"The Chinese Alphabet"

Arrival time in Dalian, China

2007-10-21T02:08:00.000-07:00

I am meeting some people at Dalian and, having offered to pick me up at the airport, they asked me for my arrival time. On my ticket I only have the departure time so I can only estimate when I will arrive. Now when I was buying the ticket I did asked them about my arrival time but was only told that the flight would take about an hour. Not very precise, is it? Usually you would expect to get a printout with your flight schedule but I only got the ticket itself which says nothing about arrival. Seems kind of symbolic -- the airline only wants you to be out of here, yet they do not guarantee that you will actually arrive. Kind of like the post office.

In any case, I am trying to figure out what to do. The first idea is to use the Internet and find out the schedule. A quick Google search shows that there is no easily accessible time table for Southern Airlines. Very well, I will try then the airline's home page and try to figure it out there. I take my time with the complex interface and enter the flight number, date, departure date, number of passengers travelling, etc. Good, pressing the "Search for flights button" makes my computer hang for about 5 minutes. After this, I get a "Page cannot be displayed" error. Hmm...

I decide to use the English interface and try my luck there. Now I have two different buttons I can choose from: "Online reservation" and "Flight schedules." I go for "Flight schedules" because that is what I am interested in. Again, after a few minutes, my screen resolves to the same "Page cannot be displayed" screen. So I go back and try to the "Online reservation" button. Here at the end of the mandatory wait I just get an empty white page.

What's next? I don't despair but look up the airline’s phone number and make a call. A lady with a sleepy voice picks up the receiver. "Wei?" I began to explain that I want to ask about the flight on the 25th to Dalian. "You want to buy an airplane ticket?" asks the lady. No, I just want to ask the arrival time, I already have a ticket. "Everyone keeps calling me about tickets," says she in despair. "I don't know why and how someone listed my phone number somewhere but I now people keep calling me about tickets."

I appologize and hang up. She is having it much worse than I am, having her home number listed as the phone number for a major Chinese airline. So I go back to the home page and check the phone number. No mistake, this is the number listed as the HOTLINE for the airline. I don't know how many calls she gets a day but judging from her feeble it is a significant number. She was not sleepy, after all, just depressed.

What can I do? I do another Google search using my flight number and the word "Dalian" and come across the "Airport Memorabilia" page of the Dalian Airport.
Great, the airport's home page must have my flight! I am somewhat puzzled by the menu choices (Sales of Passenger and Cargo - Oh my God, they are selling the passengers! And the cargo!) but after some deliberation choose the "General situation" tab, since nothing else fits my purpose.

I get to some introduction page with a "Comparison Table of National Top 15 Civil Airports with the Business in 2004." There is nowhere to go from here. I go back to Google and find a page on the same website with the Domestic Arrival List. Bingo!

I quickly locate my flight and see that it departs at 09:55, whereas my ticket says it departs at 10:20. I get a bit annoyed here, having spent the last 40 minutes trying to find out when I arrive, only being able to find that I don't even know when I am leaving.

I scroll down to the bottom of the page to see if there is a date on it, knowing that this page could easily be 4 years old. There is no date, only a copyright claim "Dalian International Airport. All rights reserved." Good for you, guys! Keep up the good work!

Clicking on the only link of this page, which says HOME, takes me to a page with lots of other links. But I notice a section which says "Importance Telephone." Not being amuzed by the Chinglish anymore, I decide to call them. But after realizing that this would be a long distance call for which I would have to ask my hotel to grant my phone line long distance privileges, which would also mean that I would have to go down to the reception and pay a deposit, I change my mind and try to find another solution.

... This is a long story by now so let’s get to the end of it. Eventually, I use the Chinese language version of the Dalian Airport website and find an Arrivals table where my flight is listed with the same departure time as on my ticket. I also learn that today's flight is 40 minutes late but at least I know when it is supposed to arrive, even if I will actually land at a different time.

