Pinyin for the Westerner   Well before this China trip, we formulated a summary in 2009/ 31 under the heading "Writing Chinese", which I asked readers to look over again before this trip to review. I remain very pleased with that writeup, especially since I surprised myself in being able to discover a lot of about Mandarin without actually being able to speak the language. I'm pleased with all the pictograms I was able to figure out for that posting and for some subsequent ones, without actually knowing most of the Mandarin words they correspond to, other than a couple. I also enjoyed putting together that silly little paragraph in English that included the Chinese pictograms, and was quite pleased of the discussion on the four tones of Mandarin (but now I have live examples). I also think the difference between the older Wade-Giles system and the newer pinyin should be rather clear. However, now having been to China, I find that some of the other information is incomplete, perhaps more superficial than it should be. For instance, WHY did the P in Peking change to a B in Beijing? Or did it really? Just why do there seem to be four CH's? Or are there only two? What's the basis for some of the weirder pinyin spellings, and at least one weird Wade-Giles one?

It wasn't then, nor is it now, my intent to learn the language, even as I become more and more fascinated with its construction, nor do I expect any readers to start doing so. (We do have at least three readers that I know speak and read Chinese in one form or another, including our writer Chun from Hong Kong.) But as I said earlier, while educated Westerners don't need to attempt to pronounce words exactly as in Mandarin (although it may be fun to try, at least while reading this), they should be able to read Chinese names in pinyin in newspapers, on maps, and in history books with a reasonably close Westernized pronunciation. Examples are the Chinese news agency Xinhua (shin.hwa); the two dynasties Qin and Qing (chin; ching); the city next to Hong Kong Shenzhen (shen.chen), and the current President of China Xi Jinping (shi chin.ping). I felt sorry for the member on our tour fumbling for the name of our next destination, Qingdao (ching.dow) and coming up with kwing.dow. Maybe no one else noticed. Maybe (probably) no one else cared. But I found it unfortunate.

I've spent a lot more time checking things out, and am pleased with what I found. I'm going to discuss selected points about Mandarin (spoken, of course!). I want to see if I can explain why the spelling of so many Chinese words has changed in recent decades. While we'll also note local pronunciations of names, we'll also review a reasonable Western pronunciation of them.

WADE-GILES Let's see what we remember from earlier. There have been a number of systems to spell out Mandarin words that are otherwise represented by logograms, which are those symbols expressing an entire concept or word. Pictograms, the easier logograms we learned, are the simplest form of logograms, since they really seem like a picture of the object. But you can't pronounce pictures. You have to have learned the word, either in childhood or later. But how can native speakers discuss pronunciation in writing? How do second-language learners learn what to say? For that you need phonograms, the fanciest word you've ever heard for alphabetic "letters", where symbols represent actual sounds. Writing Chinese logograms (hànzi) in phonograms (letters) of the Latin (Roman) alphabet is called romanization.

The best-known earlier system for Mandarin was established by two British scholars and sinologists, Wade and Giles, who both were professors of Chinese at Cambridge, one after the other (Wade the first one ever). Thomas Wade was a British ambassador to China who published the first Chinese textbook in English in 1867. Herbert Giles, who was also a British diplomat in China, revised and refined it in 1912 with the help of his son, Lionel Giles, a curator at the British Museum. The combined system became the standard for romanizing Mandarin for most of the 20C. Most overseas Chinese, for instance, spell their names in Wade-Giles (WG), it appears in many history books, and many Chinese proper names outside China are still recognized by their WG spelling.

HANYU PINYIN But in 1958, the Chinese government developed the pinyin spelling system, which is formally called Hanyu pinyin (HP). Ethnic Chinese are the Han people, and Hanyu means literally the "spoken language of the Han", in other words, Chinese. Pinyin means "spelled-out sounds", so Hanyu pinyin is essentially "Chinese Spelling". HP has entirely replaced WG in China, Taiwan, and Singapore. HP is also used today to enter hànzi into computers, which is amazing to watch. You've used automatic completion, which is when you can start to write a word or email address and the computer completes it for you. Well, I've watched people in China type in the beginning of a word in HP and then the computer guessed which symbol was meant and wrote it, before the word was completed, resulting in a hànzi text, not pinyin.

HP is found everywhere, but almost always as a supplement to hànzi. This train sign (Photo by Yaohua2000) shows the end stations, and this highway sign (Photo by Vmenkov) gives the exit name in both systems. (Can you pronounce it? Make sure you find two CH's.) Since I was mostly on trains, it was only on the very last day leaving Xi'an for the airport that I was driven on a highway like this, with this type of sign.

The first time we discussed WG and HP, I pointed out that the WG system looked at Mandarin from a Western point of view. This is still true. But I also said they disregarded some important things that native speakers needed, which is why HP was developed, and I see now, with more insight, that that's not completely accurate. WG does seem to have covered all bases, but still with a Western slant.

These comments we'll make will actually be superficial. Their purpose is to show a simplified, external view of Mandarin, and how outsiders who don't want to learn it can still manage with proper names at least. Still, in many of these situations, you'll realize something: Wade & Giles are your friends! Many of their spellings are simpler for Westerners to remember than the now standard HP ones.

MANDARIN SYLLABLES Before we get to specific sounds, I find that the topic of syllables in Mandarin is unusual enough to hopefully be interesting. Mandarin (Cantonese, too) is syllable based, that is, each word is a syllable. What seems like a longer word is a combination of syllabic words. Tien'anmen is actually Tien 'An Men, or heaven-peace-gate, then translated into Western word structure as the Gate of Heavenly Peace.

