(un)Scripted: A Linguistic Romp Through Space & Time

This is going to be rambling, disjointed, and probably pointless stringing together of words, but recently I've been really excited about writing systems. I was just perusing the website Omniglot, which inspired this post.

What brought me to Omniglot? I was looking for a clear table of the Arabic alphabet for Uyghur. I'm not trying too hard to study Uyghur any time soon, seeing as how I have my hands full, but today I couldn't help but scratch the itch by doing some light reading in the form of this Handbook for Modern Uyghur, kindly passed on to me by my friend David. I didn't get very far before my utter lack of familiarity with the Arabic alphabet started feeling like an overwhelming handicap. Romanization feels like cheating to me.

Rewind to Korea, January 2011. It was during this trip that David and I bonded over our interest in Uyghur. Meanwhile, with the help of PK, I managed to become somewhat phonetically functional in Korean hangeul. By which I mean I could sound out (at a snail-like pace) words on subway signs. The meaning of the words, of course, was beyond me.

PK's "guide" was my only resource, but I couldn't have done without it!


I was really excited because, as I mentioned earlier, it was my first time traveling in a country where I was linguistically incompetent.

Fast forward to Yunnan, January 2011. I never ceased to be fascinated by the various scripts I encountered throughout the province, most notably Tibetan and Dongba, a pictographic script formerly used by the Naxi of southern China, although I suspect that these days it appears on signs only for tourism purposes.

Dongba script on a sign near Lijiang old town:


Multilingual road sign in Zhongdian:


Fast forward to Thailand, February 2011. Bolstered by my success in Korea, I over-confidently assumed I could learn the Thai alphabet in 2 weeks. Not so! By the end of my stay I could only recognize the equivalents of a, ae, r, & ng. Unfortunately I had no resources on hand, and this book in the Chiang Mai University Library couldn't be absorbed in one sitting.



Something I found interesting was the use of what I perceived to be Latin-script-style letters adapted to the Thai alphabet to form a modern-looking typeface. Thus, the symbol for the "r" sound seems to become a backward "s". There are also letters that look like s, a, backward u, backward B...see the instant noodle cup below. (All of this is based on personal observation and not backed by research!)



The differences between traditional vs. modern-style scripts made it a lot harder to pick out letters of the Thai alphabet on, say, signs and advertisements. (I amused myself during rides in moving vehicles by trying to do so).

So I didn't learn the Thai alphabet. But I can confidently state that I am now decently familiar with the Russian variant of the Cyrillic alphabet, which may come of use because the Cyrillic alphabet is sometimes used to write Uyghur. Since returning from my travels, I've been working on Russian by painstakingly writing out song lyrics in both the upright and cursive forms of the script, which are not entirely the same. Those m's and n's are tricky!

Yes, I'm a total nerd, but don't think I'm a linguistic genius.  My spoken Russian is limited to phrases like "How are you?" and "Good/Bad", although listening to Russian rock music has helped me learn useful words like "cuckoo" and "gunpowder."

Now that I've got my Russian class to keep me motivated, and because I'm in the midst of researching employment options in Xinjiang (which quickly devolved into listening to my new Uyghur music interest, Arken Abdullah), today I took a break from studying Кино lyrics and read about Uyghur language basics instead.

Which brought me Omniglot.  Which brought me to this:

ColorHoney, a constructed script that could theoretically be used to represent English.  It looks a lot harder than the Thai alphabet.

I don't plan on devoting energy to learning a constructed, alternative, or "magical/fictional" script at any point, but...the possibilities are endless!

(Unrelated: Does alphabet soup exist in other languages?)

Back to Real Life: Spring Semester, Week 1

The week's recap:

1) My students are planning a video for Lady Gaga's new song, which doesn't have a video yet!  I got to feel like their cool American teacher for a hot second.  And then the news came out that the video is coming out on Monday.  Hm, bad timing.  Could you delay that until Week 3 of the Chinese spring semester, Lady Gaga? That would be much appreciated.  In any case, the main highlight was going through some important vocabulary words with them: gay, straight, bi, lesbian, transgendered.  They giggled, some of them may have been shocked, some didn't know what 3/5 of the words meant, some were excited to be know-it-alls.  And I think most of them absorbed my little talk about "respecting different opinions"...so I'll consider that a win.

2) Now that I have printed out over 250 Lady Gaga lyric sheets on my dime, I tried to strike a deal with the copy shop owner.  He wasn't having it.  Because the toner was low, or something of that nature, I asked for a discount.

