Shanghai Vixen

Shanghai Daily http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2008/200804/20080429/article_357528.htm

ONE of the intangible artifacts of old Shanghai is very much alive. It’s yangjingbang English, the city’s first, snappy business lingo. You could use it to wrap up a deal, talk to the ayi or ask for a kai si - kiss, writes Pan Xiaoyi.

Ha pi” is a popular word among young people today. Pronounced in Shanghai dialect, it sounds like “happy” - it also means happy - and is a common example of fashionable pidgin English. It’s called yangjingbang English.

Yangjingbang English originated in the Yangjingbang area of old Shanghai, now Yan’an Road E. very close to the Bund. As a small tributary of the Huangpu River, Yangjingbang was insignificant. However, once it became the boundary between the bustling French Concession and British Concession in 1848, it became a household word.

That’s because of the mixture of English and Chinese for fast, snappy, short-hand communication that became known as yangjingbang English. Some was imported from Canton, with Indian and Portuguese influences. Shanghainese absorbed it and developed their own language.

Today yangjingbang - the city’s original business English - still turns up in daily life. The term can also refer to popular new words.

Terms include pai si (pass), ba shi (bus), shui men ting (cement), and re shui ting (steam).

Huang Aiguo, born in the 1950s, grew up near Yangjingbang area and recalls his father speaking yangjingbang English in Shanghai dialect. “He would say someone has a beautiful fan si (face) or she is such a mo deng (modern) lady.”

Yangjingbang flowed west from the Bund toward Zhoujin (now Xizang Road S.). It was called Yangjingbang because it flowed past the Yangjing Harbor. Many cargo ships and ferries from the suburbs anchored at Sanyangjing Bridge. Ships docked with cargoes from India, Japan, Europe and the United States; the freight was carried inland. Freight from south of the Yangtze River was shipped outward.

Business boomed. Foreign companies poured in: banks, bourses, trading companies, insurance companies, retailers of all kinds. Chinese companies prospered as well.

Chinese middlemen hustled along the riverbank and made business possible between Chinese and Westerners who spoke no Chinese. Compradors were the Chinese managers of big mercantile establishments.

Office clerks in foreign companies often talked a lot with brokers and suppliers in pidgin English. It combined English and Chinese elements to communicate between English and Chinese speakers.

Huang reminisces about his father who worked for Sincere & Co Ltd, one of the four famous department stores at that time.

“When my father played with us, he would say, ‘qing nong chi lan hu mian.’ Lan hu mian literally means over-cooked noodles. Pronounced in Shanghainese, it sounds like ‘love me.’ So qing nong chi lan hu mian means ‘Please love me.’

“Sometimes neighbors might say ‘I saw them da kai si (kiss)’ when gossiping about lovers,” he continues.

Pidgin English originated in Guangzhou (then Canton), the first Treaty Port and major trading center. At first foreign business men showed little interest in learning Chinese, and the Chinese government punished those who taught Chinese to foreigners.

Thus pidgin (the Cantonese pronunciation of “business”) came into being, effective business English that didn’t sweat the grammar or pronunciation.

After Shanghai was opened as one of five “Treaty Ports,” foreign businessmen swarmed in. Pidgin English developed into yangjingbang English, the coin of the commercial realm.

English speakers also used yangjingbang English with servants at home, waiters in hotels and restaurants, coolies (also yangjingbang English, from Chinese ku li meaning laborer) pulling rickshaws, and others. Children were cared for by Chinese amahs (ayi).

Local famed author Chen Danyan writes of yangjingbang English in her latest book (in Chinese), “Images and Legends of the Shanghai Bund.”

There was a joke that a chef told his mistress in yangjingbang English, “Twenty dollar one month, eat you, sleep you.” Actually he meant his employer should pay him US$20 a month and provide food and lodging.

Other interesting examples:

An expat returned home one day to find broken drinking glasses and asked his servant. “Inside zhi-zhi-zhi, outside miao-miao-miao, glass guang-lang-dang,” the man said. It turned out that the cat tried to catch the darting mouse and crashed into the glassware.

One day, the boss of a foreign firm asked his driver to buy a film ticket. The man returned empty-handed, saying: “People mountain people sea, today no see, tomorrow see, tomorrow see, same see.” It actually meant there was a huge crowd of people and tickets were sold out until the next day.

