blog

A couple weeks ago I went to Chiayi (嘉義, pinyin: Jiāyì) to present a paper at the Linguistic Society of Taiwan’s National Conference on Linguistics.¹ I got a chance to meet some wonderful and kind Taiwanese linguists, make friends with some linguistics students, as well as explore the city of Chiayi.

Chiayi is a medium-sized city (270k people, so still way bigger that Luodong or Yilan) on the plains of southwestern Taiwan. The good news about getting to Chiayi is that there is a high speed rail station—the bad news is that that station is actually about half an hour east of the city by car. I took a taxi into the city Thursday night, but took the free shuttle service on Sunday.² As is the case with most cities on the west coast, it personally took me more time to go from Nanao to Taipei than to then take the high speed rail down to whatever city… such is life on the east coast: sans high speed rail.

The conference itself was Friday and Saturday. This particular conference was limited to speakers who were current students or recent MA or PhD graduates, so many of the talks were exploratory and less developed. They were still a lot of fun for me to see, though, especially as many of them were on Mandarin or Taiwanese, so there was a lot of data and phenomena that I’d never even considered. It was also great to see professor Luther Liu, an eminent researcher of Chinese comparatives, whom I met in 2006 at the Chicago Workshop on Chinese Linguistics, as well as many other friendly professors. I my gave my talk on Saturday and received an award for my paper.

You can see Luther Liu and I talking in this first picture below… try to find us!³

Each talk at the conference was followed by prepared constructive criticism by a “commentator” who’s a professor with similar research interests. As a corollary, while all the speakers at the conference were younger, a good number (30+) of professors from all around the island were in attendance as well. I believe this annual conference is an excellent opportunity for ling students in Taiwan to have their work known and criticized by professors outside of their own departments, and also to get to know others in their field. It fosters a sense of community among young researchers outside of their own schools—I’d love to see more such activities back in the US.⁴

On Saturday evening after the conference I went out with some MA students from Tsinghua University (國立清華大學, or simply 清大). As one was originally from Chiayi and another went to school there, I was in good hands for finding the best local food. We first hit up a stand to get some 火雞肉飯 (turkey rice) which is a Chiayi delicacy… it’s so simple yet so delicious!

Afterwards we walked around in their night market, eating some Finally, here’s a photo we took in front of the traffic circle which is a Chiayi landmark. Thanks for the good times!

Next up is the International Symposium on Chinese Languages and Linguistics (IsCLL) that I’ll be attending (but not presenting at) in a couple weeks, so I look forward to seeing some of my new linguist friends there again!

Introduction

It’s that time of the year again—Mother’s Day weekend—and that means Scav Hunt! Every year at the University of Chicago we have a huge Scavenger Hunt (a.k.a. “Scav,” or “The Hunt”). On Wednesday night at midnight, a list of roughly 300 items is released in some obfuscated fashion. The items are to be presented three days later, on Judgement Day (Sunday). While some items are simply rare and must be found, most are some sort of construction, production, or art project. There are also some other scav staples: some of the items make up the Scav Olympics, the Party on the Quads, Scav All Stars, and the Road Trip.

The Road Trips

As an undergrad I drove my trusty Toyota Camry (“Erlewine Carpool of Love”) and participated in the Scav Road Trip twice, my second year for Pierce and my fourth year for the Shoreland. Some people are in charge of research overnight and you’re woken up Thursday morning with a map in hand, some costume you’re supposed to put on, and your car decorated in some fashion. They give you a route and tell you to be back in time for judgment. My second year, fellow linguist and brother Bob Peachey, Liz, and Tiffany (with whom I oddly enough had worked together at 森林湖 a year or so before then) went up Wisconsin, across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, dipped into Canada, and drove back down to Chicago in three days. Feel free to check out the full gallery of photos.

My fourth year of college, Bailey, my life partner Evan Jenkins, our friend Jane, and I went on a long-distance adventure, across Wisconsin, southern Minnesota, South Dakota, to the Black Hills and Mt. Rushmore, down through Nebraska and Iowa, in three days. It was a marathon Road Trip route, but we still had a great deal of fun. Again, check out the full gallery.

Also check out the Badlands video we made, which was one of our items.

Scav Hunt 2008

This year’s list was just released and it continues the Chicago tradition of wit, humor, intellect, and crazy crazy fun. While no longer in Chicago, I’m still helping the Shoreland team this year, running a bbpress bulletin board system on my server to manage the progress of all our Items. I also did some road trip research… oddly enough, this is the first time that being thirteen hours ahead has been a good thing.