Syllables in Mandarin are more straightforward than in English. For instance, English can have up to three consonants start a syllable, as in "street". The Mandarin syllable consists of an initial and a final (plus a tone). The initial is one single consonant (or none). The final is basically a vocalic element, either a single vowel or diphthong, plus an optional nasal consonant, either N or NG. Just look at Wong Tai Sin (Temple) as an example, or Nan Lian (Garden) or Man Mo (Temple). An example of a syllable where the consonant appears as 0 (zero) is the first syllable of the Mandarin name for Macau, Aomen. The pattern is quite consistent: Shang-hai, Guang-zhou, Bei-jing, Tien-'an-men (where the middle syllable also lacks an initial consonant).

I have found an extremely handy online resource that will help us with the syllables, but more important, with later points we want to make. Copy and paste this chart in a separate window and keep it handy for a while:

http://www.archchinese.com/chinese_pinyin.html#tonesection1

If you consider how many possible syllables English and other languages can form, it will be surprising that you're looking at all the possibilities of syllables for Mandarin. The initials, including none at all (zero), are across the top and the finals down the side. Of course, each can have up to four tones (not all syllables take all possible tones), making a further distinction.

The only comment we'll make on the vowels involves one somewhat misleading diphthong that does appear frequently in place names, OU. You may be misled by thinking in terms of "out" or "soup". It rhymes with "mow", or to use the same spelling, with OU in "dough". Two city names are Loudi (low.di) and Botou (bo.tow). I bring this up because of the extremely common ending for many cities, -ZHOU, which sounds like the name "Joe": Guangzhou is guang.jo.

Under the topic of syllables, we've mentioned vowels fleetingly, and tones. The bulk of the questions we want to look into involve some of the consonants across the top, since this affects the interests of the Westerner more deeply.

QUESTION 1: IN SCHOOL I LEARNED ABOUT THE KUOMINTANG POLITICAL PARTY AND THE TAO RELIGION. WHY ARE THEY NOW THE GUOMINDANG AND DAO? WHY IS PEKING NOW BEIJING? WAS MY EDUCATION DEFECTIVE?

We can answer this by looking into voicing and aspiration, and consider what WG and HP did about spelling the corresponding sounds.

Voicing Many sounds come in pairs. One pair is S/Z. S is voiceless (whispered). Say S-S-S-S and then add voice and you'll suddenly have its voiced twin Z-Z-Z-Z. Try it with F/V: F-F-F-F-V-V-V-V or with CH/J: CH-CH-CH-CH-J-J-J-J. But as similar as the members of these pairs are, they are totally independent, and game-changers in English and other Western languages. In other words, they change meaning (are phonemic). Start with SIP add voice to the S and you get ZIP, a totally different word, or FINE and VINE, CHEER and JEER.

For our present purposes, we'll only consider the pairs P/B, T/D, K/G. These can of course form pairs of words where the only difference is voice, but the words are totally different in meaning: PIN/BIN, PACK/BACK; TEN/DEN, TIE/DIE; KILL/GILL, KATE/GATE. However, this type of voicing is insignificant in Mandarin and does not change meaning in this manner.

Aspiration No, we don't mean hoping, we mean blowing air. Hold a lit candle or match before your mouth (or fingers will do) and say PIN. In English, P at the beginning of a word is always aspirated, and you'll blow the candle out. Now say SPIN in front of the candle and you can't blow it out. We can say that the S draws air away from the P and leaves it unaspirated. But aspiration in English doesn't change meaning, which is why we're unaware of it. We write an aspirated P with a superscript H to show aspiration: P^h. We write an unaspirated sound either with no symbol or a minus sign: P^-, so phonetically we have either SPIN or SP^-IN versus P^hIN. It's also important to note that the voiced twin B is NEVER aspirated.

Try saying SPIN without the S, but keeping the P unaspirated. It'll be very hard to do, because it's not normal in English. But it's very normal in Mandarin. Aspiration doesn't change meaning in English, so it's relatively insignificant—voicing is what's significant. But aspiration does change meaning in Mandarin, just as voicing does not. It's a puzzlement, right?

It's voicing that forms pairs in English (voiceless/voiced): P/B, T/D, K/G.
The corresponding pairs in Mandarin are instead formed by aspiration (unaspirated/aspirated): P^-/P^h, T^-/T^h, K^-/K^h. Furthermore, pinyin spelling aside, Mandarin doesn't have the voiced B, D, G at all (more in a moment).

WG vs HP ON ASPIRATION Now how did WG show this aspiration? They used apostrophes, which is rather clever. Unaspirated gets nothing, aspirated gets an apostrophe, so they used these letters: P/P', T/T', K/K'. They didn't mislead anyone to thinking that there was any voicing here, just aspiration. Do realize that, since it's in WG's favor.

But WG was sabotaged by the very people that used it. They got lazy and left out the apostrophes, allowing two diametrically opposed sounds in each pair in Mandarin to be spelled the same: P/P, T/T, K/K. What a mess. It wasn't that WG were wrong. People just bastardized the system.

