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EnjoyingEnglish®
Chinglish...Could it be the end of Chinglish?Authorities in China have launched another campaign to wipe out amusingly misspelt English. Will it work? Upsetting news for English-speaking residents in China:
"Chinglish" is apparently being wiped out. Chinglish is the name given
to the grammatically incorrect or misspelt English found predominantly
on signs in parts of China. The language style has attracted a cult
following, with a Facebook group, Flickr pages and even a book dedicated to the subject.
But there are fears that Chinglish could be killed off before really having a chance to flourish. Reports suggest that authorities, wary of the embarrassment some examples of Chinglish could cause prudish visitors to next year's World Expo, are launching a drive to correct the quirky mistranslations.
Before we officially declare Chinglish to be a dead language, we
should note that this isn't the first such drive to wipe it out. On the
website of the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle (bear with me), in an
interview with the Chinglish enthusiast Oliver Radtke in May, it was
pointed out that "in recent years, China has kicked off campaigns to
root out poor English grammar and misused vocabulary in official
usage", including one before the Olympic games in Beijing last year.
Judging from the examples that continue to flood into internet groups,
the success of these campaigns seems to have been limited.
Radtke
is a staunch supporter of what he describes as the "wonderful results
of an English dictionary meeting Chinese grammar". He insists that his
interest in Chinglish is about "passion not mockery", and most online
groups seem to echo this, looking upon Chinglish with affection rather
than scorn. The "Save Chinglish" Facebook group has attracted more than 8,000 members and more than 2,500 Chinglish examples, while members of the Flickr group The Chinglish Pool have contributed more than 3,000 photographs.
So what is it about Chinglish that has attracted such affection?
Examples on the sites above range from amusing misspellings in menus –
"Three testes ice cream", anyone? – to simple grammatical errors – a
sign by a lake imploring visitors to "refuse to feed" the (presumably
persistent) birds.
The best ones, as Radtke says, are where English words are used
with Chinese grammar, often with incorrect spelling thrown in for good
measure. These can range from the strangely poetic – "the rust
embroidered shoes approve the zero concurrent y camp" – to the
genuinely mystifying – "pood taken late at night breakfast".
Will the latest push succeed in wiping Chinglish out completely?
It seems unlikely, but perhaps visitors to China will have to look that
little bit harder to be warned to "be careful about a landslip" in a
bathroom or "take notice of safe: The slippery are very crafty" on a
hillside.
Photo courtesy of Alison Honey. Chinglish (simplified Chinese: 中式英语; traditional Chinese: 中式英語; pinyin: Zhōngshì Yīngyǔ) is a portmanteau of the words Chinese and English and refers to spoken or written English which is influenced by Chinese.
There are an estimated 300 to 500 million users and/or learners of
English in the People's Republic of China. The term "Chinglish" is
mostly used in popular contexts and may have pejorative or derogatory
connotation. Other terms for the variety of English used in China
include "Chinese English," "China English," and "Sinicized English."
History of English in ChinaEnglish first arrived in China in the 1630s, when British traders arrived in South China. Chinese Pidgin English was spoken first in the areas of Macau and Canton, later spreading north to Shanghai by the 1830s[5].
Chinese Pidgin English began to decline in the late 19th century as
standard English began to be taught in the country's education system;
English was made the country's main foreign language in 1982.
In Beijing, in preparation for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the city authorities attempted to eliminate bad English on public signs and replaced it with better and correct English.[7]
Signs that previously read: "To take notice of safe: The slippery are
very crafty" were changed to read "Caution - slippery path". In Shanghai, for Expo 2010, a similar effort was made to replace Chinglish signs.
FeaturesPronunciationIn Cantonese
pronunciation, some consonants are nowadays changed into other, for
example N is often pronounced as L. Voiced sounds (/v/ and the /ʒ/
sound - eg. 'pleasure') cause difficulty. In speech, there is also a
tendency to add the sound "see" or "chi" at the end of certain singular
letters, such as the letters "S" and "H" ('es-see' and 'ay-chi'
respectively).
Similarly, there are no syllable codas (consonants at the end of syllables) in Mandarin with the exception of the "n" and "ŋ"
sounds. When encountering such codas, a Mandarin speaker will either
modify the consonant to form a separate syllable, or drop it
altogether. Thus, for example, CCTV presenters pronounce the letters "L", "M", and "N" as [aɪ lə] ("ai-le"), [aɪ mu] ("ai-mu") and [ən] ("n") respectively, while in Taiwan, the letter "L" is frequently pronounced [ɛ lɔ].
As all varieties of Chinese are tonal languages,
Chinese speakers sometimes apply tonal attributes to English, which is
normally a stress-based language. Stressed syllables are generally
given higher and falling tones over unstressed syllables. This imparts
a "staccato" quality to the accent, a feature shared by speakers of other tonal (or pitch-stressed) languages.
Vocabulary
Examples include "to put in Jingzhang Expressway" instead of "to Jingzhang Expressway"), and the use of "emergent" to mean "emergency" or "urgent".
As another example, when something is explained, the English
learner may respond with "Oh, I know," while the appropriate response
would be "Oh, I see." This is because "知道 zhīdao" is usually translated
as know regardless of context. "When did you first recognize
him?" is also sometimes used for "When did you first meet him?" because
"认识[認識] rènshi" is usually translated as recognize as in "I recognize him from last week's party."
The English words see, watch, read and look at are all represented by the Chinese word “看 kàn", and may be used interchangeably. The situation of speak, say and talk is similar. Phrases like "Can you say Chinese?", "I am watching a book", and "Tomorrow I will look a movie" may be common.
Another example is "turn on/off" versus "open/close". In Chinese,
"turn on" (in the sense of operating a switch or a machine) and "open"
are rendered by the same character, and so are "turn off" and "close".