Chinese characters written with water

2007-10-20T16:09:00.000-07:00

Chinese characters written on the pavement with brush and water. I have seen this a few times in Beijing, once in the Houhai park (see picture) and once on Wangfujing opposite of the Kaogu bookstore, near the Fine Arts Museum. The scenario is this: an old man dips a huge brush into water and writes large Chinese characters on the ground, which then slowly fade away. So the first characters are gone before he has finished writing the last ones.

Now where does this art of hydro-calligraphy come from? Or what is the significance of it? To be honest, it does grab you as you see beautifully written characters fade away under the rays of the sun. Something about temporality. And you can never tell when they are really gone, in one moment you still seem to see them but then maybe you don't anymore. There must be a second in time when they are actually gone but you still register them as being there.

Kanji variants in Japanese temple names

2007-09-22T03:06:00.000-07:00

The post Kanji used to ID Honnōji at No-sword describes how a specific kanji variant used on a tile was used to tracing it to the Honnoji temple in Kyoto. Apparently, the same variant has been used exclusively in the name of Honnoji so the excavation of the same form showed the connection of the object with the temple.

Here is the name of the Honnoji temple with the variant for the character 能. You can see that the right side of the character is different from the modern form.

Here is the variant in question on a roof tile.

Actually, this variant was quite common in medieval China, it appears on Dunhuang manuscripts more often than the form used today as the standard. I assume it was the same in Japan during the Nara period and possibly even after that.

The kanji variant in a Chinese manuscript of the Mahaparanirvana sutra from Dunhuang, dated 506. This manuscript is currently in the collection of the British Library, shelfmark Or.8210/S.81.

The character 能 was one of the most varied characters in China. These examples are from the dictionary called Guang beibiezi 廣碑別字 by Qin Gong and Liu Daxin, showing variants on stone inscriptions from the Han through the Tang dynasties.

Anyway, I think it is a fascinating phenomenon that a variant would continued to be used in a trademark fashion for a particular institution. As another example, I noticed that the name of the Honkokuji temple 本圀寺 is also using a special kanji variant, instead of the standard way which would be 本国寺. The character 圀 is an Empress Wu character form, called in Japan sokuten moji 則天文字. These were used during the fifteen-year reign of Empress Wu Zetian (690-715) and have been used by scholars for dating manuscripts and inscriptions. If an Empress Wu character occurs in a manuscript, it is usually automatically assumed that it dates to 690-715. This is why it is rather surprising to see it in Japan as a standard way of writing a name of a temple. But it also occurs in Japanese surnames.

There are probably plenty of similar examples in Japan but these are the only ones I have noticed. If you know of others, I would love to hear about them.

The name of Honkokuji temple with the Empress Wu character variant. The character 圀 is actually a compound structure comprising the characters 四方 or 八方, depending on how you look at it. They say that the initial form consisted of 四方 but because of the inauspicious sound of 四, the Empress had it changed to 八方.

2007-08-13T20:01:00.000-07:00

I am always amused by Chinese signs that mix traditional and simplified characters together. Obviously, in modern China they should never be mixed, writing should be standardized. There is even a committee to watch out for character irregularities in public spaces. Nevertheless, there are plenty of such examples, I am listing a few of them below.

This is a street sign in Dali, Yunnan province, advertising a family business which is a hotel, a barbershop and a bath. There are number of interesting things on this board, including the characters 館 and 照 both of which are today non-standard character variants. Most of the characters are traditional but 間 and 準 are simplified. In fact, 間 appears in the same row twice, once as fantizi and once as jiantizi.

This is a sign advertising mobile phone cards. You can see that the characters 動, 眾 and 終 are simplified, whereas 國, 無 and 費.

A good luck sign, written in gold on a red background. 進 is simplified but 寶 and 財 are not.

This is a warning that you should use the safety rail on the cable car.

This is just a good wish board.

A store sign for alcohol and tobacco. 煙 and 昇 are traditional, 東 is simplified.

Watch out for hygiene!

