洪洞

[2dimes]

Has anyone been there? I really just posted because I think it sounds funny in Honglais. Presuming I am pronouncing it correctly..

[mrswdk]

Hongtong county, Shanxi? I presumably went through it on a Beijing-Xi'an train but never alighted.

It is near the ancient city of Pingyao, which I have been to and which was a decent place to spend a day or two.

[2dimes]

Wiki where I stumbled on it wrote it with a D but maybe that was someone making it easier for English speakers, who tend to have some difficulty pronouncing a few things.
Is it kind of like Toism has a hard D sound?

Pingyao sounds pretty cool.

What was the oldest structure you visited?

I asked my bud where he was from and he started explaining it, naming off provinces regions and villages north of Hong Kong. By the time I got home to look on google maps for it I was pretty lost. There are so many places.

[mrswdk]

洞 can be read as either tong or dong, but in the place name it's tong (according to Google - I'd never heard of the place). There are a few characters that can be read more than one way like that.

And yes in Mandarin it's 'dao', not 'tao'. Spelling it as 'tao' in English probably comes from that same old school romanisation system that Victorians like Dukasaur used (the system that spelled Beijing is 'Peking'). The full Mandarin name is DaoJiao/道教 - dao meaning 'the way', jiao meaning 'religion'.

I have no idea what the oldest structure I saw was tbh. A lot of those old buildings and structures are likely reconstructions anyway; even where originals still exist, they sometime just knock them down and rebuild replicas rather than trying to preserve the old bricks and stuff. The oldest thing I saw in China that I could be sure was an original would've been the Terracotta Warriors, which are something like 2,000-2,500 years old.

[Dukasaur]

And yes in Mandarin it's 'dao', not 'tao'. Spelling it as 'tao' in English probably comes from that same old school romanisation system that Victorians like Dukasaur used (the system that spelled Beijing is 'Peking'). The full Mandarin name is DaoJiao/道教 - dao meaning 'the way', jiao meaning 'religion'.

Bruce Lee spelled it Tao.

[mrswdk]

I don't know why he chose that title but the 'do' in that title is replacing the same Chinese word that the 'tao' is replacing (both are replacing dao/道).

[Dukasaur]

I don't know why he chose that title but the 'do' in that title is replacing the same Chinese word that the 'tao' is replacing (both are replacing dao/道).

I'm no expert, but I'm told the title translates as "The Way of Fist To Face."

Bruce was tired of the pretentious hypocrisy of martial arts practitioners who pretend it's all about the religious philosophy. He was a realist, who recognized that maybe martial arts were invented by 4th century religious monks, but in the 20th century they're all about kicking the shit out of each other for a paycheque. As a direct slap in the face to all the martial arts books that are published with all their pretentious religious titles, he wanted his to very straighforwardly say, "I'm here to f*ck up your face, as quickly and efficiently as possible."

[mrswdk]

Sort of. It translates as 'the way of the intercepting fist' or 'the way of intercepting the fist'.

I don't think it's fair to say martial arts is now just about 'beating people up for a paycheque'. From a cursory Google it sounds like Lee founded JieQuanDao as a martial art that focuses purely on fighting as efficiently and minimally as possible. The implication there being that people who practice other martial arts may well be pursuing them for more reasons than simply wanting to be able to beat people up. Tai Chi, for example, is practised primarily for health benefits and meditation rather than for any combat purposes.

[2dimes]

It is almost always written Tao in English. The pronounciation is a hard D. I believe some English speakers hear it as T. Much like the use of Peking vs Beijing. I think the purpose was because when an English speaker says Pea-king it sounds much closer than when they mispronounce Beijing.

Funny you mention TaiChi, written to help us pronounce Taijii. The source was the Wikipedia article about the Chen family, who seem responsible for developing Tai Chi, from an obscure thing done by unknown monks, lost to a lack of historical record keeping, to what the Yang family has helped spread world wide.

I was lightly amused to read they had moved from Hongdong to Chen villiage.

Currently a vast majority of Tai Chi is Yang style taught and practiced as pretty much a dance routine. Many of the martial art techniques are overly complex and never effectively practiced.

Here is a video of one person doing Chen style and another doing Yang somewhat synchronized.


Most of the mixed martial arts community scoff at Tai Chi. Odd in a way because the reason Tai Chi became popular was because a few of the original Yang family guys were undefeated way back. Pretty impressive since often a challenge would be a random attacker instead of something prepared for a month ahead of time with a referee and gloves in a padded area.

Bruce Lee was innovative at the time developing punching blocks and other things that combined attacking with defense. Hence the name "intercepting fist". Also, I was lead to believe the English words "fist" & "boxing" often interchange as translation, though not for this example. He sometimes regretted naming his system because he felt it limited people from his main theory to always remain open to whatever was happening in the moment. Possibly wrongly quoted as saying, "My system is no system," meaning never confine yourself to a system.

[mrswdk]

Writing it as 'Peking' comes from the old 19th century system for romanizing Chinese names, which was based on how Chinese names sounded when read in the Nanjing dialect. Now it's written as 'Beijing' because the romanization system used today is based off how names sound in Mandarin Chinese.