One foreigner took silk to a tailor and “localized” his English: “My have got one piece plenty handsome silk; my want you make one nice evening dress.” (Simply: “I have a very nice piece of silk and want you to make a nice evening dress.”)

Yangjingbang English is evolving as white collars are keen to coin their own words. For example, jia bei qing nong (deep feelings) refers to cappucino. If pronounced in Shanghai dialect, it sounds like “cappucino.”

Similarly, ai shi jia bei qing nong (love signifies deep feelings), means iced cappucino. Some are both humorous and vivid such as huo shi bi dao (bad things happen), for hospital in Shanghai dialect.

Chinglish translated directly from Shanghai dialect is also very popular among young people. For instance, “old three and old four” (lao san lao si), meaning being arrogant and “no three no four” (bu san bu si), meaning nonsense.

Though some terms are still widely used, not many people know the origins of yangjingbang English. The river itself has disappeared. When the river became too polluted, authorities in the French and British concessions decided to fill it in and pave over the waterway.

In 1915, the new road was named Avenue Eduard VII after the British monarch. Big buildings went up. In swarmed more business. Now, Yan’an Road is still the main downtown east-west road.

“I can still hear white collars walking out of their offices on Yan’an Road speaking yangjingbang English and mixing Chinese with English,” Huang says.

The old lingo lingers

Ang san (on sale)

Originally out-dated or low-quality goods, which deceived customers and led them to buy “bargains” that were “on sale.” It came to mean an outwardly good person who actually is mean-spirited.

Sometimes it refers to a difficult situation in which one tells lies to make it more acceptable to others.

Hun qiang shi (take a chance)

It is sometimes said that someone takes a chance, or is a risk-taker in doing careless work or being lazy and relying on others to do the job.

Sha gen (shocking)

Similar to “extremely.” Describes something that is very good, so good that it is startling.

Describing price, it indicates something extremely low.

Luo song tang (Russian soup, borscht)

Old Shanghainese called Russians luo song. After the October Revolution in 1917, many Russians fled to Shanghai.

They brought many products including luosong tang, luosong mianbao (Russian bread), luosong mao (Russian hat), among others.

Interesting piece, and glad there’s resistance to the 请说普通话 campaign in the city (although I like to pretend those are aimed at illiterate foreigners) - which granted is necessary given the growing number of xiawuning residents.

Some people are worried that the Shanghai dialect may be dying out and are taking steps to preserve their “mother tongue.” Yao Minji reports on their concern and the launch of a dictionary of the dialect by a famous linguist.

Flora Gu came back to Shanghai after four years of study in America. Unlike most people returning from abroad who frequently mix English into accented Mandarin, Gu insists on speaking Shanghai dialect whenever possible.

“For me, that is the real sound of home,” explains Gu, who says she had no chance to speak the dialect while she was in America although she used both English and Mandarin frequently.

“Only when I phoned my family and friends in Shanghai did I have the chance to speak the dialect. I missed the air in Shanghai, flooded with sound of the dialect. And whenever I’m homesick, I’ll speak the tongue to myself, I even tried to read the Chinese news online using Shanghainese.”

On the other hand, many Shanghai-native kids like third-grader Lin Guochong do not speak a word of Shanghainese. The younger the kids are, the worse their dialect skills are. Teachers and kids are required to speak Mandarin in schools in Shanghai which cuts into the time for them to speak Shanghainese.

“And my parents speak Mandarin to me at home, too. Only grandparents speak a Ningbo-accented Shanghai dialect, of which I usually understand only about 40 percent,” Lin says.

Kids like Lin make people worry about the continued existence and development of the Shanghai dialect. Some, especially among the youngsters, consider it useless because “Shanghai is an international city. Shanghai dialect won’t last forever and will surely become history.”

Others, including well-known linguist Qian Nairong, see the dialect as a significant part of Shanghai’s culture and ask: “What makes it Shanghai if you don’t have any feature of it left?”

“If we can not even protect and promote our mother tongue (Shanghai dialect), how dare we talk about developing an advanced world culture?” asks Qian.

Gu is definitely a follower of Qian’s ideas. She still remembers “when you had to speak the Shanghai dialect, otherwise you would be either discriminated against or cheated in the 1990s. I am not saying that was correct.”

