William Galvin displays his ignorance

Mitt Romney's been called many things as he runs for president, but chances are "Sticky Rice" isn't one of them.

That's how his name might be read on some ballots, according to state Secretary William Galvin.

Galvin says the federal Justice Department is pressuring Boston election officials to translate candidates' names into Chinese characters in precincts with prominent Chinese-speaking populations.

But there's more than a little lost in translation, according to Galvin.

Since there's no Chinese character for "Romney," translators have resorted to finding characters that most closely match the sound of each syllable in the name.

The problem is that there are many different characters that could be used to match the sound of each syllable, and many different meanings for each character.

So Mitt Romney could be read as "Sticky Rice" or "Uncooked Rice." Fred Thompson might be read as "Virtue Soup." And Barack Obama could be read as "Oh Bus Horse."

Galvin's own name could be read at least two different ways, as "High Prominent Noble Educated" or "Stick Mosquito."

But perhaps the most perplexing translation would be for Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's name, which could be read as "Sun Moon Rainbow Farmer" or "Imbecile," or "Barbarian Mud No Mind of His Own."

"To try to make rhymes or approximations in Chinese, you can have unintended negative meanings," Galvin said. "It leads to confusion. You can render it with a good meaning or a bad meaning."

To add to the confusion, Galvin said, the ballots have to be offered in two major Chinese dialects, Mandarin and Cantonese, leading to even more potential variations of candidates' names.

But advocates for minority voting rights say Galvin's objections are misdirected. If the translations are awkward, they say, the candidates should be free to offer variations, or look to the way Asian language newspapers already transliterate their names.

As the article points out, these people already have names. I found these on the internet:

• Mitt Romney 米特• 罗姆尼 Although 米 mǐ does mean rice, it's also a surname in Chinese.
• Fred Thompson 弗雷德•汤普森 or Fred Dalton Thompson 弗雷德·多尔顿·托马斯. Yes, 德 dé is "virtue" and 汤 tāng is "soup", but 弗雷德 is the standard way to render "Fred" and 汤普森 is the standard way to render " Thompson" (as in "Emma Thompson", for instance).
• Barack Obama 巴拉克·奥巴马 Obama's last name is Ào bā mǎ, where "ào" means "inside" "mysterious", but is used in many names. "Bā" does not mean "bus" unless it's bāshì 巴士. By itself 巴 doesn't mean much of anything. "Mǎ" does mean "horse", but it also happens to be a surname.
• William Galvin has been translated as 盖文. For once, he nearly gets the translation right. 盖 gài means "cover", and 文 wén means literary, which he has extrapolated to "Noble Educated". The standard transliteration of "William" is 威廉 wēi lián; "wēi" means "authority" and "lián" means "honest".
  
• Thomas Menino is 托马斯．马尼诺. I don't know where the expressions in the article come from.

It seems as if William Galvin has been talking to someone who just started learning Chinese and is overly focussed on the meanings of the characters. Perhaps from that meeting that his name links to above? But the fact is, the Chinese don't pay that much attention to them. People can also make something out of our names. For example, take Bush. Omigosh, it means something. What about Clinton: Ho-ho! Clint means "limestone blocks that make up a limestone pavement." As for Galvin, you could say I was galvanized to write this. I hope he has a better grasp of public policy than he does of these names.

Serve the people 为人民服务

Cameron Diaz apologized Sunday for carrying a bag with a political slogan that evoked painful memories in Peru.

The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated "Shrek" films visited the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru's Andes on Friday carrying an olive green bag emblazoned with a red star and the words "Serve the People" printed in Chinese, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong's most famous political slogan.

The bags are marketed as fashion accessories in some world capitals, but in Peru the slogan evokes memories of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency that fought the government in the 1980s and early 1990s in a bloody conflict that left nearly 70,000 people dead.

Not just dumb

Two offensive linemen in a rented boat catch an unusually large number of trout in a secluded cove. As they start back to the marina, one reaches over with his felt-tip pen and marks an X on the starboard bow. “I want to make sure we can find this spot again tomorrow,” he explained. “Idiot,” his friend replied, “what makes you think we’ll get the same boat?”

