User Comments - aert
aert
Posted on: Hiring a Courier
February 7, 2008 at 10:55 AMNicolas I am glad still to be able to try and do so in the 2000's.
Posted on: Hiring a Courier
February 7, 2008 at 10:52 AMhenning For the record, and just to show how much CPod is on the ball, the emphasizing force of DE is mentioned by John in the podcast of the "don't litter" elementary lesson. The sentence here is qīngjiégōng huì sǎo de "the street cleaners will sweep it up". Here again I doubt whether shì can be used. The same goes for your second example. Perhaps Lujiaojie can tell us.
Posted on: Chinese New Year Plans
February 6, 2008 at 11:55 AMHi Chinesepod Chinese New Year is a good opportunity to express my great appreciation and warm gratitude for all your work, and I also want to thank all the users who so often provide additional material, interesting questions, details of life in China and last not least jokes (the shortest one was the first reaction to the Hard of Hearing lesson: "shénme?"). It is Chinesepod that makes all this possible and I think you are doing a terrific job. A very Happy New Year to all of you!
Posted on: Hiring a Courier
February 4, 2008 at 9:14 PMChangye For NOT using services you should have lived in Holland in the 1960's. In the town where I lived I had seen a big sign ONE HOUR SERVICE (in English!) on a small cleaners' establishment. Once when I had to look my best on a weekend I took a suit there on a Friday 2:00PM on my way to classes, intending to pick it up on my way back home after five. When the man gave me my ticket he said "It'll be ready Tuesday afternoon." Somewhat taken aback I pointed to his sign. He explained that my suit's turn wouldn't come till Tuesday morning, but that then it would be ready within the hour. I had neither the gall nor the wish to return the ticket and pick up the bag again, so I left, one small story richer.
Posted on: Hiring a Courier
February 4, 2008 at 7:15 PMhenning and lujiaojie The question "with or without DE" is an interesting one, and the example in the expansion is particularly interesting because the sentence ends with the object of the whole sentence and the subject of the subordinate one, ie. rén is the object of pài and the subject of diàochá. The matter is discussed at length in Li and Thompson's "Mandarin Chinese. A Functional Reference Grammar" U. of California Press 1940 ISBN 0-520-04286-7 in the chapter "Nominalization". They try to refine the usual notion "emphasis" by examples like the following:(1) tā zuòtiān lái le vs.(2) tā zuòtiān lái de. Here (1) would be an answer to the question "Has he arrived yet?", (2) eg. to the question "Why couldn't he speak English?" Note that (2) has an alternative with shì after tā. They conclude that (1) refers just to an action and (2) to a situation by affirming or denying some supposition. They give several more examples, but none in the syntactic position as in the Expansion sentence. Would it be possible to add a shì after rén? They define it formally as "The (shì)...de construction", so if the addition of shì is impossible here, their theory needs further refinement. The answer to the question "where does the DE come from?" is that it nominalizes a preceding phrase, it changes (der Mann) kam gestern into der gestern gekommene (Mann).
Posted on: The DVD Ploy
January 30, 2008 at 7:06 PMHi Changye As usual, a by itself already useful lesson is enhanced by the comments. My simplified dictionary gives different characters for yán "salt" (noun) and yān "to salt/pickle/preserve"; the latter has the old radical 130 and on the top right dà "big" with under it diàn "electricity". It occurs eg. in yāncài "sauerkraut". In your examples from Google the character for the noun is used, so I hope they pronounce yán here, or we will have another irregularity. The DVD ploy is the successor of the old "etchings" one. I doubt if this is progress, to look at etchings you have to sit closer to each other than with DVD's.
Posted on: Evading Nosy Questions
January 28, 2008 at 7:48 PMPS I forgot to mention yīyàng when doubting whether there is an ordinal in all these cases. I hope we didn't saddle up the CPod team with an impossible job.
Posted on: Evading Nosy Questions
January 28, 2008 at 7:41 PMHi,Changye The book of Seidel from which I quoted is not very good. He wrote in the time when Latin grammar was imposed on all others. But at least he gives information without contradicting himself in the matter of yi. All more modern books I have either are uninformative or contradict themselves. The old rule for yi appears e.g.in Rudiments of Chinese Phonetics (Beijing 1982), but has dìyīmíng "first place, number one", which agrees with your rule. Scurfield's "Chinese" in the Teach Yourself Books series also gives the old rule and according to that writes dìyícì "the first time", yìdiǎnyíkè "a quarter past one" but yīyuè "January", yīyàng "alike, the same", with your rule again. Other sources are uninformative because they either do not write the tones at all (e.g. Alleton's otherwise excellent short grammar) or leave out a tone mark in yi+measure word (Li & Thompson in their grammar; the only cases I found leafing through). Years ago I tried to get Chao's grammar, but it was out of print. I am not sure if your last example can count as "ordinal". If so, it would have to be because it precedes nián. In giving telephone numbers you use cardinals (and replace yī by yāo). What really interests me in all this is the strange parallelism of yi and bu. Did the Korean books you mention indicate the tones? At one time I thought "In 2 or 3 years I'll learn to read Chinese, and then I'll go into historical phonology." Famous last words. This weekend I had visitors, no chance to do Chinese, but they made up for that by bringing me a book which you probably know: Cecilia Lindqvist's Tecknens Rike, which was translated into many languages including Chinese (Dutch title in English "The character of China"). Much I knew from the Russian Sher's book on Chinese writing, but many details are new to me. Highly recommended, it would interest you if only for many new archeological details.
Posted on: Evading Nosy Questions
January 25, 2008 at 6:30 PMHi Changye It is 5 years ago that I worried about the pronunciation of Chinese (which I am just trying to learn to read). And my sources are mostly old. I remember it was a lot of trouble to fix the behavior of yi. But the rule as I stated it I can now find only in an old (1901) German "Konversations-Grammatik" by A. Seidel, p.25, though I got it from a combination of other, mostly Russian books. Your textbooks must be newer and will therefore reflect contemporary usage. This, then, is an additional rule. I have no idea whether it is an innovation in the language or simply omitted in my sources. Though not of practical importance for me, I find the question as such interesting. BTW I see now that Seidel gives another rule: bā "eight" is pronounced bǎ before the classifier gè. I wonder if that is still true. In all these cases there is really not "change" in the language but "alternation". But a learner has to start with something, so if (s)he starts with yī then yí and yì are "changed". In Holland we say "A good cold (gǎnmào) lasts six weeks." I hope and trust you got rid of yours quicker.
Posted on: Hiring a Courier
February 7, 2008 at 4:59 PMhenning and nicolas I made a mistake in the date of Li and Thompson's book. The publication is of 1981. — 1940 is the year Li, Charles N was born. The birthyear of his co-author Sandra A. Thompson is not mentioned.