In both dialects the name is written the exact same: 北京, meaning 'northern capital'. It's just pronounced differently.

[2dimes]

Ah yes, that is another layer. I know better but still tend to think of everyone there speaking one language (Mandarin) when there are a few more still kicking around.

Many don't even have a way to write. If you grow up speaking one of those, you most likely learn some Mandarin so you can learn to write. Unless you are too busy on the farm.

Is Mandarin displacing Nanjing or does it depend where you live?

It's interesting how English is spoken in so many places and only a small percentage is altered.

[Dukasaur]

It's interesting how English is spoken in so many places and only a small percentage is altered.

You don't get out much, do you?

Some of the Caribbean dialects are almost unintelligible.

But worse than those are the Scots. When I was a cab driver, I used to insist that drunken Scotsmen had to write down their address on a piece of paper. No matter how many times they'd repeat it, I never could figure it out. Couldn't understand anything else they said, either, but as long as I had their address I could get them there, and just nod-and-smile to the odd animal noises that came out of them in the meantime.

[mrswdk]

There are a huge number of Chinese dialects. Mandarin is a northern dialect that originated in Beijing and nearby areas, but Mandarin is just one of (I think) hundreds of Chinese dialects. Cantonese (Guangdong dialect) and Hokkien (Fujian dialect) are a couple of other dialects that are relatively well known outside of China.

Mandarin is the official language of government, business and education and so is now the most widely spoken (by almost everyone these days), as it's taught in schools across the country. A lot of people will also grow up learning and/or speaking a local dialect though (usually rural people), and there are still some (mostly older) people out there whose Mandarin is very limited or non-existent.

The interesting thing about all the dialects is that beyond a few colloquial turns of phrase, the grammar and syntax of all the dialects is identical. The only thing that varies is the way in which characters are verbalised (e.g. Duk's 'Jeet Kune Do' is Cantonese, in Mandarin it is 'Jie Quan Dao', in both it is written the exact same as 截拳道). Dialects from similar regions sound relatively similar to each other, but if you compare dialects from very different parts of the country (e.g. Mandarin vs Cantonese) they're so different that someone who speaks only one would find it impossible to understand the other.

It's possibly the same as the differences between Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic etc.(?).

[mrswdk]

It's interesting how English is spoken in so many places and only a small percentage is altered.

You don't get out much, do you?

Some of the Caribbean dialects are almost unintelligible.

But worse than those are the Scots. When I was a cab driver, I used to insist that drunken Scotsmen had to write down their address on a piece of paper. No matter how many times they'd repeat it, I never could figure it out. Couldn't understand anything else they said, either, but as long as I had their address I could get them there, and just nod-and-smile to the odd animal noises that came out of them in the meantime.

lol, I was going to mention Jamaican Patois. I think Sean Paul has described it as a 'language barrier' that prevents dancehall from becoming more popular than it currently is.

Scottish people are best communicated with using physical gestures and facial expressions.

[2dimes]

So it is just dialects? I was told there are some seperate languages.

Are traditional characters being replaced by simplified? Do you write it or just type?

I became the translator at work for the Jamaican guys.

Still I can't seem to get much Mandrin going.

[mrswdk]

Whether or not Mandarin, Cantonese etc. count as different dialects or different languages seems to depend on which source you Google. Although there are five different languages on Chinese money: Mandarin pinyin, Tibetan, Zhuang, Uyghur and Mongolian.

Simplified characters have totally replaced traditional in the mainland (except in karaoke bars, for some reason). In Taiwan and Hong Kong they still predominately use traditional and in other countries like Singapore and Malaysia I think they use a mixture.

[2dimes]

That was another rumor I heard, Cantonese is a simple language, much of it is not written.

What do they speak in Vietnam? One of the Vietnamese guys I worked with 30 years ago hung out with me at lunch because he knew English but not Mandrin. The other two would speak Mandrin because they were scholars.

He was a nice guy, killed himself, I was bummed when I found that out.

[mrswdk]

Cantonese is basically Mandarin but pronounced differently. It's all written down in the same way.

Vietnamese people speak Vietnamese. Naturally you knew many Vietnamese people who also spoke Mandarin, because these days any sensible person who knows what's good for them learns the language of the world's most powerful and attractive country. Presumably it was not being able to find a Chinese wife due to his inability to speak to Chinese women that drove that guy over the edge. Shame. These days he could've just popped down to the Confucius Institute for some lessons and been fluent before he knew it!

[2dimes]

I think he got depressed because he never left the factory. One of the guys who spoke Mandrin left in an ambulance, part of the reason I resigned two weeks later.

So, is it a dialect or seperate language?

[mrswdk]

Dunno. I'd say they're all dialects of the Chinese language, some etymologists apparently disagree. It depends if you're one of those people who likes dividing everyone up into their little boxes, on their separate buses, or if you're the sort of person who looks around in a crowded room and all you see are people.