Pointing out that, yes, this is technically correct, because his name is written in hanzi as 吳, and in Mandarin that's pronounced "Wu" But Mr. Wu, a working-class bus driver from Guangzhou, most likely *never* called himself "Wu" in daily conversation
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And his ancestors, for the vast majority of their family history, wouldn't have called themselves "Wu" either Because as a South Chinese family from Guangdong their actual native language was Cantonese, in which 吳 is pronounced "Ng"
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It's a difficult situation to translate into Western terms in modern times But it's like all these old-timey historical figures referred to only by their Latin names, names they'd never have used in conversation
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Notable also is how medieval church records would often Latin-ised everyone's names to Henricus or whatever but their daily use name is likely a dialectal diminutive of it
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True. And the hegemony that came from first the Roman Empire and later the Catholic church meant that Latin was the prestige language in Europe, so that was political, too
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My understanding of how classical written Chinese is used historically is very coloured by me being a medievalist, I confess. I often end up likening it to the relationship the various European cultures had to Latin.
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There's a lot of similarities, yeah Including how "classical Chinese" as we know it is a "high language" that for much of its history was used by scholars to communicate in writing, that they translated their actual daily vernacular into
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jeannette_ng and
So a lot of the stuff that makes a book like the Dao De Jing so gnomic is just the result of it being highly compressed into shorthand by scribes etc
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It is also sometimes very not gnomic because those characters being still in use can have very blunt and mundane meanings. Like, some old texts can seem so immediate you forget that character used to mean another thing. That there has been linguistic change.
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Replying to @jeannette_ng @arthur_affect and
Have we brought up how the use of Chinese characters to transliterate loanwords can result in added meaning? It blew my mind utterly to learn that the origin of 台灣 wasn't that it looked like a platform. It's a transliteration of an older native name.
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Ha, yes, the Chinese colonizers themselves pulled the same thing that Europeans pulled on them when they turned "Guangdong" into "Canton"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jeannette_ng and
My mom told me once about how she struggled for the longest time, as someone who moved to Hong Kong as a child, with why the HK term for Western-style bread is 吐司 (tǔsī in Mandarin, "tou si" in Mandarin)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jeannette_ng and
It's just two completely unrelated characters, "bite the wax tadpole" style It wasn't until she actually learned English in high school that she had a lightbulb moment -- "It's just 'toast'!"
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