Daan park
This is in the middle of Daan district. It’s sometimes written Taan, sometimes Daan. (If you're curious, see the first comment for my explanation of why this is, so I don’t bore the rest of you with linguistics.) Evelyn and her roomies live about a block from this park. Saturday morning, I was jetlagged and up early, so went running in the park, thinking, hey, it’s 630, I’ll have the place to myself (as I would in a Seattle park). I get there, and there are hundreds (and by hundreds, I mean thousands) of people there doing various forms of exercise. Mostly calisthenics, which I assume is Tai Chi. It was often large crowds, sometimes in matching uniforms, performing moves to recorded music from a boombox on the ground. I had always thought of Tai Chi as being a slower, more deliberate set of moves, but some of these people were doing something that I, had it not been a giant group of Chinese people in a Chinese city park, dancing to Chinese music, would have called “Jazzercise”.
There were also lots of people bicycling, walking their dogs, and I even saw a few runners. I now know that in this climate, Chinese people actually do sweat, which made me happy to know. There’s a set of basketball courts (which was being used), an amphitheater, a large jungle gym area, etc. In the interior of the park, in which I haven’t yet been, there’s a “ecological pond”. Not sure what that is, but I may investigate tomorrow morning. I like me some urban parks.
Jerry, these guys were playing a little later (about 8AM). The guy in the grey tank top and his teammates were really good, taking the other team to school. Behind the back, no-look passes, hook shots, jump shots from outside. Ev tells me the courts are in use late into the evening as well. Next time you’re in town, bring your Shaqs, and you can talk six-year-old trash to them.
posted by Kenneth at 1:35 AM
5 Comments:
Why the various spellings? This is a result of various transliteration schemes. To understand this problem, we have to learn a little bit of phonetics. In English, we have a variety of consonant sounds we can make. A major class of consonants are called “stops”, which means that the air escaping from your lungs is completely stopped on the way out, briefly. Our stops in English are the labials (p/b, which block the air with the lips), the alveolars (t/d, where the air is blocked by the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, which is the little bit of tissue behind the upper teeth – it’s the part that gets burned when you eat too-hot pizza), and the velars (k/g, where the air is stopped by the back of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, right in front of the throat.) Try saying each of these sounds and pay attention to where your tongue touches the roof of your mouth, and you can see what I mean.
Each of these pairs of sounds differs in a quality called voicing. The second sound in each pair has the vocal cords vibrating while you pronounce it, the first sound does not (hold your fingers to your throat while you pronounce them to see this – you can feel the vocal cords vibrating.) In English, you can substitute one of these sounds for another and change the meaning of a word. That is, you can change only the voicing, and change the meaning of a word containing the sound. For example, pat/bat form what is called a minimally contrasting set (or a minimal pair), demonstrating that voicing is contrastive in English. (tad/dad and cad/gad are further examples). Okay, we’re almost done with the background, and we’re about the get to the bit with the Chinese, I promise. Another property of sounds is that of aspiration. This is a measure of the amount of air that is released as the sound is spoken. To understand this, hold up your hand in front of your mouth, and say the tad/dad pair again. You should be able to feel air being released when you say the t in tad, but not when you say the d in dad. This air release is called aspiration. And aspiration, unlike voicing, is not contrastive in English. There are no examples of words where I can change the aspiration of a stop, and change the meaning of the word. This is not true of other languages (Hindi is a great example, where there are actually 4 labial stops, 4 alveolar stops, etc, since the aspiration is contrastive. (I just had to write a paper on Hindi for a class this summer - that's the only reason I know this.)) In English, we have voiceless aspirated stops initially, and voiced unaspirated stops initially. Internal to a word, we have voiceless unaspirated stops (try the experiment again with pat/spat – you shouldn’t feel aspiration after the p in spat - at least not nearly as much.) If you work at it, you can pronounce a voiceless unaspirated stop at the beginning of a word. Try this – try to pronounce pat without aspiration. To the degree to which you are successful, this will sound a lot like bat. And this tells us that our perception of whether someone is pronouncing a p or a b depends as much on whether we hear any aspiration than on whether we hear voicing (we do hear this – our brains are actually quite sophisticated sound processing machines.)
Anyway, finally, here is my theory of the weird spelling variations when transliterating Chinese (this is just my theory, I haven’t studied the phonetics of Chinese, specifically.) Initial Chinese voiceless stops are not aspirated. So, they sound to an English listener like voiced stops. So, a Chinese speaker says Taan, and it sounds to us like Daan. I think a very similar thing happened when we used to call Beijing: Peking.
Now, aren’t you glad I put that in a comment?
you are a dork.
Yes, but he's such a happy dork. If you can keep him focused for a couple of months he seems to have the ability to learn just about anything...such a good little monkey.
And here I've wondered (but not very diligently) for 30 years why I see the word "tao" also spelled "dao".
I just spent the past 4 evenings watching the first 3 seasons of "South Park" (always late to the party) and they almost never discuss linguistics...at least not like kenny. Although come to think of it, by the end of season two I could almost understand kenny and then there was "starvin' marvin" (who should have his own series). btw -k, do ethiopians have a click language or are matt & trey in error? I thought the clicks were only featured in the speech of the hottentots down south.
Isn't it just amazing how often linguistics is relevant to conversation?
p.
and an additional btw -k, have you been following the hexacyclinol controversy? There are some way cool t-shirts.
p.
In defense of Kenneth, tell me more! I love good teachers, it's easier to learn when someone 'splains it. That's Ricky Ricardo talk for you gen x-y-z ers. Does your expertise explain why Evelyn talks fast?
Cassie
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