Where is here

From LibraryWiki

Where is here?

Imagine you were browsing on the internet and saw some characters on a map in Chinese, and you wanted to know what that place was. Would it help to know how to pronounce the place name that they represent? Or would it be faster to find the corresponding place on a map in English?

As usual, the answer is, "It depends." For most English speakers for most purposes, the latter method would probably do the job, provided they knew where they should start looking on their English language map.

But if you were a beginning student of Mandarin who wanted to talk about that place on the map to your language instructor, you might be tempted to reach for some handy tools on the internet. You could copy the place name and paste it into the search box in the following website: Pinyin Conversion and it would give you the romanization (transliteration into the Latin alphabet) for the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of each character followed by a number to indicate by which of the four tonal contours it should be pronounced. This system of romanization is called pinyin.

For example, if you were curious about the place labled 九龙 on the map above, you could follow the steps outlined here and you would find out that 九龙 is pronounced jiu3-long2. This is exactly the right sort of information for someone who 1) wants to communicate with a speaker of Mandarin about that particular spot on the map, and 2) knows how pronounce things written in the pinyin system.

But for most English speakers for most purposes, it is more helpful to know that the place is commonly known as "Kowloon".

Would it help the English-speaking student of Mandarin to know that 九龙 means "Kowloon"? Probably. Does Pinyin Conversion provide this information? No.

In fact, the Mandarin pronunciation is so far removed from the Cantonese upon which the English version is based that jiu3-long2 doesn't serve as much of a clue. How to look up the precise Cantonese pronunciation is a another question entirely.

For now, let's stick to the Mandarin. You could look up 九 in a Chinese/English dictionary such as 實用漢英詞典 (A new Chinese-English dictionary) by either traditional methods or by pronunciation (jiu3). A beginning student of Mandarin may not know how to look up characters by traditional methods (i.e., either by stroke-count or by radical), so here, knowing the pronunciation may be of benefit. Many Chinese/English dictionaries are organized alphabetically by the pinyin corresponding to a given character, listing lexical items that begin with that character. But even a reasonably-sized Chinese/English dictionary like the one cited above won't include major place names and personal names among the entries under the initial character.

There is even a dictionary organized entirely by pinyin alphabet, viz. ABC Chinese-English comprehensive dictionary. Unfortunately, this dictionary won't lead you to the information that 九龙 = jiu3-long2 = "Kowloon" either.

If you are lucky enough to find yourself in a library with a world-class Asian Studies collection, you might eventually find a dictionary like the 新时代汉英大词典 (New age Chinese English dictionary), which gives the following definition under the heading "jiǔ":

• 九龙敕令 Jiǔlóng Chìlìng (HK) Kowloon Order in Council.

From this you might infer that "Kowloon" designates a place in Hong Kong. But what if you aren't blessed with so many choices in dictionaries? Comparing maps is looking better and better.

By now it should be clear that Pinyin Conversion is good for quickly looking up the Madarin pronunciation of personal names that you won't find in a dictionary, or as a shortcut to help you use Chinese dictionaries organized by pinyin, among other things. But its uses are actually fairly limited.

Alternatively, if you knew that 九龙 was simpified PRC Chinese equivalent to 九龍, you could do a search in the Japanese Language Wikipedia, which would give you 九龍 = 「カオルーン」 = "Kowloon" (Here's the result for such a search: Japanese Language Wikipedia: 九龍). But searching for 九龙 won't get you anywhere in the Japanese Language Wikipedia.

Luckily, the Chinese Language Wikipedia will treat searches using simplified characters as equivalent to searches using the corresponding unsimplified characters, and will give you 九龙 = 九龍 = "Kowloon" (Here's the result for such a search: Chinese Language Wikipedia: 九龙).

Finding the right tool for the job should be straightforward if you start with a clear idea of what you want to do, and enough knowledge about what tools are available. But the moral of this story is 1) that the tool closest to hand is not always the best one to pick, and 2) that "the job" might call for more than one tool.

In this case study, figuring out that 九龙 = jiu3-long2 = "Kowloon" wasn't straightforward at all. Even so, as you can see, there are any number of ways to get to the same information. In addition to the ones we looked at, there are Chinese/English atlases, for instance. Or the tried and true method of asking someone who knows.

All of these are part of information literacy for the Asian Studies scholar. At this point I hope you will appreciate that some specialized skills are involved.