The two terms may be used interchangeably.
"Welcome you" is one of the more noticeable cases of Chinglish, especially on mainland China.
This is used as a direct translation in Chinese, "歡迎". It can mean
"welcome to," "we invite you to" or "you are welcome to", and is used
more as an incentive to the activity introduced or as a form of "thank
you". Its use is almost always cordial, inviting, or otherwise
positive. Example:
Grammar and SyntaxChinglish reflects the influence of Chinese syntax and grammar; in
Chinese, verbs are not conjugated (either for tense or pronoun), and
there is no equivalent word for "the." Therefore "the" is often either
overused or not used at all.
Comma splices can occur frequently. This is because in Chinese writing, the comma (逗號 "，") is sufficient to terminate a clause, with no need to follow with a conjunction. The equivalent of full stop (句號 "。") is usually reserved for the end of an idea, which theoretically may continue for an entire paragraph.
Discourse PragmaticsCertain unique discourse features exist in written China English,
such as "inductive" structure and a preference for a "problem-solution"
pattern.
Examples of Chinglish on signs
The following are several examples of unusual English found on signs in China:[
Chinese-Ordered EnglishChinese-Ordered English (abbr: COE) is the use of English words to represent the meaning of Chinese phrases and sentences that maintains the word order (syntax) of the original Chinese.
COE was conceived as a technique by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University to help English speakers learn Mandarin Chinese.
COE allows English speakers with no or little knowledge of Chinese to
discover the similarities and differences between English and Chinese
grammar and syntax. The similarities between English and Chinese (both
being analytical languages
with canonical subject-verb-object word order) are sufficient for most
COE phrases and sentences to be understood by English speakers with
little or no knowledge of Chinese, with differences between Chinese and
English grammar also being readily apparent.
For teaching purposes, COE is described to students as "the
Chinese way" as in "How would we say 'Yesterday I went to the park with
my friend' the Chinese way"? This is opposed to saying (or writing)
something "in Chinese" which has all of the words in Chinese, none in
English.
ExamplesHere is an example of a Chinese sentence in simplified Chinese characters, Pinyin, COE and English: Hànzì : 昨天 我 和 朋友 去 公园. The COE above ("Yesterday I with friend go park.") shows that
Chinese (a) has no past tense, (b) keeps the preposition phrase "with
friend") next to the subject of the sentence (which it modifies), and
(c) has no definite article equivalent to "the" in English. Other
examples of COE can be found in the "literal translations" from Chinese
to English provided in Chinese Grammar.
Another example of COE that English-speaking readers should have no trouble understanding:
The preceding example shows that Chinese has no plural form and does not always express grammatical subjects and copulas.
The following example of COE is taken from a news article of August 24, 2006.
TeachingFor teaching Chinese to English speakers, COE can be used along
with a gradual replacement of English words with their Chinese
equivalents (starting with the highest frequency words) so that the
texts students read gradually change ("morph") from COE to Chinese as
students' knowledge of Chinese vocabulary increases.
Chinese Pidgin English (simplified Chinese: 洋泾浜英语; traditional Chinese: 洋涇濱英語; pinyin: yáng jìng bāng yīng yǔ) is a Pidgin language between English and Chinese. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, there was also Chinese Pidgin English spoken in Cantonese-speaking portions of China. Chinese Pidgin English is heavily influenced by various Chinese languages with variants arising among different provinces (for example in Shanghai and Ningbo).
A separate Chinese Pidgin English has sprung up in more recent decades in places such as Nauru.
HistoryEnglish first arrived in China in the 1630s, when British traders
arrived in South China. Chinese Pidgin English was spoken first in the
areas of Macao and Guangzhou, later spreading north to Shanghai by the 1830s . "Yangjing Bang English" in Chinese (洋涇濱, or 洋泾浜) derives from the name of a former creek in Shanghai near the Bund where local workers communicated with English-speaking foreigners in pidgin (broken English).
Historically, it was a modified form of English developed in the 17th century for use as a trade language or lingua franca between the British and the Chinese. Chinese Pidgin started in GuangzhouEnglish
in low esteem and therefore disdained to learn their language, Pidgin
English was developed by the English and adapted by the Chinese for
business purposes. The term "pidgin" itself is a corruption of the
pronunciation of the English word "business" by the Chinese. Chinese
Pidgin continued in use until about the end of the 19th century, when
Pidgin came to be looked upon by the Chinese as humiliating (because
English speakers considered it ridiculous) and so preferred to learn standard English instead.
(Canton), China, after the British established their first trading port
there in 1664. Because the British found Chinese an extremely difficult
language to learn and because the Chinese held the
Chinese Pidgin English began to decline in the late 19th century
as standard English began to be taught in the country's education
system. English language
teaching has been widespread throughout modern Chinese history- it was
made the country's main foreign language in 1982.
FeaturesChinese Pidgin English was based on a vocabulary of about 700 English words, with a small number of words from other sources. Grammar and syntax
are simple and positional; that is, grammatical categories are
indicated by the position of words in the sentence rather than by inflectional endings, prepositions, or the like (e.g., in English “John loves Mary” is distinguished from “Mary loves John” by the position of the
words in the sentences).
Typical sentences in Chinese Pidgin are Hab gat rening kum daun (Have got raining come down) “There is rain coming down”; Tumoro mai no kan kum (Tomorrow my no can come) “Tomorrow I can't come”; and Mai no hab kachi basket (My no have catch basket) “I didn't bring a basket.”
Influence on EnglishCertain expressions from Chinese English Pidgin may have made their way into colloquial English, a process called Calque. The following is a list of English expressions which may have been influenced by Chinese.
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