The people that devised HP made a curious decision here, one that avoided apostrophes or anything else to distinguish the Mandarin pairs. They decided that the ASPIRATED member of each pair would be written with the simple letter, so today P^h gets to use the letter P, T^h gets to use the letter T, and K^h gets to use the letter K. They then decided that the UNASPIRATED member of each pair would use B, D, and G!!!! They presumably felt they had to make a statement to show it was different, and didn't need B, D, or G otherwise, since voicing is not an issue here. So what does this mean to us? We can look at it two ways.

It depends if you want to become a student of Mandarin, or just want an acceptable Westernized pronunciation. I'll look at a map for guidance. When you see the cities of Pingliang, Tangshan, and Kunming, the student, knowing any P/T/K is aspirated, will pronounce them P^hingliang, T^hangshan, K^hunming. Westerners will pronounce them as written. (There's a bit of language irony, since P/T/K at the beginning of English words are aspirated anyway!!)

But if the student sees B/D/G, he or she will pronounce them as UNASPIRATED P/T/K, so Beijing will be P^-eijing, Dalian will be D^-alian, Guangzhou will be K^-uangzhou. Again, Westerners will pronounce them as written, and falsely believe that Mandarin really has a B, a D, and a G.

Now let's check this out, but I have a warning. You are about to be fooled. I'm not going to fool you, your English-speaking brain is going to fool you. I'm going to try to explain what's going on, but then we'll all fall back into the deception and remain there, enlightened, but happily ignoring the enlightenment.

Go back to the syllable chart. On the top row, click on P, T, K, and listen. Do you hear a sea of aspiration? Of course, because at the beginning of a word at least, English does the same, so all this aspiration will seem familiar. Now try B, D, G, and remember, do not shoot the messenger.

You are going to insist—INSIST, mind you—that you're really hearing B D G! So why am I trying to deceive you? Well, calm down. It's your English-speaking brain that's deceiving you. English cannot have an UNASPIRATED P/T/K, certainly not at the beginning of a word. But wait—the corresponding twins, B/D/G, always appear unaspirated in English. Thus the lack of aspiration is fooling your brain to think it's hearing B/D/G instead of unaspirated P/T/K. If you try hard, you can convince your brain it's wrong. But, unless you're a student of Mandarin, who really needs to hear it accurately, why bother? Beijing is Beijing with a B, and that's the end of it.

QUESTION 2: WHAT ABOUT THOSE NAMES WITH THAT FUNNY-LOOKING HS SPELLING LIKE HSU (OR HSÜ)? WHERE DID THAT COME FROM? WHAT HAPPENED TO IT? AND WHAT'S THAT BUSINESS ABOUT THAT X IN XI'AN? WHERE DID THAT X COME FROM? WAS IT AN ARBITRARY CHOICE?

Sibilants Sibilants are simply hissing sounds. English has just two voiceless ones, ●S and ●SH. Say S-S-S, then pull your tongue back a bit and say SH-SH-SH, noting the location. End of story.

Mandarin, though, has three voiceless sibilants. The first is ●S, just like in English, and both WG and HP spell it S, so no problem. But then, further back, it has two others, which I'm going to call an "almost-SH", but spelled ●SH, and a "back-SH", spelled ●X.

I call it "almost-SH" because it's slightly different. The term is retroflex, which is just what the American R is. Note how your tongue curls (flexes back, or retro) when you say an American R. The Mandarin SH has that curled element to it. Saying an English word like "marsh" with a strong R, somewhat blended into the SH will help you say it.

Some European languages use a retroflex SH. The Swedish word for "first" is först, and the RS blends into a retroflex SH. Polish SZ in szum, does it, as well as the Russian ш (SH) in шесть / shest'. So Mandarin does fit in well, when we see that our mountain pictogram, 山, corresponds to the pronunciation shān. But worry not. The student has to keep this in mind, but since both WG and HP spell it SH, the Westerner can become totally complacent and use the SH he or she is familiar with.

For the "back-SH", try this. Form a Y on your tongue and hold it. Breathe over it, realizing that this is further back in your mouth than SH, and you'll have something very close to the back-SH. It's not as far back as the German ich-Laut (for those that know it), although that can be used to "fake it" as well.

This sound, too, is used in European languages. Russian and Polish use it—in Polish it's spelled ś as in śruba. All the Scandinavian languages use it, and I first learned it in Swedish, where one spelling for it is a K, so it's an odd coincidence that the Swedish name for China is Kina, starting with this sound.

This is the sound that WG spelled HS, and for the life of me, I always thought that was the weirdest spelling I'd ever seen, appearing in family names like Hsu or city names like Hsi'an. Then I recently had an epiphany. Clever Wade and Giles! To show it was similar to an SH, they just spelled SH backwards and got HS! So HS was to mean "special SH". The only thing is, it didn't really work, just looked weird, and always confused me, for one.

So the pinyin people reached into the international grab bag, and found an X. You may think that was arbitrary, as I did, until I thought about it. But X has some unusual uses. Look at Don Quixote where it's pronounced H (although spelled Quijote in modern Spanish). In Portuguese (a language that comes up frequently when talking about China), X is used for SH in xampu (shampoo), xale (shawl) xerez (sherry). In Catalán as well, X can be used for SH, and the very name for China in Catalán is Xina. So X used for SH is really part of the international grab bag of spellings, and is a good choice for the back-SH. X makes sense in spelling the name Xu or the city Xi'an.

Go back to the syllable chart and click on S, SH, X to hear the pronunciations, but just as the student has to be precise, the casual Westerner can use the usual English SH for both SH and X, and it will be understood. Try saying the name of Shanxi province both ways.