Him: 8 kuai is all I can do for you. 
Me: But that's just 0.40 off! Can we do 7.50?
Him: Ha, forget it.  0.40 is already a lot!
Me: (resorting to a different tactic) I will be printing a lot this semester, since I'm a teacher.  Could I have a special price?
Him: (some story about some other teacher who has 3 classes, 40 students each)
Me: I have 250 students.
Him: (continuing to tell the story while fiddling with his World of Warcraft interface)
[Copy shop owners, of course, don't actually make any copies.  They sit around playing WoW and smoking cigarettes, while their employees sigh and take a break from their online chatting to "serve" you using a machine they don't really know how to operate.]
Me: 不太明白.  I don't really understand.
I gave up and went ahead and paid my 8 kuai.
Me: Okay, well we'll keep talking.
Him: Sure thing.

Well, at least I tried.  I feel like the level of respect for me in the place just got nudged up a teensy bit since I did the ultra-Chinese thing of asking for a discount on the kind of thing that just proves how much of a penny-pincher I am.

3) I am taking Elementary Russian..in Chinese...with 3 of my freshman oral students, Horse, Niki, and Tiffany.  Yup, it happened.  We'll see how long I can do 3 hours of night class a week.  We spent the first 45 minutes of class learning to write the Russian alphabet in cursive.  (Did I really sit through that?) Then it quickly went over my head, since I missed the first class.  How did I find out about this? Horse was studying the Russian alphabet at the beginning of class today.  I accosted him, and now here I am.

It's good to be back in Dalian!

This'll Be A Long One (AKA Yunnan)

I spent the last 2 weeks of January in Yunnan province, Southwest China with Rob.  He can attest to the fact that besides the gorgeous mountain scenery, what I never ceased to be fascinated by was how distinctive the architecture was, along with customs, language, and attire, in the different regions we visited.  We didn't even have time to see that much of the province, which is home to 25 different ethnic minorities. 

We started in the capital, Kunming, where my freshman oral student and Kunming-native, Amy, served as our wonderful guide.  (Thanks also need to be given to fellow Obie Adam and his roommates for hosting us!)  Here's me with Amy and her father, an artist (马骧）.



Amy is half Hui (Chinese Muslim) on her father's side.   I think she identifies more with her Han Chinese side, while going with the flow when with her Muslim relatives.  Her family, including an uncle, a cousin, a cousin-in-law, and a second cousin (I am still confused about the relationships), generously treated us to dinner at an upscale Muslim establishment, the Dubai Club.  Think burgundy, plush velvet, cloth napkins (what? in China?), way too much food, and awkward yet warm social interactions, and you've got the idea.   I thoroughly enjoyed my first opportunity to play "The Esteemed English Teacher" (or rather, "The Esteemed English Teacher Who Looks Very Young...But Wait, She Speaks Chinese?? Amazing!").

Islam is not that important to her dad, Amy told me, but his relatives still stick to custom and only eat at Muslim restaurants, of which there are many around the city.  There are also a lot of mosques.




Our next top was the Lijiang.  The old town zone of the city is a UNESCO Heritage Site, and it was most beautiful at 8 am before all the tourist shops opened.  You can read about it on Wikipedia -- I was more interested by the area around Lijiang, some of which I explored by bike and some of which I saw during our minibus ride to the most beautiful place I've been to in a long time, Tiger Leaping Gorge.  (The Gorge deserves its own post...coming soon!)  The area around Lijiang and the Gorge (2 hours to the north) has a large Naxi minority population.  Many of the older women were wearing blue brimmed caps, blue skirts, and what looked like a cross between a backpack and an apron on their backs.  The Naxi houses I saw all seemed to be made of reddish-brown stone with wooden fish painted in green, blue, red, or some other color hanging from the roof joint. Here is one of the villages we passed when we started our Gorge hike.



We finished hiking the Gorge in less time than expected, so on a whim, we headed several hours north to Zhongdian, otherwise known as Shangri-La since 2001.  The city's dubious status as the location of author James Hilton's fictional Shangri-La has received competition from other places claiming to be this Tibetan Buddhist Himalayan utopia.  Seemingly dropped down in the middle of a somewhat remote, snow-covered area where yaks grazed, and with its uncharacteristically wide boulevards and very un-Chinese architecture, Zhongdian seemed like a cross between a Wild Wild West saloon town, Tibetan style, and a movie set.  The signs were all bilingual (Chinese and Tibetan), and the buildings were unlike anything I've seen. This is a hotel.



There was also an abundance of drying yak meat.  A bicycle comes in handy.



Zhongdian is home to Yunnan's largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Ganden Sumtseling Monastery.  It is, no doubt, the mystical lamasery of Hilton's Shangri-La.