It's not exactly the same, but it reminds me of this anecdote:

There was a man from the state of Chu who was crossing a river. His sword fell out of the boat into the water, and he quickly marked the boat, saying, "This is where my sword fell." When the boat stopped, he got into the water to look for his sword at the place where he had marked the boat. The boat had moved but the sword had not. Is this not a very foolish way to look for a sword?

In Chinese the expression is 刻舟求劍, literally "Marking the boat to find the sword"; the original story is from the 3rd century B.C. 呂氏春秋 Lǚ shì chūn qiū (Spring and Autumn Annals of Master Lü), but instead of stupidity, it's used more in the sense of stubbornness or inflexibility. This follows the original sense, where the anecdote is used to argue that the law must change to suit changing times.

Half the languages in the world are tonal

Tone languages are languages (like Chinese, Thai, Yoruba, and Zulu) in which the pitch or “tone” of words and syllables makes a difference to word meaning. For example, in Chinese huār (with a high level pitch) means ‘flower’ and huàr (with a falling pitch) means ‘picture’. (Go here for another Chinese example, with sound files.) In Yoruba, igba spoken with different tones means different things (recordings courtesy of Dr. Lawrence Olufemi Adewole of Ile-Ife University, Nigeria): LowHigh = a kind of tree, MidMid = '200', MidHigh = 'gourd' and LowLow = 'time'. In non-tonal languages (like English or Spanish), pitch is only used at the sentence level, for emphasis and overall meanings like questioning. Roughly half the languages in the world are tonal and half are non-tonal, but they’re fairly unevenly distributed: tone languages are the norm in sub-Saharan Africa and are common in Southeast Asia and among Native American languages especially in parts of Central and South America. Non-tone languages are the norm in Europe and Central, South and West Asia, and among the aboriginal languages of Australia.

Chinese stock market slang

"black horses" 黑马 shares that have beaten expectations
"deer market" 鹿市 markets moving erratically because of large groups of amateur, short-term speculators
"fighting for the hat" 抢帽子 buying cheap to sell high later
"ghost shares" highly risky shares
"lifting the sedan chair" 抬轿子 circulating news that will boost prices
"meat slicing" 割肉 selling at a loss to avoid further losses
"rat investors" 老鼠仓投资者 insider traders

According to this, a "deer market" is a flat market, but a "monkey market" 猴市 is one jumping all over the place.

Political rights you can't exercise anyway

One sometimes reads about people convicted of crimes in China who have been deprived of their political rights. In Chinese criminal law, deprivation of political rights (剥夺政治权利终身 bōduó zhèngzhì quánlì zhōngshēn) refers to deprivation of the following rights:

(1) the right to vote and to stand for election;

(2) the rights of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration;

(3) the right to hold a position in a State organ; and

(4) the right to hold a leading position in any State-owned company, enterprise, institution or people's organization.

Yep, "the right to vote and to stand for election" and "the rights of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration", all guaranteed under Chinese law, except even ordinary citizens not convicted of any crime can't exercise them most of the time.

Crispy sock holes

I'm less than enchanted with Qiu Xiaolong's When Red Is Black. I think part of the reason for the popularity of his books is the fact that he provides literal translations of Chinese idioms, which non-Chinese might like, but that make the book a little too quaint for me. Far worse, towards the end of chapter 7, he speaks of noodles with a "crisp" texture, at one point speaking of them as boiled. How could boiled noodles be crisp? Surely he means the kind of chewy I mention below. The last straw for me was that he describes the detective's wife as having holes in her socks, apparently to show how poor she and her husband are. Plenty of people who are not poor, including Paul Wolfowitz, have holes in their socks.