A hotel sign mixing fantizi and jiantizi.

A no parking sign.

This is the sign of the celebrated Donglai Shun restaurant in Beijing, famous for its dumplings. I am a little ambivalent about including it here because the simplified characters could simply be considered a calligraphic feature. What do you think?

This is a parking lot sign. Pay attention also to the variant forms of the simplified 點, consisting of a 占 and 大.

Weird Chinese tattoos: Lost in translation

2007-08-13T19:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a tattoo design I saw in the window of a tattoo parlor, showing someone's arm with a dragon and some Chinese characters on it. The Chinese characters say "hao jiu bu jian" which simply means "long time no see." I have no idea what it is supposed to be but it really makes no sense to have it tattooed on someone's arm.

Chinese character structure: Tracing it back

2007-08-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

Let's look at the structure of variant Chinese characters for a second. (This post is triggered by Amida's comment to the blog entry below but I thought it deserves to be in a main entry.)

Does the structure of a particular character form always have to go back to a standard or a historical form? Or can you look at the structure of a form in its own right, without automatically tracing it back to earlier or more standard forms? I have always felt suspicious about the practice of analyzing Tang character forms by digging up earlier and earlier forms of the same character and eventually tracing it back to jiaguwen. It is true that even the Tang character forms originate from the oracle-bone script, I am not trying to deny that. At the same time the relevance of such a genealogy is highly debatable.

Would it make sense to look at running hand character forms in their own right? Instead of saying, "Ah, this is the abbreviation of this" or, "This should actually be written like this," just look at the way it is actually written. Take, for example, the character 盈 in the Santi Qianziwen page on the picture below. The caoshu form in the left-most column is clearly not of the same structure as its kaishu form. You cannot say that it has the 皿 component at the bottom, even though this particular character has that component in other styles, such as the kaishu and xingshu styles on its right. On the other hand, the components in this caoshu forms could also be analyzed and categorized. The little thing that replaces the component 皿 probably occurs in other caoshu forms, replacing the same or even other elements.

Now there might be some cases when you do not have a kaishu form to rely on, simply because it has not survived. Imagine a scenario where you only have caoshu characters and you have to make sense of those alone. You would not be able to take each character form and say, well, this actually should be written like this. Instead, you would have to work with what you actually see.

The same goes for tracing Han or Tang character forms back to oracle-bone inscriptions. Yes, there is a lineage but you should be able to look at the evidence at hand in its own light, shouldn't you? Plus then the oracle-bone inscriptions should be traced back to something as well, only we do not have anything to trace it back to.

I am really curious about what others have to say about this.

This is the beginning of the Santi Qianziwen, or the Tri-style Thousand Character Classic, which is essentially the same text written in three different calligraphic styles: kai (standard), xing (running hand) and cao (drafting).

Chinese character variant: Uighur-Chinese sign

2007-08-10T02:52:00.001-07:00

This is the Chinese character "an1" for safety on a sign somewhere near Turfan in Xinjiang. Now what do you think is going on here with this character? Is this a common variant or just a local phenomenon? Or perhaps a personal calligraphic habit of the person who wrote it?

For the sake of the context, I am also including below the picture of the sign where this Chinese character comes from originally. You can see that the top row is in Uighur, the lower in Chinese. Also because of the context there can be now doubt as to what the above character is. But without context it is not so easy to recognize it, is it?

A Chinese-Uighur sign from Turfan: "This place is dangerous, please watch out for safety."

Too many Chinese characters: Busy web interface

2007-08-07T07:15:00.000-07:00

Have you ever noticed how most Chinese websites are choke full of text? When I come to a Chinese website for the first time, I never know what I am supposed to do because there is so much content that I have a difficulty finding the part that brought me there in the first place.

Here is, for example, a section from the website Taobao.com, the Chinese equivalent of eBay. (The real eBay never made it in China, apparently the Chinese preferred their own way of doing online garage sales.) If you click on this image to see the larger version, you can see that it is packed with text. Now I guess a Chinese person will just intuitively ignore the parts he does not need but I need to start reading to see what I need.

