User Comments - sclim
sclim
Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities
July 7, 2011 at 4:33 AM"why would it necessarily start with the Chinese?"
Oh, sorry, in that previous mass of verbiage on the Thai language was the eye opening (for me) nugget that in Thai numbering, the numbers 1-99 are borrowed wholesale, hardly altered, from the Teochew dialect of Chinese, which is why I found it so easy to learn. So when you are saying "twelve" Sibsong in Thai, you are actually talking IN CHINESE 十双!
Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities
July 7, 2011 at 1:27 AMSilly me, 傻死了...我念错了I misapprehended it as 四!!
But I was merely trying to emphasize the point that the first two syllables of the original 13th century Thai/DaI name Sibsong十双..was ALREADY Chinese (borrowed from Teochew) and needed no further translation.
Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities
July 6, 2011 at 7:36 AMSorry, I rushed the translation:
The ancient Kingdom was called Sibsongbanna (more or less) when pronounced in Modern Thai, which I assume is close to modern (Chinese Ethnic Minority) Dai, otherwise they wouldn't transcribe it as Sipsongpanna. Then the Modern Chinese Government took the latter sound and randomly pulled out Zhongwen characters that sort of matched the sounds and came up with 西双版纳, which has a Chinese meaning 西=4 (misleading), 双=pair (misleading), 版纳(no relevant meaning). I was merely making the point that the name of the Ancient Kingdom said originally in old Dai and now
in Modern Thai had a relevant meaning:
Sib=ten, from Teochew 十, song = two from Teochew 双, ban="thousand"(this is a native Thai/Dai word, not from Chinese); na=ricefield(s) (also a native Thai/Dai word not from Chinese). Twelve Thousand Rice Fields was a place of tremendous fertility and agricultural wealth in those days, and I would imagine still is, which, together with its revered history going back 800 years, is why they still call it by that name. I was merely saying that the Chinese Government didn't need to make up 2 of the phonetic characters; 十 and 双 work just great for the first 2, and they are accurate (meaning 12), so all the authorities needed to do was to add 2 substitute Chinese characters that had the right meaning, 千田, and you got a name that preserved the historicoriginal meaning of the Traditional Placename, while re-using 2 of the original CHINESE characters -- 十双千田 -- the perfect name!
Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities
July 6, 2011 at 4:23 AMPS: one of the Thai Ethnic Minorities I met firsthand in Northern Thailand was a small community of Mandarin Speaking Ethnic Chinese living near Pai. They were veterans of the Chinese Civil War and their descendants who were on the Kuomintang losing side, and had to quickly get out of China, and somehow didn't make it on the boat (or were pushed off!) to Taiwan when they lost, Wow, it was hard to imagine what their lives had been like over the years, stuck in a "foreign" country, dreaming of "home" for all these years.
Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities
July 6, 2011 at 4:15 AMBingo!! I am emerging bleary eyed from hours of research, which partially confirmed what I had half remembered from prior travels in Northern Thailand. Bodawei, thanks for your collaborative field research, adds so much to my interest. I take it you live in Yunnan? exactly where? So it turns out that there was a proto-Dai (I coined this term, no idea how valid it is, but may actually have some scholastic usage unknown to me) linguistic group (member of the Tai-Kadai lingistic family) arising somewhere in Southern China, Northern Vietnam, but succumbing to in-migration pressures from the North (Han and non-Han) started migrating West and South, themselves displacing pre-existing Hindu and Khmer populations in the process. These proto-Dai peoples eventually split into many groups including: The various Dai subgroups existing in Southern China, including the Dais that the Han Government calls 西双版纳 (more later!), various Dai subgroups in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and of the latter 3, including the ("MAINSTREAM") Ethnic Thai people, various NON-ETHNIC THAI but related Dai-descendant (Thailand) ethnic minorities, the ("MAINSTREAM") Ethnic Laotion people (Modern Thai and Laotion are mutually intelligible) and NON-ETHNIC LAOTIAN but related Dai-descendant (Laotian) ethnic minorities, as well as Dai Vietnamese ethnic minorites. Whew! So the belated answer to my own question is yes.
A few tidbits I picked up on the way; in Thailand, the term for the ethnic Shans (a NW Thailand Dai-descendant group) is Tai Yai "Big Thais", don't know why. The term for one large group of Dai-descendants living in NE Thailand is Tai Dam "Black Thais" because the ethnic dress, particularly of the women is largely in Black. Outside of Thailand, a huge majority of the displaced Tai Dam have emigrated to Iowa, USA!!
