The Chinese is supposed to mean “Do not follow” other people, go your own way. And the translation turned out like this.

I don’t think Nokia China’s marketing team use Twitter at all.

I came across this word on the package of a snack. And the definition of this word is exactly how I felt when I read the word, even before tasting the snack.

I asked several friends about their instinctive feeling of this word. At lot of them gave me exactly the correct answer. (They didn’t cheat. You can’t even find the answer by simply googling before this post was published.)

I asked 21 people, and 10 of them answered “sour”, two of them gave examples like lemon and cherry to illustrate the taste. When some thing goes bad, it should taste sour, or foul. I am not sure what exactly they meant by this answer. One of my friend who went for “spicy” explained you may very likely make noise like chü chü chü after eaten something really spicy.

چۈچۈمەل (chüchümel) means sour in the Uyghur language.

This might indicate sound by itself, indeed, might mean something. A similar phenomenon is the bouba/kiki effect. This falls into the scope of “phonosemantics“. Chüchümel may well serve as an example.

No. This is a common misconception, and it’s not what really happened in history.

An article published in the October 2008 issue on the magazine of Chinese Language Society of Hong Kong (香港中国语文学会) quoted linguist Yao Dehuai (姚德懷) as saying, the common belief in Hong Kong that, in the early years of the Republic of China, Cantonese lost to Beijing dialect only by one vote, is groundless. And the fact that such misconception was held by quite a few academics is shameful. (Commemorating 110th Anniversary of Mandarin/Putonghua Movement / 紀念國語普通話運動110周年)

First it was not 1911. There was indeed a meeting to determine the national dialect, but it was first convened only in 1913.

According to A History of the National Dialect Movement (国语运动史纲) written by linguist Li Jinxi (黎锦熙), by the time the Pronunciation Unification Council (读音统一会) first convened in Feb 1913, nearly a third of its members were from Jiangsu and Zhejiang (both provinces are near Shanghai). Only 4 were from Guangdong. Even if some other dialect could become national standard, rather than that of Beijing, it could have been the Wu dialect spoken in the provinces near Shanghai. Besides, actually each province only had one vote in the later meetings of the Council. It would be unimaginable that a representative from some other province would willingly vote for the dialect of Guangdong.

And even if Cantonese had lost the contest to Beijing pronunciation, it would not happen by only “one vote”.

It was not a law that simply said “Let’s all speak Cantonese”. It was a more complicated process with fierce debate. All provinces in China use the mostly same set of characters. What matters to set a national dialect is to unify the pronunciation of those characters. Later on that council, after heated discussion, the standard pronunciation of more than 6,500 characters were decided one by one. And in that process, each province only had one vote. For any dialect to become national, it would take thousands of votes. The pronunciation is largely based on Beijing pronunciation, with some exceptions.

The closest point of Cantonese to national status was in 1926, on the 2nd national congress of Kuomintang. The meeting was held in Guangzhou (aka Canton) and Cantonese was taken as official language for that meeting. Mandarin speeches delivered by “Northerners” were interpreted by Cantonese party members. But that was only ad hoc. On the provincial education meeting held later in that same month in Guangzhou, Cantonese was not allowed in official speeches. (Source [Chinese])

A blog provides a lengthy account here 方言的“一票之差”国语情结. That blog is written in Chinese and I just summarized his arguments. Most of the information that I give here comes from there.

Chinese text reads:

Find the right one to marry on True Love Online.
– Get married in 2011!

Ummm, what does LOL in that URL mean?

The Chinese in this signpost means: “Sacred revolutionary land Yan’an”.

Yan’an (延安) had been the capital of the Communist Party.

And now I am officially scared!

A lot of people gathered there. Many came there because of the call. And many other people were just tourists and passers-by. Of course, a lot of police and national security personnel were present. People took photos and tweeted. Some of them just curious to know what the heck was going on, why were there so many people. But nobody chanted political calls, no one held sings.

Revolution? You can even call this a protest. Similar things happened when Google was forced out of China. People gathered there and gave their farewell at Google headquarters near Tsinghua University. They took photos of the scene and of each other, tweeted, blogged. And interestingly, Google employees took photos of the crowd through office window.

No one seemed to be talking. There was not likely any discussions. People don’t feel they have the freedom of talking about those events or other issues in front of strangers — i.e. people don’t feel having the freedom of assembly and talking about politics in public. I believe freedom will grow if you believe in and keep practicing it.

A tweet from @watchmen725 moved me very much:

Spectacular! For some time a lot of cameras overwhelmed the shitty faces of police. People would not back off. It was impossible to disperse the crowd. A fat national security tries to control the jasmine guy but he can’t. His every movement is blocked by the crowded. There was not any word other than the bouquet of flower. This is already very exciting.

Another tweet is even more encouraging:

A 80’s generation young man was put on the focus for receiving interview from a financial media and a news outlet from Hong Kong. He said “We must end the one party rule” when asked about his slogan.

There will be more shows of solidarity, more indications of people power. There will be the real thing.

There will definitely be worse traffic congestion like any other smaller cities. They don’t know how to tackle traffic problems until they meet them. People won’t learn how to respect traffic rules until they meet these problems and know traffic rules are important.

This is what happens in my hometown — a small county in north China. The provincial government is pushing a large infrastructure re-development program, as part of the nation wide construction boom.

My town now sprawls away to the north. It is now too far to get around by bicycle, and there is no reliable bus system. Taxis are far from enough (strikingly less expensive than in Beijing though). People are buying cars. As flats are increasingly expensive, cars seem more affordable.

And now, people drive their cars to get around, residential compounds are packed with cars. And most importantly, few people follow traffic rules. Traffic congestion happens more frequently than it should. And traffic problem is only part of the disease caused by hasty urbanization.

I’ve just done a few tweaks on this blog. Added sharing buttons and tags. Wrote a short “about page”. The share button doesn’t look that good though. There’s still long way to go for me to have a big tag cloud.

I hope I can carry on.