Q

香 Q (xiāng Q) is an expression from Southern Min Chinese that is also used in Taiwanese Mandarin and sometimes on the Mainland, too. The Mandarin equivalents are 筋道 (jīndào), 有劲 (yǒujìng), and in southern China, 筋拽拽 (jīnzhuāizhuāi). It describes a somewhat chewy texture of food in the mouth, but may be not as soft as what Americans think of as chewy. For instance, the texture is not that of chewing gum. It's hard to think of a common equivalent in American food. Maybe something like the crust of thick pizza, although it's not crispy. In her article "Q" in Gastronomica, Zoe Tribur writes,

When you put something in your mouth—cold or warm, salty or sweet, dry or wet, it doesn’t matter—if the substance first pushes back as you seize it with your teeth, then firms up for just a moment before yielding magnanimously to part, with surprising ease and goodwill, from the cleaving corners of your mandibles—that is Q. It is light but not insubstantial, flexible, supple, resistant, yet ultimately compliant.

Not to be confused with Q and lying.

To the nines

"In China, interest rates are always set to be multiples of nine," said Fan Wenzhong, deputy director at the Research Department of the China Banking Regulatory Commission in Beijing.

Because the financial year in China has 360 days, it's easier to compute monthly and daily rates if yearly rates are evenly divisible by nine, as are the current lending and deposit rates. The divisible-by-nine rule was enshrined in accounting standards issued jointly by the central bank and the Ministry of Finance in 1993.

The rule also simplifies interest computation on an abacus, the calculating tool that came into use more than 2,000 years ago during the Han Dynasty and is still used today.

"Rates divisible by nine avoid rounding of interest and allow easier calculation by abacus," said Wang Qing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong.

In addition, the number nine in Chinese shares a pronunciation with the word "longevity" and has long been considered a lucky number. Chinese wedding feasts have nine dishes; Beijing's Forbidden City has 9,999 rooms.

"The number nine is very important in the Chinese society and business world," said Chan Mansing, associate professor at the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. "Nine stands for longevity, abundance and masculinity. It also represents the highest attainable level in all human endeavors in the Book of Change, a Chinese philosophy book that has been read for thousands of years."

I'm skeptical about some of that, particularly the number of rooms in the Forbidden City.

The orchid as Confucius' "king of the flowers"

A news article is claiming that "Confucius often referred to the orchid as the king of all flowers." Did Confucius ever say such a thing? As far as I can tell, the closest utterance of his to this is found in "The School Sayings of Confucius" 孔子家語, where he is quoted saying, "芝蘭生於深谷，不以無人而不芳；君子修道立德，不為困窮而改節。" ("The orchid grows deep in the valley; even if no one is about it emits its fragrance. The junzi cultivates the Way and establishes his virtue; even if he is in difficulty or poverty, he does not waver in his integrity.")

The poet Cai Yong 蔡邕 claimed that when Confucius came across a solitary orchid, he said that it emitted its fragrance for kings (爲王者香), but now it bloomed alone among ordinary plants, just as the wise like himself were not employed by rulers but were left to mingle with ordinary people. "夫蘭當爲王者香，今乃獨茂，與衆草爲伍，譬猶賢者不逢時，與鄙夫爲倫也。"

Nowadays, "王者香" is used to mean orchid, but Confucius apparently never called orchids the "king of flowers".

On the other hand, that same article goes on to say that Confucius wrote "The association with a superior person is like entering a hall of fragrant orchids." (與善人居，如入芝蘭之室). Incidentally, the original continues, "After a long while, one no longer smells their fragrance, and comes to resemble them. The association with an inferior person is like entering a salted fish shop; after a long while one no longer smells the stench, and comes to resemble them" (久而不聞其香，即與之化矣！與不善人居，如入鮑魚之肆，久而不聞其臭，亦與之化矣。) This is also from "The School Sayings of Confucius". (Which has only tenuous connections to Confucius anyway).

Apparently it was Zhang Xueliang 張學良 who said that the orchid was the "king of flowers": "The orchid is the king of flowers; it's odor is mild and its appearance is elegant." "蘭是花中的君子，其香也淡，其姿也雅".