QUESTION 3: WHY IS IT HELPFUL TO KEEP IN MIND A NONSENSE PHRASE LIKE "MOZART EATING PIZZA ON THE YANGZI"? WHAT HAPPENED TO TS? WHAT'S AND WHAT'S WITH THIS Z AND C?

Affricates To understand the answer to this question and the next as well, you need to be clear on what an affricate is, since they appear everywhere. It's a hybrid consonant. It starts out one way, but ends another way. There are many possibilities, but we'll consider those that start in T and end in a sibilant. English has only one voiceless affricate. It starts with T and ends with SH. To show it's a genuine affricate, most English speakers are totally unaware that combining T+SH yields the affricate that's conventionally spelled CH. To further show it's an affricate, there's the alternate spelling TCH that actually shows the T. We can use a memorable phrase like "rich bitch" to show both spellings.

But it should be pointed out that an affricate exists when native speakers feel that it's a single sound. CH works in English and Spanish. Italians use C as in cello or CI as in cioppino, the fish stew. Russians use Ч as in Чехов (Chekhov). But in other languages, it is not a natural affricate, but simply two adjacent sounds. German uses T+SCH in Deutsch, and can even use it at the beginning as in Tscheche (Czech). French uses T+CH (French CH=SH) in caoutchouc (rubber) and can also even use it at the beginning tchèque (Czech). (Note that English uses the French spelling for Tchaikovsky; the native English spelling would have been Chaikovsky, like Chekhov, both using the English affricate CH.)

Mandarin Affricates with S Now let's bring this discussion to Mandarin, which, as we said, has three sibilants, S, SH, X. We're going to combine T with the first sibilant, S, and get TS. But how are we going to spell it?

Wade and Giles thought spelling it TS as in English was a good idea, but that's one example of imposing their English-language background on Mandarin. T and S can combine in English and appear finally in HATS and SITS, and medially in WATSON. But it's not an affricate, it's a simple juxtaposition of two sounds appearing together by chance. The two sounds can even can appear initially in a word borrowed from Russian like TSAR or from Swahili like TSETSE, and though unusual, English speakers have no trouble pronouncing it. But it's still not an affricate in English, or in some other languages.

But then we come to Mozart, and find that TS is a genuine affricate in German, spelled Z. (You are particularly sure you have an affricate if there's a special spelling for it, since natives never perceive that it's built up from two sounds.) As in the English situation, the T can actually appear as part of the spelling, TZ as in Blitz (lightning), or the reindeer Blitzen. TS is an affricate in Italian, also spelled Z (or doubled) as in pizza or mezzo[-soprano]. It's an affricate in Russian, spelled Ц as in цар (tsar).

There's another spelling for TS in the international grab bag, C. German used to use it frequently along with Z, but has moved to just using Z in most cases. Still the beautiful town of Celle (TSE.la) still uses the C, and Polish uses C for TS, as in cynamon (cinnamon).

In Mandarin, TS is an affricate, so even though that WG spelling might have made it easier for English speakers, it wasn't true to the language, so the pinyin people reached again into the international grab bag and came up first with Z. That's why the old spelling of Yangtse is now Yangzi, why the goddess Matsu is Mazu, why Mao Tse-tung is Mao Zedong. And don't forget to pronounce hànzi correctly.

But hold your horses. It has to be reemphasized how important aspiration is to Mandarin in making significant pairs, and that goes beyond P, T, and K. In Mandarin, there are two TS sounds, which WG wrote TS/TS'. It's the unaspirated TS that's written Z. The aspirated TS^h uses the other possibility, C. We've only seen that C rarely, and the only example I have is the name of the fortune sticks shaken in the box at Wong Tai Sin in 2013/18, which is kau cim. Students should aspirate that C, others can consider both Z and C to be TS.

Return to the syllable chart and check out C first, then Z, and see if you notice anything odd. There should be no problem with the C. It's clearly TS, and even though we don't aspirate TS in English, you can clearly hear the aspiration in Mandarin. But when you listen to Z your brain starts up again with its tricks. You're sure that TS is voiced here, sounding like DZ, right? It's again only because you're hearing it unaspirated. Still, a reasonable westernized pronunciation for both C and Z is TS, and we can safely send Mozart off to eat pizza on the Yangzi. Maybe he can even try his hand at kau cim.

QUESTION 4: WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CH SPELLINGS IN MANDARIN? IS IT JUST TO CONFUSE ME? AND ARE THERE ACTUALLY FOUR CH SOUNDS, OR REALLY ONLY TWO? ZH AND J ARE BAD ENOUGH, BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT OFF-THE-WALL Q?

Mandarin Affricates with SH If you've followed the discussion thus far, this last tangle will fall into place, because the sequence of this discussion has been set up that way. We said in Mandarin T forms affricates with S, SH, and X. We're up to T+SH. This is ALMOST exactly the same thing as our CH affricate in English, except that students will have to remember that if SH is retroflex, so will T+SH be. The rest of us can consider it the same as English.

Well, there is one problem. You now know Mandarin's fascination with aspiration. It's come up in everything we've said so far, including the TS affricate, resulting in two of them, and the same thing happens here. We have both an unaspirated and an aspirated T+SH.

As it turns out, the spelling CH has been chosen to represent the aspirated version, and since English CH is aspirated, we'll all be pronouncing the city of Chengdu as Ch^hengdu, with enough aspiration to blow out a candle.

