Viswanathan K's Thoughts

With Chinese/Mandarin (#2, 1.3 billion speakers), Gaston Dorren’s Babel focuses on the script. There are a lot of misconceptions about the script, and they never go away because they contain a kernel of truth. Let’s learn more.   Chinese is written top to bottom; its columns then ordered left to right . Long, long ago, both statements were true. But for a long time now, it has been written left to right on horizontal lines.   Chinese characters are pictures or ideograms. A very small fraction (2%), yes. But the majority (98%) are not.   Chinese characters are over 3,500 years old. Yes, writing in China is that old. But the characters have changed a lot over that period, so much so that most modern Chinese readers cannot read the ancient texts.   Chinese has over 50,000 characters. As per some official dictionaries, yes. But in practice, many of those are very niche used only in some places or professions. Only a quarter of that is relevant to dai...

When one of my colleagues in China resigned, he sent his personal mail id to keep in touch. It read something like this: xxx@163.com (I felt it was a bit weird that a site had only numbers on it but I didn’t give it any further thought). When I Google’d a bit though, I was surprised to find that it is, in fact, very common for Chinese sites to have only numbers! Christopher Beam gives many such examples : “For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.” This seems insane. Wouldn’t it be much harder, if not impossible, to remember so many numbers, I wondered? Why would anyone choose numbers instead of letters for their website? Beam found the answer, and it makes perfect sense once you hear it: “To a native English-speaker, remembering ...

Until I visited China recently, I never paid any attention to their script. I assumed the basic approach would be similar to either any Indian or European language. You know, vowels, consonants, put together to form words. I could not have been more wrong. My first sign was when I noticed that all white guys at office are given Chinese names for use on their nameplates. No, this isn't a cultural curiosity; it is a necessity! A white guy called Don Beduhn was “renamed” Da Ba Du! But why is a name change even necessary? To answer that, you first need to understand that Chinese characters are of many types : 1) Pictogram: the symbol denotes an entire object; 2) Ideogram: the symbol represents a concept, like “up”; 3) Radical-radical compound: each element of the character (called radical) hints at the meaning; 4) Radical-phonetic compounds: one component indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other hints at the pronunciation; 5) A few other types t...

I’m guessing the title grabs one’s attention, so here’s the story. Recently, the US shot down a proposed law to address the issue of selective abortion of female fetuses. Which surprised me on two counts: 1)       Did that mean Americans prefer male children over female the way Indians and Chinese do? 2)      Had the scale of such gender based abortions reached the point for the need for such a law even in the US ? Then I read that several women’s organizations had opposed the law. That didn’t make sense: surely, women’s organizations should support such a law, I thought. So I decided to read up more on this. Turns out the proposed law would impose fines and prison terms on the doctors ( not the person undergoing abortion) who performed such sex selective abortions. Many legislators voted against the law because it was unfair to expect the doc to identify the reason for an abortion. Women’s organizations opposed it because they didn’t ...