My fantasy Scav items

I myself actually applied to be a judge for my fourth year… unfortunately I had a scheduling mixup and couldn’t make the interview. Here, for the first time in history, however, I will make public the items I submitted as part of my application. If any of these show up on future lists, the world will know where credit is due:

1. …GACCTGGACGCCACACACTGTACCTGTTGCGATAGTGGAGTACCGTCGCTGGAGA
   AAGGCACTGTAGTTATTACTCGCTACTCCCGCACCCTTT… [20 edible points]
2. A flight data recorder. [30 points]
3. ∃x(CAPTAIN(x) ∧ ∀y(SPEAK(x, y) → LOGLAN(y))). [⋆ points]
4. Zipper prom is the new duct tape prom. [50 points per couple]
5. A ramen vending machine. No people dressed up in boxes, thank you—we want the real deal. Must be free for judges. [50 points]
6. A letter from your congressperson, agreeing to support legislation for a Chomskian Sin Tax, if brought to the floor. [15 points]
7. “Zimmer: The Musical.” Send three team members to (place) at (time): a singer, a writer, and an instrumenter. The show goes up at (a later time) at (another place). [30 points per participating team member]
8. Show the world that our faculty be pimpin’. Install spinning rims on your favorite professor’s car. The professor themself must drive the car to Judgement Day. [40 points; 80 points for the Zimmster]
9. Feces perfume. [23 points]
10. Is the water from Botany Pond safe to drink? Check against the EPA NPDWR MCL’s. [up to 60 points]
11. Procure the following:
    • 赤巻紙青巻紙黄巻紙 [3点]
    • 生麦生米生卵 [3点]
    • 引き抜きにくい挽き肉は引き抜きにくい温い肉 [10点]
    • 骨粗鬆症訴訟勝訴 [40点;英語でもよし]
    • 東京都特許許可局 [※点]
12. Get married. Sign your papers at judgment. [50 points]
13. Ever played Lemonade Stand on the Apple //e? Yeah, so did we. Bring us a copy and a //e so we can play. [30 points, 5 points bonus if you beat us]
14. Musical Department Chairs. You bring your best Chair to (place) at (time) . [15 points for participation, 50 points if your Chair wins]
15. The Trabb Pardo-Knuth algorithm? brainfuck it! [10 points]
16. A Proof movie poster, signed by five people in the film, with vidcap proof. [50 points]
17. UChicago Answers. Refer practical questions to Google Answers. [75 points]
18. Straight A’s won’t help you now. Bring us one (1) official U of C transcript. [3 points per distinct grade code]
19. It’s Stroganoff Fest 2007!
    • beef stroganoff [2 points]
    • frog stroganoff [7 points]
    • rabbit stroganoff [7 points]
    • Michael Strogoff stroganoff [7 points]
    • tofu stroganoff [8 points]
    • Kung Fu stroganoff [10]
    • Shaq Fu stroganoff [12 points]
    • Hufu stroganoff [25 points]
20. TOYNBEE IDEA
    IN MOVIE 2001 
    RESURRECT DEAD
    ON THE QUADS [100 points]
21. Only one Cucumber can survive! It’s Larry vs. Bob, à la Extreme Championship Wrestling. Now on DVD.
22. Domesticate a Hyde Park parakeet. [20 points]
23. Distribute the pamphlet “Putting the ‘Sensual’ Back in ‘Non-Consensual”’ on the Quads. [? points]
24. Affect the Rapture Index. [20/3 points]
25. Regenstein Puzz-3D. [13 points]
26. Schönfinkelised chicken. [3 points]
27. The Blagoynich manuscript. [12 points]
28. Hello Kitty® Litter. [5 points]
29. Pyjamas in bananas [2 points]
30. Do any of the above, on a numbers station. [10 bonus points]

Sports day

Three Mondays ago, Nanao had their annual sports day.¹ The sports day reminded me of the years of Japanese school sports days I used to go to, complete with the representative student’s pledge of sportsmanship, a three legged race, and concluding relay, though it was only half a day.² It also was billed as the Nan’ao town and school joint sports day (村校聯合運動大會) and indeed many parents, families, and other miscellaneous townspeople were there to join in the festivities.

The day started with a performance by our school’s very own orchestra (well, after the national anthem, of course). This was followed by a communal running-around-the-track, Atayal dance performance by community members (mostly middle-aged), and the kids dancing to Buklavu.