But what about the unaspirated T+SH? The pinyin people reached again into the international grab bag and found ZH. Now ZH is an artificial spelling in Western languages. It's usually just used to represent that one particular sound, the French J in déjà vu, or in English words with various curious spellings of that sound such as in treasure, casual, beige, version, luxurious, seizure. However, it's particularly noticeable and useful to transliterate into English and some other languages the Russian letter Ж as in the title and character Доктор Живаго / Doctor Zhivago. (French uses its J: Le Docteur Jivago.)

At any rate, it's this ZH spelling that the pinyin people appropriated from the international grab bag of spellings, not for its Western use, but to spell its own UNASPIRATED CH. So everyone, students and the rest, can pronounce Zhongshan as CHONG.shan. Or can they? Let's listen to it on the syllable chart. Try CH and you'll hear the profuse aspiration. Now try ZH and you'll find our old problem again. As English speakers, when we hear CH unaspirated, we feel we're hearing its VOICED version, English J. Nevertheless, students should attempt to pronounce ZH unaspirated, and the rest of us should Westernize it to a simple CH, just like the other CH. Thus, when saying the name of the city of Chuzhou, students will say the two sounds differently, but the rest of us will say CHU.cho.

Mandarin Affricates with X The last possibility is to have T+X, that is, T plus the "back-SH". You can also assume that there are two versions based on aspiration, unaspirated T+X^- and aspirated T+X^h. And this is a point where I argue with the pinyin people, who I feel went too far.

The best example is a well-known German one. There's a sound referred to as the "ich-Laut" ("ich-sound", or sound as in the word "ich", meaning "I") and also the "ach-Laut" as in the name Bach. These are two different sounds, but they are in what is known as complimentary distribution. That means that one appears only in one place (after certain vowels) and the other appears ONLY in the other place (after other vowels). Because they never cross paths, they can be written with the same digraph, which happens to be CH (different from English CH or Mandarin CH).

Another, more everyday example. If I sell apples in one town and get to be known as the apple-man there, but then sell cookies in another town and get to be known there as the cookie man, what am I? If my name is "CH" and in one place CH sells apples and in the other CH sells cookies, CH can maintain this split personality because the apples and cookies are in complimentary distribution in each of their locations. This happens in many situations, where two "families" (sounds) live in the same "house" (the digraph CH) and don't get in each other's way.

It also work in English. If we use a P at the beginning of a word to represent an aspirated P (PIN), but also use the same P after an S to represent an unaspirated P, we can get away with using the same letter P for both uses, since the uses are in complimentary distribution, initial versus after S.

This is where I agree with Wade-Giles, and some others who have worked with Mandarin. They saw that T+SH and T+X were in complimentary distribution (where one appeared, the other couldn't), and used the same symbol. They used CH for both unaspirated ones, and CH' for both aspirated ones. This was a very wise move, which resulted in only two spellings, CH and CH'. (These are the two above ones, which in pinyin are ZH and CH.)

The pinyin people went the other way, and in my opinion, caused more trouble than they solved. They decided that, even as unaspirated T+SH^- was written ZH, unaspirated T+X^- would (unnecessarily) be written J. And even as aspirated T+SH^h was written CH, aspirated T+X^h would (unnecessarily) be written Q. Let me repeat this in a chart:

I think they were being overly and unnecessarily fastidious, but it's the system we're stuck with. And I think the international grab bag failed them. While CH, ZH, and J in English are similar sounds, and those spellings can be grudgingly accepted, Q is ABSOLUTELY OFF-THE-WALL!!! They scraped the bottom of the barrel—er, grab bag—when they came up with that one. Using Q for a version of CH is so counterintuitive that it makes one's head spin.

Go back to the syllable chart and check out to see that Q is aspirated, like CH, and that J is unaspirated like ZH. In unaspirated form, the J sounds like an English J, which is why we pronounce Beijing with what seems like an English J, rather than a CH. But then we can move to a western pronunciation with all of them where the two CH's—darn it, four CH's—all end up sounding the same.

Putting up with a J is a passable bother, such as pronouncing the city of Jianyang as CHYAN.yang, or pronouncing the Chinese name for the Yangzi River, Chang Jiang, by starting both words with a CH. But it's a really tough visual thing, to see a Q in the name of the Qin Dynasty and know what to do with it. WG spelled it Ch'in What's this demonic Q all about?.

Maybe we should practice this bad idea of using this Demon Q with English words. Would you like potato qips with your ham and qeese sandwiq, and some qocolate ice cream later? Wanna take a qarter flight to Qile to visit a historic qurq? Isn't it maddening?

OK, here are some real words. How about the city of Qiqihar in NE China? For places we visited, we went to Qingdao, leaving from Shanghai's Hongqiao Station. A major part of the Tibet trip was through Qinghai Province named after the largest lake in China, Qinghai Lake, which we passed. And then there's both the Qin and Qing Dynasties . . .

