentence, but puellae if it were the indirect object. That is the difference between "The girl (puella) gave a gift to me" and "I gave a gift to the girl (puellae)." Modern English preserves this difference between nominative and dative only in its personal pronouns, for example: "She gave a gift to me" and "I gave a gift to her."

Most English nouns now only decline for two forms--an 'endingless' form for the singular (whether subject, object or whatever), and a form ending in -s for the plural or genitive (the possessive case, which we now write with an apostrophe, -'s). Singular dog, plural dogs; one bath, more than one baths; and so on. There are exceptions, however: one deer, more than one... deer; one foot, two feet; singular child, plural children... or childer. We often call these "irregular nouns," and we may view them with some amount of embarrassment or light apology to those who have to learn this "irrational" language as a second or foreign tongue. But many of these irregular plurals, including all of the examples given above, are part of our inheritance from Old English, which had many ways of declining a plural noun, and were quite "regular" in their time. For example, deer (from the Old English dēor, or animal) belonged to an entire group of words which attached no ending to their roots to form the plural--thus the singular and plural forms of "deer" are identical (other examples existing in Modern English would be sheep and swine). Foot, which is almost unchanged from Old English, came from another group of words, "root-consonant stems," which were unique for the fact that many of their forms (including the nominative plural) were created by changing the vowel sound in the word itself--foot to feet, man to men, tooth to teeth, and others.

Finally we come (back) to child. Child, from Old English cild, has a more complicated history. It comes from a fairly rare group of nouns in Old English that formed their plural by adding an r to the end of the word, and so the expected plural of modern child would in fact be childer--which in the particular Northern British dialect that Charlotte speaks, it is. However, in the rest of English language, child developed a second plural, children. It did this through analogy to another group of nouns in Old English, which declined their plural by adding an n to the end of the word; the only original, extant example of this declension in today's language is the plural oxen.[2] Children is a double-plural then, because it retains the r of its original plural ending and adds an -en by analogy. Similar words in Modern English are brethren and kine, a poetic plural of "cow."

This is perhaps an unnecessarily long explanation that does not, for most people, adequately explain why I got so excited about seeing the word "childer" in a webcomic. It may be that I am what linguist Stephen Pinker calls a "language maven," a term he does not invest with much love or respect.[3] A language maven is basically a self-proclaimed language expert, or, perhaps more kindly, language enthusiast. I at least seem to be of the kind he finds least offensive--the wordwatcher. "Unlike linguists, wordwatchers train their binoculars on the especially capricious, eccentric, and poorly documented words and idioms that get sighted from time to time. ... I don't think they do any harm, but (a) I never completely believe their explanations, and (b) in most cases I don't really care. ... For me, wordwatching for its own sake has all the intellectual excitement of stamp collecting, with the added twist that an undetermined number of your stamps are counterfeit."[d] While I have heard two different, spirited arguments against Pinker's classification of "language mavens," I can pretty well accept his criticism on this point, and I may have just written a blog post on stamp collecting. Granted, in pursuit of this particular stamp, we have covered a lot of ground in English language and history, defined a few of the basic terms for how language works, and explained at least three other commonly misunderstood and maligned words in the English language. So even stamp collecting can have its benefits. But really, I just find it terribly interesting, and I can only hope my readers do as well.

Linguistic stamp collecting [e]

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Notes:
[1] Actually, John Allison's Scary Go Round and Murder She Writes are independent comics, though set in the same universe and hosted on the same website -- www.scarygoround.com . The website also hosts another comic by Allison, Bad Machinery, which includes his most recent stories.

[2] The "n" plural was nearly as popular as the "s" plural for a time; 'tree' had the plural treen, 'eye' became eyen, and more than one 'house' were housen. These examples, along with almost all others, are taken from John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language[c].

[3] The term, Pinker points out, actually originated with William Safire, who used the term self-descriptively on his weekly column "On Language" in The New York Time Magazine. 
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References
[a] John Allison, Murder She Writes, Webcomic, http://www.scarygoround.com/scare/?date=20111121
[b] Beowulf manuscript, image found on Google Images
[c] John Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 6th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2010), 110.
[d] Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Creates Language (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), Ch. 12 Language Mavens, e-book. 
[e] Postage stamp collection, image found on Google Images