This was followed by a judo performance. The judo offering is one of the four “special characteristics” (特色) of the school; the other three are the orchestra, aboriginal dance, and reading.

A special event offered particularly for the parents and other community members was the log sawing competition. It took the form of a relay, with teams organized based on the “neighborhood” (鄰), of which there are six in Nan’ao village.

The festivities concluded with the aforementioned relay.

The kids had a lot of fun throughout the day, probably particularly enjoying the fact that school was then dismissed at noon. Kids bought food at the night-market-like stands right outside the school.

Hot spring

We teachers were then invited to a banquet at the head of the PTA’s house. Having the rest of the afternoon off, a few of us teachers decided to go to the Nanao hot springs. There were some major renovations there since I last went and took a bath… there’s even a roof now! The water was, unfortunately, pretty lukewarm, though.

Sayun’s bell (莎韻之鐘)

Special ed. teacher Mr. Cai was kind enough to take us around in his car, so we next stopped by Sayun’s bell (Chinese: 莎勇之鐘, Japanese: サヨンの鐘). The Sayun bell is a memorial to an actual Atayal girl named sayun hayung who died in 1938, located right near a truck stop/gift shop/coffee shop off of the 蘇花公路 (sūhūagōnglù, Suao-Hualien highway).³

The story goes, sayun greatly respected her Japanese teacher and was saddened to learn that he would leave and go back to Japan. She was carrying his luggage for him and was going to send him off when a big storm knocked her off a bridge and into the river, drowning her. The story was picked up by Japanese mainland news (read “propaganda”) as a hear-wrenching story of the Taiwanese indigenous people respecting and loving their Japanese teachers and, by extension, Japanese rule. There was two Japanese songs written about this incident (1941, see lyrics below, courtesy of Chienese wiki) and a Japanese movie (1943) was made as well.

The story was also recently referred to in the popular (in Taiwan) 2007 film Island Etude (練習曲 liànxíqǔ), which has a little five minute segment retelling the story at the bell (complete with historical rendition featuring a guy I know who lives in Nanao!).

The original memorial bell is apparently owned by the family (or was thrown away, according to the Japanese wikipedia article) but this newer bell and memorial was built in 1998. It’s an interesting relic of the Japanese era right in my backyard.

Gaofeng (高峰)

高峰 (gāofēng) in Chinese simply means “peak,” and that’s the only name I know for our next destination. We drove up a steep one-way path up a mountain (an unmarked road off the highway between 武塔 (wǔtǎ) and 漢本 (hànběn) stations) and went up to the top. Along the way we could see some beautiful scenery over the ocean, though it was a cloudy day so we couldn’t see too far.

Up on the peak we first walked around a traditional Chinese-style single-clan courtyard with a few houses around it. There didn’t seem to be anyone home. They seemed to have some fascination with game pieces… there were some dominos scattered in one part of their lot, 象棋 (xiàngqí, Chinese chess) pieces elsewhere, and some 麻將 (májiàng) tiles actually stuck in the concrete in another place. I felt like it would make for a good setting for a mystery novel.

All around us were some beautiful 日日春 (rìrìchūn, Catharanthus roseus (Madagascar Periwinkle)) and not-so-wonderful 檳榔 (bīnláng, betel nut, a kind of palm) trees.

There was a beautiful stream nearby as well as a hose with water from a small man-made reservoir, which Mr. Cai used to clean the car.

Going further into the mountain, we saw even more houses and some beautiful farms, mostly with cabbage. Mr. Cai explained that many of these farmers were actually relatively well off people (and retirees) from Luodong or Yilan who bought this land and come to farm there as a hobby or in retirement. We found a small Daoist shrine as well, as a testament to his statement that these farmers were not aboriginal but of Han Chinese descent.⁴ At this point, though, it started raining more heavily, and we decided to call it a day and head back home. All of us had a wonderful and relaxing day exploring Nanao!

Just a quick announcement: Inspired by one of my favorite phrases from Barack Obama’s compelling speech on race in America, I created a website called The Children of America which gives you a random photo of a child of America. The importance of investing in our future as a nation through investment in our children is often only glossed over in politics… it’s always good to be reminded of what we’re working for.

Visit The Children of America

The project also acts as my foray into the Flickr API… I’m particularly proud of the dynamic submission chooser. Use it to submit your own creative-commons-licensed Flickr photos of American children.