Summary: Chinese Surnames To close this section, I looked up the most common surnames in China as of 2007 and want to list some with interesting spelling changes. Numbers show the name's place on the frequency list. For each pair, the HP form used in China will be first, followed by the traditional WG form that still may be found outside China:

Note familiar names like Chang and Chung, to see how they have changed. I go to an upscale Chinese restaurant in New York called "Mr K's", because the owner is named Kao. Should it be renamed "Mr G's" now?! Compare people named Cheng in 21) and 44) to see how ZH was CH but CH was CH'. For the other kind, compare people named Chin in 60) and 72) to see how J was CH' but Q was CH'. Thanks to friend Allan for explaining that his surname, also Chin, fits in not down below, but into 5) as a variation of Chen, and also his pointing out that the same Cantonese name in HK is Chan, as in Jackie Chan. This is also a relief, because now I know that the fictional Chinese movie detective from 1930's films, Charlie Chan, can maintain his CH spelling and doesn't have to become Charlie Jan or Charlie Qan--or even Jarlie Jan or Qarlie Qan.

Dispelling Two Urban Myths   We need a total change of pace. Talking toilets worked in the previous posting, so we'll try it again. Although this toilet topic is only tangentially related to the previous one, in that both sitting and squatting toilets use flushing devices, it's even more fun.

There are two urban myths that most people have heard of and most people believe, mostly because it's fun to believe them. However, they are not true. We'll dispel both of them here, and then everyone will go right back to believing them anyway, because fun is fun.

URBAN MYTH # 1: THE FLUSH TOILET WAS INVENTED BY THOMAS CRAPPER. Although you may have heard that, it never happened. However, there really was a Thomas Crapper in the 19C, whose name is a variation of Cropper, someone who harvests crops. While he did not invent the flush toilet, which dates to the 16C with additional water closet improvements later, Crapper had been a plumber and did manufacture and popularize indoor toilets in a period when they were rare. He promoted sanitary plumbing in the Victorian era when such topics were taboo, and opened the world's first showroom for baths, sinks and toilets. Thomas Crapper & Co in London was known for its quality products, and received royal warrants. He WAS an inventor, however, and did invent the ballcock mechanism, that flush valve by which toilet tanks flush their water. This is his logo, and this is a Thomas Crapper Toilet (Both Photos by Oxyman). Both are displays in a Brussels museum, so do that this topic seriously.

We do, though invoke Crapper's name, although we don't realize it, when we say that some failed project is "in the crapper". Perhaps it should be written "in the Crapper", because in actuality it's a reference to one of Thomas Crapper's devices.

URBAN MYTH # 2: THE WORD "CRAP" ORIGINATED AS A BACK-FORMATION FROM CRAPPER'S NAME. Absolutely not true, nor is his name based on the word "crap" (see above), although his name may have helped popularize the word. This urban legend apparently started with the story that American servicemen stationed in England during WWI noted Crapper's name on toilets and would then say they're going to the crapper, with subsequent shortening of the word.

The word "crap" has nothing to do with this, and more interestingly, has a very logical development. It always had a meaning relating to rejected matter, useless things that are unwanted and discarded, like rubbish. Medieval Latin had the word crappa, meaning "chaff", the waste of processing grain. Old French had then crappe, Middle French crape, and Middle English crappe, where it still referred to chaff, but also to weeds, or rubbish. Only later did it get extended to bodily waste. Nevertheless, the word still maintains this general "rubbish" or "junk" meaning to this very day when we say that something is of low quality and is therefore crap, or that an idea is crap—or is a crappy idea. We may think when we call something crap that we're using the word scatologically, but in reality the word in that sense has a long, venerable meaning of "rubbish", parallel to the toilet usage of the word. And that's no crap.

Using our Directional Vocabulary   We learned the cardinal directions in Mandarin in 2013/17 as we were talking about the rivers that make up the Pearl River: Dong Jiang, Xi Jiang, Bei Jiang, plus two tributaries of the Xi Jiang, the Beipan and the Nanpan. We also saw the adjacent city of Nanning. From this we collected the names of the four directions, clockwise starting with north; bei, dong, nan, xi. These words will be very useful, so review them, not only sequentially, but also in opposite pairs, like bei/nan and dong/xi. These words appear as part of names all over the map.

Cities The greatest excitement I found with learning these four words is when I found out that Beijing and Nanjing are a related pair of names, Beijing meaning "North Capital" and Nanjing meaning "South Capital". There even was period of time when Xi'an was known as Xijing, or West Capital, but then it reverted to Xi'an (West-Peace, that is, Western Peace). Some provincial capitals are the above-mentioned Nanning, "Southern Tranquility"; Xining, "Western Tranquility"; Jinan "Ji South", that is "South of the [river] Ji"; Nanchang "Southern Flourishing".

Stations It was also very useful in the names of railroad stations, which we can now pursue. While many high-speed stations are located downtown, particularly in Japan, also in Paris, many are suburban, with the downtown station being used for standard trains. I first experienced this when we rode the TGV in France express from Avignon to Paris in roughly 2h45. We had to drive a few kilometers south of Avignon to get the train. However, it was a major station with all services and we were able to return our car there. Similarly, with China's expansion into HSR, there are multiple stations in many cities, downtown and in all directions. (In all names of stations, the word Zhan (Station) is understood afterwards, and sometimes expressed.)

We had quite a ride to get the HSR train at Guangzhoudong, a new station, although a later train did leave from the older (1908) Guangzhoubei, which also serves regular trains. Connecting in Wuhan, we ended the day in Nanjingnan, which was also some distance away. Coming up from Qingdao, we arrived in Beijingnan. While we did use the downtown Beijing Station for a side trip, when we left for Tibet it was from Beijingxi. Knowing the names of the directions helps in knowing where the stations are from downtown.

