Hi,
Today i was sent this article. Alas, i couldn’t find the web page from which it was taken, so instead of posting the url, i’ll just copy/paste the whole thing…
It’s about Chinese youth, internet, language creativity / language decay, reactions.
I stressed a few things by using bald fonts, and i insterted some comments.
Net-savvy Chinese say ‘88’ to traditional vocabulary
By GEOFFREY YORK
Friday, November 11, 2005 Posted at 6:06 AM EST
From Friday’s Globe and Mail
Beijing — Call it the "88" generation.
In the new age of hip, young, Web-savvy Chinese, you don’t say goodbye with an old-fashioned Chinese word. You sign off your messages with a cheery "88"—a phrase that baffles parents and horrifies conservative language guardians.
The phrase’s origins are a crossbreed of English and Chinese cybershorthand, a globalized argot favoured by the Internet crowd here. The Chinese word for eight is ba, so 88 can be pronounced as ba-ba or bye-bye.
That phrase, at least, is relatively easy to comprehend. But some of the new slang is based on puns and wordplay. Instead of asking, "What?" in a computer message, many use the Chinese character xiami, which means "shrimp as small as rice." The reason? Xiami sounds a bit like shenme, the Chinese word for "what."
The Chinese written language has survived thousands of years of turmoil and foreign invasion. It survived the transition from classical Chinese to the modern, simplified version, and it even survived the deadening slogans of Maoist propaganda.
My note: as if all this has anything to do with the Chinese language proper. But it’s a journalist writing, not a linguist.
But it has never suffered anything quite like the indignities of the latest threat: the huge popularity of the Internet, with more than 100 million people connected—and the number rising exponentially every year.
Mind the usage of "suffered", "indignities", "threat". But again, it’s a journalist.
To the outrage of the older generation, these newly invented Internet words are creeping into state press, young students’ schoolwork and even university entrance exams. The government is striking back with
laws and regulations to protect the ancient language.
Some measures are well known. Internet cafés, for example, are strictly controlled, with registration rules for users and limits on computer games. But in recent months, debate has erupted about the Net’s influence on language itself.
One professor of literature, Li Rulong, has denounced Internet slang phrases as "unhealthy" and a form of "pollution" in the language.
Retired teacher Yang Zhengde, 62, called for a government crackdown on the "embarrassing" trend.
"Just for the sake of our high-speed, fast-food lifestyle, is it worth sacrificing our language with its history of several thousand years?" he asked in a newspaper article.
"New words are coming out too fast," complained Liu Ping, a teacher in Nanjing. "Older teachers are getting headaches when they see such compositions."
The mother of a high-school student in Xiamen said her son was constantly using strange new words that she’d never heard before.
"She worried that her son just surfed the Internet and talked less and less to her," a Chinese news agency reported. "Even if there was a precious chance to chat, communication was more and more difficult because she hardly understood his words."
In response to the mounting concern, several local governments are introducing new laws.
Shanghai has drafted rules that would prohibit Internet slang from being used as "official language" in classrooms, newspapers, government departments and publications.
The city of Nanjing has banned the use of Internet slang in
compositions by elementary and middle school pupils.
The province of Jilin is introducing laws to require "standard characters" in advertisements, billboards and eight other categories of writing, effectively banning Internet slang from those areas. And the city of Guangzhou has ordered a review of the influence of
Internet slang.
Internet users have fought back, accusing their critics of being frightened, old stick-in-the-muds who can’t accept the normal evolution of language.
"How out of date you are if you don’t know how to use Net words," said Wu Dong, a 15-year-old high-school student. "It’s like someone who doesn’t know McDonald’s and KFC."
The official People’s Daily website published a lengthy article by one Internet user, Zhu Shugu, who said the critics were needlessly panicking.
"If you look carefully at the Internet language that young people prefer, there’s nothing unhealthy about it, it’s just different from existing rules," he wrote.
"Where’s the logic in claiming that words are unhealthy just because teachers cannot understand them?
"Internet language does have a huge impact on the traditional language, which may frighten the scholars and professors. But the Chinese language is changing all the time. To accept this change is to respect the rules of language development."
A Beijing newspaper argued that teachers should make an effort to learn the new Internet slang. "They shouldn’t suppress the writing enthusiasm of their students," it stated.
At least somebody who keeps the head cool.
88 MM, 520
Some examples of Chinese Internet slang words:
88: bye-bye, from the Chinese word ba, meaning eight.
MM: beautiful woman, from the Chinese word mei, meaning beautiful.
konglong: ugly woman, from the Chinese word konglong, meaning dinosaur.
GG: brother, from the Chinese word gege, meaning brother.
JJ: sister, from the Chinese word jiejie, meaning sister.
TMD: curse word, from the Chinese words ta ma de, meaning his mother.
FT: to faint from surprise, from the English word faint.
PK: an opponent, from the English words player killer.
520: I love you. The Chinese words for 520 sound like wo ai ni, meaning I love you.
7456: makes me angry. The Chinese words for 7456 sound like "make me angry to death."
Frank
. And some people on this board react in quite similar ways as the purists mentioned in the text.