From Old Man on Campus:

The Shoreland’s 13 floors, hundreds of rooms, will be a dorm for another year or so before it’s transformed into high-end condominiums. Meanwhile, plaster sifts from the ceilings, and the lobby is a mishmash of couches, stacks of student publications, a big-screen TV and handbills covering the walls. A friendly, bored staff of desk attendants watches as students — listless, sleepy, harried, running late, dressed to the nines, falling down drunk, depending on the day and hour — file past.

Accurate. I can vividly visualize the scenes he describes. Funny, I miss the Shoreland.

(via Bailey)

Here’s my (and Aaron’s) latest favorite night market food… 抓抓餅 (zhūazhūabǐng). Here’s an iMovie video which explains the process.¹

Bailey just won the Grand Prize at the 22nd Annual Japanese Language Speech Contest in Chicago. I think she’s still in shock and disbelief. The prize involves a round trip ticket to Japan.

She never let me see or listen to the speech, though—now I’m curious.

I’m very proud of her. ^^

In my recent quest for podcasts, I just today discovered Jerry Sadock’s Automodular Grammar lectures on iTunes U, brought to you by the University of Arizona. This is essentially the first few lectures from his Automodular course I took my last year in college, which was one of my favorite and most thought-provoking and challenging (“thought-challenging”?) courses while at Chicago. While I still feel that having visuals (slides, or his handsome face, above), you can download his talks and handouts separately from their website, linked here:

1. Automodular Grammar 1. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 18, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
2. Automodular Grammar 2. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 25, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
3. Automodular Grammar 3: The Passive. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, February 1, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)

Possibly one of the positive results of ridiculous college entrance exams and a culture of cram schools: here’s a series of Tokyo Gas commercials. Various historical characters jump out of his armoire (the other end of a time portal) and learn about natural gas products, including John Ambrose Fleming (ad #4)! I swear, though, in the US, you couldn’t run an ad that makes fun of Fleming’s Left Hand Rule. You just couldn’t.

Now that the Taiwanese presidential election is out of the way, the already pretty boring Taiwanese news has hit a new high in boringness, today asking if closer ties to the PRC (with Ma Ying-Jeou’s promise to open up the Three Links (三通)) means we can have a panda now. No seriously. The people have been waiting.

This, together with my currently daily train commutes, have led me to further explore the world of podcasts. I’m now a proud subscriber of “The Bugle: the Audio Newspaper for a Visual World,” with John Oliver of Daily Show fame and Andy Zaltman, distributed by The Times of London. Like a weekly audio Daily Show, except more British and thus more ridiculous. It’s fabulous fun, and perfect for those of us who hate reading.

Here’s a snippet from this past episode:

USA and Britain are once again at the top!, of the western world’s teenage pregnancies – also called the two countries most committed to the war on terror. … What it also suggests is, as nations, we get overexcited in the prospect of an easy conquest without really thinking about the long term consequences.

So true.

The fact that Japanese and Chinese both share the use of Chinese characters. The connection goes beyond simply sharing characters, though: many two- and four-character expressions in Japanese come from older Chinese (these are known as Sino-Japanese items in the biz). This is how I can often “cheat” and use my knowledge of Japanese to guess what some Chinese words are saying, even if I have no idea how to pronounce them.

There are, however, many Chinese-Japanese false cognates—words which look the same and often do indeed have a shared etymology, but have quite different contemporary meanings.¹ As such, I’ve often lamented to friends, especially learners of Japanese or Chinese, the lack of a dictionary highlighting these false cognates and how their usage differs between the Japanese and Chinese. A couple weekends ago I was browsing dictionaries in the Page One bookstore in Taipei 101 and I found exactly that: 誤用度100%日語漢子.

Each spread shows the three sets of cognates, with an explanation of the Japanese use, in Chinese, on the left, and vice versa on the right. It’s a godsend.

By the way, here’s my favorite Chinese-Japanese false cognate:

勉強 (べんきょう)

one’s study (N), to study (V) ~する

勉強 (miǎnqiǎng)

• V
  1. force sb. to do sth. | ¹Bié ∼ tā. Don’t force him to do it.
  2. do with difficulty
• S.V.
  1. unconvincing; strained | Zhège jìhuà ¹hěn ∼. This plan may not work.
• Adv
  1. reluctantly; grudgingly | Tā ∼ xiàole yīxià. He forced a smile.
  2. barely enough | Tā ∼ néng shuō jǐ jù Fǎyǔ. She can speak only a little French.