As a non-religious, non-spiritual person, visiting temples and monasteries, especially those where monks live and practice, tends to make me feel like a nervous intruder and uncultivated heathen who might at any moment upset a monk by forgetting to walk clockwise around the room (as is required in Tibetan Buddhism).  Then again, plenty of Chinese tourists were walking around snapping pictures, and the monastery was running a slick tourist operation complete with a visitor reception center 1 km outside the monastery zone.  I appreciated the opportunity to see some spectacular architecture (the keyword of this post), and I only regret paying my 80 kuai entrance fee to the Chinese government, rather than sneaking in and donating directly to the monastery's construction fund.

The pipes were frozen in Zhongdian, so after one night we headed back south to spring-like Dali, a favored destination for Chinese tourists and western backpackers alike, and a Bai minority stronghold.  Along the way the building styles changed from Tibetan to Naxi to Bai -- white houses decorated with "Chinese looking" paintings, calligraphy, and honeycomb-like designs, either painted or tiled.



Despite the fact that it was extremely touristy, I really enjoyed Dali because people actually live there, whereas in Lijiang the old town was home only to hostels and tourist shops, and new Lijiang, the true residential zone, was an unfortunate slice of dirty, loud, commercialized China.  It was very possible in Dali never to eat a pizza or drink coffee, but those options were there as well.  We opted for affordable and delicious Chinese food for every meal, and enjoyed local specialties including stirfried 树皮, or "tree bark", which I will assume was lichen, and fish and aquatic plants from nearby Erhai Lake. The spread of fresh flora and fauna to choose from, cooked by one woman and her wok, was my favorite aspect of eating in Dali.



My favorite part of Dali was actually getting out of Dali, and riding a bike 2 hours north along Erhai Lake to the village of Shaping, where a weekly Bai market occurs.  The ride sounded idyllic -- flanked by snow-covered Cangshan Mountain to the east (I should say Cang Mountain but let's not get nitpicky) and glittering Erhai Lake to the west -- but in reality it was a long, choked, raised roadway with belching, honking trucks making even a seasoned rider feel nervous (and definitely scaring the bejeezus out of Rob!), with the lake too far away to actually see. However, just being on a bike made me happy, and the end destination was worth it.



If you ever need hot peppers in bulk...



Or baskets to carry things on your back...



I also haggled, unsuccessfully, for a Bai tie-dye （扎染） from this woman, who said she died and embroidered them all herself. As a weaver and an exuberant appreciator of Beautiful Handmade Goods, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and paid a non-discounted but also non-exorbitant price for a beautiful piece that now adorns our apartment. For US $4.50 it felt a bit like stealing.



The market was a fascinating cultural experience, and although there were merchants hawking goods aimed at western tourists, there were also people just doing their weekly shopping. My impression of the Bai were that they have proudly maintained their culture while modernizing and profiting in the 21st century. It seemed that many of the houses I so admired were newly built, with solar water heaters and impeccable white walls, but still in keeping with the traditional aesthetic. And women were wearing their traditional headdresses, yet at least in Shaping, it didn't seem like a tourist gimmick. So many places in China seem fake, and of course, Dali had some of that, but overall, I found it to be a place where, with a bike and some language skills, it is very possible to enjoy "real" China sans wifi and latte.

All in all, Yunnan was beautiful, and I haven't even written about Tiger Leaping Gorge yet!

Live Octopus

After a month of travel, I'm back in Dalian with one week before the spring semester starts.  I have yet to fully process my time in Yunnan and Thailand, and before I can do that, I need to first turn my thoughts back to Korea.  Between my Harbin trip and a rushed couple of days grading finals before heading off to Yunnan, I spent a really fun week in South Korea with friends from Oberlin and their cohorts. Although I didn't have enough time to travel around the country, except for my almost daily hourly commute between the small town of Munsan and the big city of Seoul, my excellent hosts Peter and Gerald made sure that I experienced Korean culture to the fullest, mainly in the form of crazy foods.

Thus I give you (since I had free time and was inspired by Gerald, whose much more professional videos can be viewed here)...Sannakji.

We were also treated to hongeo, or rotting sashimi (raw fish), which may require another video in the near future!

Korea was the first country I've visited where I didn't speak the language, and therefore an exciting, new linguistic challenge.  It was also the first developed Asian country I've been to (I was too young to remember Taiwan), and a welcome change from China.   And it was certainly the first country where I enjoyed the sensation of a tentacle squirming in my mouth and grabbing my tongue.  I went knowing nothing and having planned nothing, but thanks to my excellent company, I had a blast!