But now, it is considered abrupt and inappropriate to speak Shanghainese in many office buildings, especially in Pudong, when the common languages are usually English and Mandarin.

Philippe Hu works in one of those buildings and says there is only one other Shanghai native among his 70 colleagues.

“I have to speak Mandarin and English during work. Day by day, I actually feel awkward speaking the dialect,” says Hu whose only solution is to use the dialect on instant messengers and SMS. “I’m really worried about losing the tongue because it would be ridiculous to be a Shanghai native without knowing how to speak the language. I mean, even expats in Shanghai can speak a few simple lines.”

However, those like Lin’s parents hold the opposite opinion. Born in Shanghai and both working for foreign enterprises, Lin’s parents are not at all worried about Lin’s not speaking the dialect.

“It is just a dialect, it is not a language. He wouldn’t really need it anyway. My husband and I don’t ever use Shanghainese in our work or social life,” says Lin’s mother. “Plus, how do you define Shanghai native since Shanghai is an immigrant city? By birth place? Then many kids born in Shanghai have parents from out of town, so they won’t even be able to learn the dialect from their parents. How can you force them to learn it?”

Lin’s mother also raised a question about the standard Shanghai dialect. Most residents in the city are only second or third generations of the people who moved to the city in the 1950s. So the dialect has been influenced by the other dialects from surrounding areas including Ningbo, Hangzhou and Yangzhou among other.

They are different from the original dialect which is now spoken by only very few natives who live in outlying areas like Songjiang, Minhang, Nanhui and Jiading districts.

Qian’s answer is simple and direct. “The standard dialect is the one we are using now. Languages develop with the society. I consider the language used by most youths to be the mother tongue of the Shanghainese. If we have to use something that is the most standard, then it must be the one that is most used.”

Putting his words into practice, Qian has even compiled “The Dictionary of Shanghai Dialect,” said to be the most complete book about the tongue. The dictionary was published in August and Qian is currently working on building an input system to type the dialect on computers.

And many Shanghainese are also more and more concerned about protecting the language. Many started writing blogs in the dialect and some even became well known for doing that.

Moreover, there are now more Shanghainese rapping in the dialect online, with some of the more successful ones spreading among the city’s youth. Maybe in the future, we can expect to find the dialect appearing in other cultural forms.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2007/200709/20070919/article_331660.htm

Languages Die, but Not Their Last Words

Chris Rainier/National Geographic
Charlie Muldunga, right, the last known speaker of Amurdag, with two researchers who are making a record of dying languages, K. David Harrison, left, and Gregory D. S. Anderson.

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: September 19, 2007

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic and at languagehotspots.org.

In a teleconference with reporters yesterday, K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture.

Beginning what is expected to be a long-term project to identify and record endangered languages, Dr. Harrison has traveled to many parts of the world with Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute, in Salem, Ore., and Chris Rainier, a filmmaker with the National Geographic Society.

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families.

In Australia, where nearly all the 231 spoken tongues are endangered, the researchers came upon three known speakers of Magati Ke in the Northern Territory, and three Yawuru speakers in Western Australia. In July, Dr. Anderson said, they met the sole speaker of Amurdag, a language in the Northern Territory that had been declared extinct.

“This is probably one language that cannot be brought back, but at least we made a record of it,” Dr. Anderson said, noting that the Aborigine who spoke it strained to recall words he had heard from his father, now dead.

Many of the 113 languages in the region from the Andes Mountains into the Amazon basin are poorly known and are giving way to Spanish or Portuguese, or in a few cases, a more dominant indigenous language. In this area, for example, a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have a secret tongue mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science.

“How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery,” Dr. Harrison said in a news release.

The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages in the Northwest Pacific plateau, a region including British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Only one person remains who knows Siletz Dee-ni, the last of many languages once spoken on a reservation in Oregon.

In eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional languages, like Russian or Sakha.

Forty languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico, many of them originally used by Indian tribes and others introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of the languages are moribund.

Another measure of the threat to many relatively unknown languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that 83 languages with “global” influence are spoken and written by 80 percent of the world population. Most of the others face extinction at a rate, the researchers said, that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish and plants.