Provinces In the US, we're used to states having names that include directional words, like West Virginia as opposed to Virginia. We also have those that come in pairs, North Carolina & South Carolina and North Dakota & South Dakota. In Europe, related names often take an "upper" and "lower" connotation, such as the German Länder of Sachsen and Niedersachsen (Saxony and Lower Saxony) or the French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie (Savoy and Upper Savoy).

Surprisingly, about half of the names of the provinces of China (Map by Lorenzarius) use directional words in their names, some singly, others in pairs. Most of these directional references are geographic: rivers, lakes, mountains, the sea. We'll start with the pairs.

Surrounding Hong Kong and Macau and in the heart of Cantonese China is Guangdong, which means "Expanse [to the] East". Adjacent is Guangxi, or "Expanse [to the] West", whose capital is the previously mentioned Nanning. The capital of Guangdong is the logically named Guangzhou (Canton). The last syllable –zhou apparently means something like "prefecture", defining a city, and appears in the names of numerous cities across the map. Technically, since 1958 Guangxi has no longer been a province, but the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region because of the Zhuang ethnic minority, related to others in southeast Asia, that makes up one-third of the population. But back to the paired names.

We move directly north of this area on the above map, first to Hunan, then to Hubei. "Hu" is "lake" and refers to Lake Dongting, so Hunan is "Lake South", or "South [of the] Lake", and Hubei is "Lake North" or "North [of the] Lake".

We're on a roll moving north now, and the next pair is Henan, then Hebei. (Beijing Municipality and Tianjin Municipality were carved out of Hebei.) The reference here is to the Huang He, or, word for word, Yellow River. Henan is "River South", or "South [of the Yellow] River", and Hebei is "River North", or "North [of the Yellow] River".

Most of these pairs border each other, but the last pair separates Shandong and Shanxi, which to not touch each other. You may recall that shan is "mountain", and the reference here is to the Taihang Mountains, which cover the region. Shandong is "Mountain East", or "East [of the] Mountains", and Shanxi is "Mountain West", or "West [of the] Mountains". Can you think of an English word that derives from this area? Think clothing.

The old WG spelling of Shandong is Shantung, and shantung is to this day the name of a dress fabric originally coming from this area. It's sort of a heavy silk fabric that was very popular for women's dresses in the early 20C. This 1912 French magazine says below the picture in French that this tailored dress is in pink shantung trimmed in black shantung. While not used much today for regular fashions, shantung in white is still very popular for bridal gowns.

There are four provinces that don't come in pairs, and the first one is particularly interesting. To the left of Shanxi is Shaanxi (!!!), whose capital is Xi'an. What's wrong with these names? The issue is so typically Chinese that you can only shake your head in disbelief.

Actually, they both should be spelled Shanxi, yet they're STILL not homonyms! They DO differ, but only in tone! The Xi'an one to the left, when spelled completely and accurately, is Shǎnxī and the other one, paired with Shāndōng, is Shānxī—these last two both have the same tone, ā, as well, but the first one has ǎ. But since the tone marks are often omitted, visually, the two names would look the same. For that reason, the special AA spelling was devised for the official, non-tonal romanization. When the tone marks are used, the AA is suppressed: Shǎnxī.

Thus, with or without the tone marks written in pinyin, everyone can READ which province is which. In spoken form, though, Chinese can HEAR the tones, so they still know which is which. That means that Westerners are at a loss and have a pair of homonyms, since they still HEAR Shaanxi/Shǎnxī as sounding the same as Shanxi/Shānxī.

If the earlier one meant "Mountain West", then this Shaanxi is translated as "Narrow West", which at first confused me. They I found information that implied it was a road that was narrow, so I believe the best translation is "Western Narrow [Road]". Now think hard. What road could that be?

Well, Xi'an was the eastern end of the Silk Road, and if you look to the west to the city of Langzhou, it was on it as well. Langzhou's province of Gansu has that long, narrow shape which shows it squeezes between the Tibetan plateau and a plateau to the north. Thus, I believe that Shaanxi was named after the Silk Road, which led to the West, and, apparently, was narrow. We'll talk a lot more about the Silk Road when we get there later.

Let's swing south from here to find the other three single-named provinces. Find Yunnan. In that province are the Yunling Mountains ("Cloudy Peaks"). Yunnan means "Yun[ling] South", or "South of the Yun[lings]".

Now swing east to the only island province, Hainan. "Hai" means "sea" as it does in "Shanghai", so Hainan means "Sea South", that is, "South of the Sea". That doesn't make sense until you realize that the sea reference is the Hainan Strait separating the island from the mainland.

Finally, further east is Jiangxi. While "He" meant "river" referring to the Yellow River, apparently "Jiang" means "large river" and refers to the Yangzi, whose full name is Chang Jiang, or Long [Large] River. The region to the south of the lower Yangze at its delta, including Shanhai, is known as the Jiangnan, or "[Yangzi] River South". The name of the province, Jiangxi, is actually a contraction of "Jiangnanxi", or the "Western Jiangnan". If you want to squeeze a further translation out of Jiangxi, you could say "Western Lower Yangzi".

Quick final question: We learned in 2009/31 (and reviewed in 2013/16), that 山 indicated a geographical feature and that 東 (the sun-in-the-trees character) was one of the four directions. This leads to the question: which province's name is written with these two pictograms that we know: 山東? I'm not giving the answer. If you don't remember the two characters, look them up and cross reference what you find with the above list.