St. Patrick’s Day for many means a wholesale celebration of faux-Irishness through Guinness and everything green. While I’m not a fan of beer, I decided to put something green together to eat today. One of my favorite food writers Mark Bittman of the New York Times made a chicken with salsa verde but since I can’t find half of those ingredients in this country, I made a simpler non-Irish dish: a green pilaf, based on Bittman’s own recipe. Why not try a simple green vegetarian dish for St. Patrick’s Day?

As an added bonus, I set this recipe to Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois. I was just in a Chicago-missing mood and listening to it while cooking, and it seemed to work so well.

Time: 45 minutes (mostly waiting, though)
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Salt and pepper
1 1/2 cups (400cc) chicken stock (I used a bouillon cube—雞湯塊)
1 medium head of broccoli, just the flowers, in small chunks (maybe 3/4-1 cup)
1 cup (250cc) short grain white rice
1/2 cup (130cc) chopped parsley, optional

1. Track 1: “Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois.” Put oil in a pan on medium heat. Add the garlic, onion, and a pinch of salt and stir occasionally until the onion is translucent or until you hear the piano riff on track 3, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” In the down time, you can make sure your chicken broth is heated up in a pot.
   
2. Track 3: “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” Add rice to the onion pan and stir occasionally until they get clear and start to brown, sometime during the second half of track 3, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Pt. II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In a Dream.” Throw the broccolli in the broth to let cook for the last minute of “Carl Sandburg.”
   
3. Track 4: “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” Add the stock/broccolli to the rice/onion pan. Heat to a boil and then let cook for the rest of the track. Stir occasionally. Compare yourself to a serial killer as you watch the bubbles.
   
4. Track 5: “Jacksonville.” Cover and cook until the end of track 9, “Chicago.”
   
5. Track 10: “Casimir Pulaski Day.” Enjoy my favorite song on the CD. Turn heat off and let sit, uncover, stir gently, cover again, and let sit on the burner until track 15, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us.” Optionally mix in chopped parsley for additional green. Serve.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

The Fulbright program sets up an extra “co-school” to work at for a small period of time in the spring, as a means of giving us ETA’s increased variety and different school experiences, as well as letting us touch more students’ lives. For the month of March, I will be at Dongshan Elementary in Dongshan (冬山).

Teaching at Dongshan every day involves taking the train every day, and I’m fully psyched about that. I was first quite worried as there are, according to the online trip planner, only three trains a day that go directly from Nan’ao to Dongshan but this has turned out to be false. It still does mean at least an hour a day on trains, but I’ve got my iPod with wonderful podcasts, and I’m pretty sure my class schedule lets me avoid transfers.

I’m also excited about taking the train so often as Dongshan has the newest train station in Yilan county. It’s a beautiful new modern design of tasteful glass and steel.¹

The school itself is much larger than what I’ve been used to, with five classes per grade of about 30 students each… therefore about 700 students total. A special characteristic of the school is kites… the school has a kite museum and students make kites and fly them. The English classroom closet was also filled with kites.

On the teaching front, I’ll be teaching grades 2, 3, 4, and 6. I’ll be teaching all of those classes once a week, focusing on storytelling. Today I told Jump, Frog, Jump! to second graders. I’ve never had the chance to really use the same lesson plan over and over, and I already can see that I’ll be able to learn a lot through the iterative process.

Thanks.

The Lantern Festival (元宵节) is annually on the 15th day of the lunar year, this year February 21, 2008. Yesterday my Fo Guang friend Aaron and I, after buying textbooks for our upcoming classical Chinese course, met up with Michelle and Jerry in Taipei to check out the lanterns at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Jerry took us first, though, to a casual but very authentic Japanese restaurant, famous for their eel. (Here’s Michelle and Aaron, below:)

Many of the lanterns at the festival were not of the traditional variety…

…but more “artful” ones. Some were made by school teams…

…some were made by elementary school kids…

…and some were the joint effort of a high school and a “Beer Team.”

Many had mice on them, as it is the year of the rat. And then there was this one…

The Memorial Hall was lit up with lanterns and Hollywood lights, and there was a huge glowing orb out in front. Maps described it as the “main lantern,” but really I personally wouldn’t call it a lantern at all. The orb was made up of plastic mouse-shaped balloons that lit up.

Down the street, the festivities continued near the Taipei City Hall, which lit up the streets right under Taipei 101. We all had a great time and enjoyed the lanterns.