A section from the Chinese online auction site Taobao.com.

Or here is another example from one of the top Chinese search engines, Sohu.com. Sohu.com is extremely popular in China and you can do pretty much everything on it, starting from searching the Net and playing online games to trading stocks and buying property.

Characters flooding the page on Sohu.com's main page

Now my question is whether this is completely normal for Chinese users or they would also prefer a much less crowded interface? After all, why would you always want to have on your screen hundreds of words you never look at? I don't need to see "pet food" as a category on my auction site every single time I go there. I really don't because I do not own a pet. Neither am I interested in kitchen utensils, I never ever look at them.

So, going back to my original question, is this tolerable for others? Does it bother anyone else or is it just me?

Chinese characters on old European etchings

2007-08-03T21:38:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed the Chinese characters on the pictures in old European books about China? Some of them are OK, others are flipped around, and some are downright illegible. I wonder if anybody has done a study on this, it would be a fascinating topic.

Here are, for example, some pictures from from William Alexander's famous book, The Costume of China, published in 1805 in London. You can see that of the Chinese characters on the pictures look OK, some not. My question is, why? If the artist does not know how to read and write Chinese, and in the case of Alexander I think he did not, then how come some of the characters are legible?

Chinese characters over a window, flipped horizontally.

Chinese characters on a gate. You can recognize the character sheng (holy) but not the other one. And the other characters along the horizontal planks are illegible to me, too.

These characters are completely illegible to me but I can sort of make out that they are flipped.

A bestseller on Japan: Frances Little

2007-08-03T19:45:00.001-07:00

Just finished reading Frances Little's Lady of the Decoration which, as I learned was the number one bestseller in the US for the year of 1907. Wow! It is a fun little book but I would not have thought that it was so popular at one point. Now it does not even get a popularity grade on Amazon.

It was written by Fannie Caldwell using the psedonym Frances Little and it is about a young lady spending several years in Japan operating kindergartens with some American mission. The book consists of her letters to a friend of hers back in the US. She is very homesick, misses a man called Jack who at the end comes to Hiroshima to marry her. This is where the book ends.

Having said that, the book is fun but it would have been nice to have a bit more facts in it. Or at least some names. The heroine, for example, meets a Japanese princess and we do not even learn her name so there is no way of placing the event in history. It would have been a good background information on this particular English-speaking princess but we can only guess who that might have been.

Bushido as patriotism

2007-08-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

As I was reading old newspaper articles on the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, I came across a reference to Bushido which surprised me. Admiral Sir Edward Seymour said over the annual dinner of the Japan Society that Japan was rich in many things but especially in "bushido," translating it as "passionate patriotism," and that a country which possessed passionate patriotism was safe.

On a second thought, this is not such a bad rendering for Bushido, wasn't it? After all what it really means is that the warrior, be it the samurai or the kamikaze teenager towards the end of WWII, follows the orders of his officer without questioning those, all in the name of patriotism. "Passionate" simply means that he goes to the extent ordinary people would not, such as sacrificing his life, or the life of others, in the most unthinkable way.

As for Japan being safe with its Bushido, well, we know that it worked only for a while. In 1910 Japan was still bathing in the glory of its victorious Russo-Japanese War and things looked promising. As they indeed were for the next 30 years. Also, during the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, Japan was a British ally, whereas in later years they were at war with each other.

Going back to Bushido, which we usually understand along the lines of the Way of the Warrior, the Warrior's Code, etc., interpreting it as a political/social conduct was quite interesting to me.

"The Chinese Alphabet": Logoi.com in blog mode

2007-08-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

I've been too busy for the past few years to do major improvements to this site but now a new look and a new structure is becoming a matter of urgency. So until I can make up my mind which way to go and what to do with the whole thing, I am using Logoi.com for a blog on the mythical subject of "Chinese alphabet," something this site is most associated with.