Sinoglot - For Chinese Language Lovers

Dan Edwards | Feb 22, 2010 2:00 pm | 2 comments | 3379 reads

Here’s one for Chinese language lovers: Sinoglot, a fascinating group blog about hanyu and the myriad other languages spoken within the PRC’s borders.

If you’re just setting off down the path of basic Mandarin acquisition you’ll probably find most of the posts a little obscure, but if you’re one of those passionate linguistically-minded folk who love looking at the nuances of language, Sinoglot will be an endless source of interest.

The blog’s introduction states: “China means not just lots of languages but language families: Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, Tungusic… If you expand the scope into history, scripts, bilingualism, language acquisition and so on, it’s enough to induce vertigo. Sinoglot is never going to cover it all, but we give you a bit in every dimension, eclectically.”

Sinoglot is written by a group of translators and linguists specializing in everything from Shanghainese dialects to the languages of China’s Muslims. You can check out the most recent post here.

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admin's picture admin Submitted by Guest on Thu, 02/25/2010 - 14:15

Beijing Koala wrote:
Funny that the article about the Chinese language should have a picture of a sign in broken Chinese! Lol

It should have correctly read:
禁止停车 jìnzhǐ tíngchē

仃 [dīng] is an obscure rarely used word with a rather different pronunciation with obvious different meaning.

read the blog ...
http://www.sinoglot.com/blog/2010/02/20/park-that-simplification/

Quote:

"when I stumbled across this No Parking sign:

禁止仃车 (jìnzhǐ tíng chē)

in which the third character is 仃 instead of the proper 停, I immediately assumed it was an uneducated mistake propagated by one of society’s fringe characters.

But it turns out to be a fringe character of a different sort.

I asked Sinoglot’s Kellen Parker if he’d run across 仃 used this way. Not only had he run across it, he had the Wikipedia reference! According to that article (which has some fascinating-looking references — I just expanded my Amazon wishlist) 仃 was used for a few years as a completely legitimate simplification of 停 in the so-called “second round” of character simplifications. The simplifications didn’t stick and were repealed in 1986, but it’s possible, if our No Parking writer was educated between 1977 and the mid-80s, that 仃 was simply how they learned to write it."

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Beijing Koala's picture Beijing Koala Submitted by Guest on Thu, 02/25/2010 - 13:52

Funny that the article about the Chinese language should have a picture of a sign in broken Chinese! Lol

It should have correctly read:
禁止停车 jìnzhǐ tíngchē

仃 [dīng] is an obscure rarely used word with a rather different pronunciation with obvious different meaning.

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