Now for some linguistic marvels: I was confused to learn that Thai is NOT related to Chinese, because I learned very quickly to count in Thai, and regarded it as a dialect of Chinese, and the numbers at least, were very close to Hokkien. I have just found out that Thai numbering is BORROWED FROM TEOCHEW CHINESE (which is very closely related to Hokkien). That explains why the numbers were so easy to learn. But the kicker is that the Thai name for the Kingdom of Sipsongpanna (mid 1200's to mid 1400's) is Sibsongbanna (I would guess close to the Dai pronunciation) which means "twelve thousand ricefields", which you probably knew. But the part that means "twelve", sibsong, as I alluded earlier is borrowed from Teochew Chinese, so the phonetic transliteration is unnecessary, and inaccurate to boot. 十双 is the Teochew for 12, and pronounced in Putonghua would be Shishuang, close enough to Sibsong to do, and more accurate than 四双. So why not go all the way and call the modern day Sipsongpanna 十双千田 and go for literal accuracy rather than the fickle phonetic "good try"?
Why most of Chinese Buddhists are Mahayana and why not only Thai, Lao, Cambodian and Myanmar Buddhists, but also apparently the Dai Descendant Buddhists (if this is accurate) are Theravadans is a puzzle to me. By the time Theravada Buhddism was imported to IndoChina from Sri Lanka after 10th Cent CE, Mahayana Buddhism was firmly entrenched in China. But why the still migrating, illiterate and I assume disorganized Dai diaspora (unintended pun there) uniformly assimilated Theravada along linguistic lines doesn't make clear sense to me. Unless the linguistic cohesion made for more reliable religious conversion, even among widely dispersed groups than I would have thought, I just don't know.
BTW, I don't know the exact translation of 小 and 大城佛教, but Mahayana prides itself as "the Greater Vehicle" and looks down on Theravada as "the Lesser Vehicle"(!??), so if this is what is meant by大 and 小城佛教, she's got it reversed.
Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities
July 5, 2011 at 8:41 AMAnother intriguing question, assuming I'm right about Thai and Dai being mutually distinct ethnic groups nowadays, are there Thais living just across the border in China (I bet there are-- why wouldn't there be?), and are there Dais living in Thailand -- the Thais have quite a number of designated ethnic minorities just like China does, in fact I know some are the SAME Ethnic minorities as in China. But offhand I don't know for sure if Dai is one of them. I'll need to search but it's way past bedtime. You know, when I was in Thailand, I seem to remember, now, the Thais had some designation for an ethnic minority living in their North (i.e. along the Chinese border) that was "old Thai, or ???Dark Thai, as I remember, implying that they were some not-so-distant relatives of the Thai people, which would fit what little I know of the Dai...gotta follow that up later!)
Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities
July 5, 2011 at 8:28 AMI'm assuming that the Thai language and culture are sufficiently different now from Dai culture and language that it was natural for the Chinese, being well aware of both, to assign different (rather than the same) names and identities to the two sides, so I'm not implying merely an artificial current day political boundary drawn through 2 segments of a homogeneous language group. In contrast, the Chinese have no problem identifying Korean speaking people in China on the border of Korea as 朝鲜 in identity, which is the same designation as that of the people in Korea. So I guess their having 2 different words Dai and Tai must imply some linguistic and cultural gap that must have occurred. But this is just a deduction on my part from what seems most likely, guessed mostly out of ignorance.
Posted on: The 着 (zhe) Chronicles: How We Verb
July 5, 2011 at 8:09 AMHope it's correct!
Posted on: Cold Noodles
July 5, 2011 at 7:56 AM
This is a subtle point, and perhaps difficult to put into action in a mere language lesson. But given the various different shades of meaning for 泡 (as demonstrated exellently in the expansion exercises that follow), and given that John (must be a cook, that Florida John!) picked up on the fact that when you 泡 the noodles in cold water after cooking, you're not actually "soaking" them i.e. to absorb up moisture, but actually quickly "rinsing" them, (actually to cool them off rapidly, so they don't continue to cook with their retained internal heat, and get too soggy), couldn't you use a better translation than "soak" in the accompanying dialogue English transcription? The "rinse" that John suggested would work, or "douse" or "cool" or something like that so as not to imply a "long soak", so the sense will be closer to what was intended. At the very least, Podsters would be able to use the translation as an accurate recipe for making 冷面, thus furthering ChinesePod's reputation as a paragon of Haute Cuisine!
Posted on: Ice Cream Run
July 8, 2011 at 2:59 AMNot in Canada, which mostly mirrors USA. "Lollipop" is not widely used, but when used is exclusively about solid colored sugar clumps on a stick at room temperature. Never "lolly". (Nor is "brolly" used for that matter. Come to think of it, nor "lorry" except by Brits just off the boat. Golly, lol.) For ice cream on a stick, always "popsicle" (originally a trade name, I think, now gone generic.)