China's Three Longest Rivers   We've been mentioning rivers, so we might as well quickly summarize them. The three longest rivers in China, in reverse order, are the Pearl, Yellow, and Yangzi. We already talked about the Pearl River (Map by Kmusser) in 2013/17, how it's really a conglomeration of smaller tributaries spreading a region that's largely within the Cantonese area with the name "Pearl" actually being used as it approaches the Pearl River Delta. Its name is actually Zhu Jiang, the first word apparently short for zhenzhu, literally "precious bead". We also mentioned how a canal was built connecting it to the Yangzi allowing through river traffic between that delta and the Yangzi Delta.

The Yellow River (Huang He) and the Yangzi (Chang Jiang), on the other hand, cut a wide swath across central China and flow rather parallel to each other. Copy and paste this link in another window:

http://www.travelchinaguide.com/map/

The Yellow River is not only the second longest in China, it's the second longest in Asia. The English name is the literal translation of Huang He. The "yellow" reference is because of the muddiness in its lower reaches. The oldest records show that the river was once just called He. I did not get to see the Yellow River (Map by Shannon). I was planning on looking for it on the train up to Beijing, but it had already gotten dark by the time we were there, and Xi'an isn't close enough to it.

I did get to fleetingly spot the Yangzi River (Map by Papayoung) after changing trains in Wuhan as the second train crossed it on our way to Nanjing, but then failed to spot it after that. Again, the Yellow and Yangzi are so fundamental to Chinese history that the Yangzi, too, in the oldest records appears only with the name Jiang, so that the two rivers were the He ("River") and Jiang ("[Large] River").

By the 3C, as the He became the Huang He, the Jiang became the Chang Jiang (Long River), which it remains today. But that leaves us in a quandry. Huang He translates literally, but where did the Western name Yangzi come from?

We spoke in the previous posting on the use of Mandarin about the city of Yangzhou, which had adopted Wu/Shanghaiese over time. Yangzhou lies on the north bank of the lower reaches of the Yangzi/Chang Jiang, and is the source of the name Yangzi. In the 6C the stretch of the river near Yangzhou began to be referred to as Yangzi Jiang, and, by the 19C, that spread to the whole river, but the river has now reverted to its original name, and Yangzi has primarily become the exonym.

After the Nile and Amazon, the Yangzi is the third longest river in the world, (the Mississippi system is fourth) and the Yellow River is sixth. The Yangzi starts in the Tibet Plateau and drains one-fifth of China. Three cities we visited, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai, are all on or close to the Yangzi, but Wuhan was the only place I spotted the river, because I knew it was there. Others in the group remained blissfully unaware of what the train was crossing.

Hollow Expressions   As I mentioned in the last posting I was going to do, this week I went to dinner with Chun from Hong Kong. We went to Orso, which I've written about many times, the Italian restaurant on New York's Restaurant Row on 46th Street that's known for celebrity spotting. The conversation dwelt heavily on China and Chinese, and the US and English.

Chun mentioned that, working in a Spanish bank, he finds most of the people are from Spain and Latin America, and he brought up the use of greetings he's learned such as ¿Cómo estás? and ¿Qué tal?, which are greetings with hollow meanings, such as "How are you?' in English. We discussed that expressions like that are not at all asking about one's health, but are hollow in meaning. "How are you?" actually conveys "I greet you" and "Fine" conveys "I accept your greeting and greet you back". Then the actual conversation can start, most probably not involving anyone's health.

At that point I brought up a point that I'd read about. The corresponding "hollow" greeting in Chinese is "Have you eaten yet?", which uses the subject of hunger instead of health. Chun laughed and said that it actually is "Have you had rice yet?", which to me is even more culturally Chinese, but I still maintain that "eaten" is the more useful translation.

I had also read about another Chinese expression, one that refers to the Cantonese specialty of dim sum, the small-dish light meal of dumplings and steamed buns. I know that in Chinese, if you're interested in dim sum, you don't mention them, but instead suggest to someone "Let's drink tea", which actually means "Let's have some dim sum (with tea on the side)".

What that brought to mind is the unusual situation in Britain about tea time. In the traditional British context, tea is not only a beverage, but also the name for a light meal of small sandwiches and cakes that you had at 4:00, sort of a second lunch, also with tea on the side. My own experience with tea time is almost totally on Cunard ships, plus the Deutschland, all of which had tea time at 4:00. I also had High Tea—fancier, more to eat—at the Empress Hotel in Victoria BC (2008/21). In any case, going to "have tea" means more eating than actually drinking tea. I've heard of a mother telling a child playing with his food to "eat your tea", which clearly referred to the sandwiches and cakes, not the beverage. Language and language use is such a sociological reflection of the human condition.

I might as well add at this point that, while celebrity spotting at Orso can be, well, spotty, we were successful that evening. Two parties entered, one right after the other, and the first one was led by Candace Bergen, who went further into the restaurant, and the second which included the Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who I'd seen before at Orso and who sat right across the aisle from us. I pointed out to Chun that, this being New York, no one batted an eyelash, externally at least. But we did discuss the loss of privacy that celebrities have, with eyes always on them. That evening, I found and sent Chun some online information about the two, since he wouldn't necessarily recognize the names.

We'll conclude China Potpourri 2 here. The next postings will be on two important historical topics, dynasties and concessions, before we continue after that with the description of the trip.