Month: January 2017

Popular: Second-largest bookstore in Singapore?

The Kinokuniya at Ngee Ann City is Singapore’s biggest bookstore, but I’d say this is the runner-up. (I hear there’s a huge Times outlet at Punggol that might be bigger… I should visit!) This is the Bras Basah branch of a Singapore retail chain which is called Popular, presumably due to the Chinese habit of naming businesses with aspirational happy adjectives for good luck.

The place wasn’t looking so popular on a Monday afternoon, though, and I only went there to look for a specific kind of 2017 calendar, which they didn’t have. (Apparently the second week of January is too late to buy a calendar/diary/planner thing if you want a good selection to pick from; luckily, I eventually found what I was looking for at NBC Stationery at Raffles City.)

Despite the square footage, this shop didn’t have what I would call an impressive selection. There’s a whole floor of “assessment books”, locally produced test preparation workbooks for preschool through university, and six walls of “favourite characters” products (movie and television tie-ins), but only one or two shelves of picture books…

Here’s a post about places to buy books in Singapore.

Possessive adjectives in child Singlish

The kids I used to teach had trouble producing the sound of short “i”. It comes out as long “ee”. (In linguistics, this ee and i are a tense/lax vowel pair.) Thus, as I tell new teachers during training, there are no fish in Singapore. They’re all feesh.

That means that “ship” and “sheep” are homophones. The fact that “ship” and “sheep”  are not actually the same word is really confusing to kids who are learning plurals and collective nouns (fleet of ships, flock of sheep).

Another significant effect of this problem is that “his” and “he’s” sound exactly the same. The obvious effect of this confusion is that kids often write one of these words when they should be writing the other one. The more subtle effect of this confusion is that kids sometimes assume that there exists a possessive adjective “she’s” which means “her”.

Here’s what they hear here:

He is a boy. That bag is he’s bag.

Therefore, by analogy, they want to say:

She is a girl. That bag is she’s bag.

I wish English were that logical!

I think (I hope?) most Singapore kids grow out of saying “she’s” as a possessive adjective but they don’t necessarily learn to pronounce lax vowels as lax vowels. The adults here also say “feesh”.

The “oo” in “moon” and the “oo” in “book” are another tense/lax pair, which explains why kids (and adults) say the word “book” with the vowel sound that’s in “moon”.

Update: More on the ship/sheep pronunciation problem.

Stackable jewelry box with lots of great feathers

If you thought AutoCorrect only affected text messages, think again.

Whoever was responsible for inputting the marketing text that describes the features of this stackable jewelry box got as far as “feat—” and then took the first word that was suggested.

I mean, clearly this is not the result of a manual typo or a translation error. Some kind of auto-complete software seems to be a plausible explanation in part because this product is made in China, and as I understand it the way you type Chinese is:

  • you type the transliterated (Pinyin) spelling of the syllable you want, using the Roman alphabet and possibly a number for the tone
  • some predictive software shows you a list of characters that match the sound and possibly also the sentence context
  • you select the character from the list

I can imagine similar predictive writing software being used for English text if the writer isn’t typing on a phone but also isn’t a native speaker.

Crave vs. crave for

It used to be normal to say “[someone] craved for [something]” instead of “[someone] craved [something]”. The former sounds like a mistake to me, as if the speaker meant to say “[someone] had a craving for [something]”.

I’m not the only one with this intuition.

The difference is whether the verb “crave” is considered transitive, thus requires a direct object to follow immediately, or is considered intransitive, in which case a prepositional phrase beginning with “for” is needed.

Modern dictionaries list only the transitive version (as above), or they list the transitive version first, followed by the less common intransitive version.

The “wrong” (historically more popular, intransitive) version appears in the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, aka Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, a respected work of literature in English:

It was all owing to his too affectionate nature, which craved for admiration.

The text refers to Mr. Darling, father of Wendy, John, and Michael.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

It’s as if Kafka decided to write a book with Carl Sagan, M.C. Escher, and Edwin Abbott Abbott (author of Flatland), and set it in China: You’ve got alienation, disillusionment, despair; satellite dishes listening for alien messages and actually receiving them; complex or impossible geometry, organisms passing from life to death and back again, meditative reflections and echoes of the self; and extrapolation that gratuitously passes beyond three dimensions… all of which is set against the backdrop of the bloody Cultural Revolution and conveyed in English that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I found it hard to enjoy The Three-Body Problem because I found the book badly written on a macro level as well as a micro level and because I dislike some of the themes. It was only interesting to read because it was really weird. Specifics but no spoilers below.

Continue reading The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Healthy yet delicious Korean food

Whoops! The sign in front of this shop in the basement of United Square is implying that healthy Korean food is usually not delicious. I mean, okay, maybe, but that’s not what you want people to be thinking when they’re standing in front of your Korean restaurant at lunchtime.

What if they used “and” instead?

Healthy and delicious Korean food

Well, now it almost sounds as if they’re offering two different kinds of food, healthy Korean food and delicious Korean food, which still implies that “healthy” and “delicious” are incompatible.

They should just put the two problem adjectives in front of Korean with just a comma:

Healthy, delicious Korean food

The reverse order sounds okay too:

Delicious, healthy Korean food

Storewide sale in a narrow store

Far East Plaza is a warren of small fashion shops (and, sadly, fewer bookstores than it was when I arrived in Singapore in 2008).

Whenever I read the signs advertising promotions and discounts, I always laugh because there’s always at least one that says “storewide sale” in front of a narrow little shop.

I’m thinking, “Your store is—what, ten feet wide? So it’s not a very wide sale, is it?”

One could deploy the same pun in the context of discounts offered at “all outlets islandwide”. It’s not a very wide island, in the scheme of things.

Sakura Cuisine’s Saliva Chicken

I posted a photo of this restaurant before because the name seemingly advertised so many kinds of food. They’ve simplified the name—presumably not because they saw my blog post, but who knows?

Now they are promoting a dish they call “Saliva Chicken”.

The Chinese name of the dish is three characters (that’s the traditional one for chicken, not the simplified one):

口水雞
mouth water chicken

Note that there is no sure-fire way to determine how many characters in Chinese correspond to a “word” in English. If you take the first two characters together, they mean “saliva”, because that’s what “mouth water” is.

口水
saliva

The restaurant seems to be offering a chicken dish cooked with saliva (?!), but actually it just wants you to order the chicken dish that makes you salivate. If they’d named it “mouth-watering chicken” in English, the name would have been perfectly unobjectionable.

In my opinion, the problem is not that the Chinese language is hard, or that English is hard, just that translation is hard. All languages assign meanings in arbitrary ways. Why, after all, should we English speakers think that “saliva chicken” sounds gross, but “mouth-watering chicken” sounds delicious? This distinction is not meaningful in Chinese, any more than the distinction between “cow meat” (eew) and “beef” (yum).