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Speaking of t-shirts, I’d been toying with a t-shirt idea for the past year or two: a Beijing Pirate t-shirt. Let me explain…

A distinctive feature of Beijing dialect of Mandarin (and, indeed, most northern Chinese dialects) is the very frequent rhoticization (adding to or replacing the end of a word with “arr”) whose function is often glossed as a diminutive suffix. This phenomenon is called 儿化 (érhùa) in Chinese. Here are some examples, blatantly stolen from Wikipedia:

• 公园(gōngyuán)(public garden) →　公园儿(gōngyuánr), pronounced “gōngyuár”
• 小孩(xiǎohái) (small child) → 小孩儿(xiǎoháir), pronounced “xǐaohár”
• 事 (shì) (thing) → 事儿(shìr), pronounced “shèr”

The result of this variation is that it makes you sound like a pirate… and thus my t-shirt idea was born:

I’m happy to say that I recently found exactly what I’d been looking for—someone to print the shirts, store them, and handle shipments—in the form of PrintMojo, and yesterday constructed the website to go along with it: beijinghuar.com. The shirts are printed on very comfortable Hanes shirts with nice white cross-stitching. They’re $20 a piece, plus shipping.¹ Sure, not the cheapest shirt, but pretty awesome. Make sure to check it out.

Related posts:

1. 北京 Part 3: The Great Wall of China! and noodles: Day 3: The Great Wall Before we finalized our plans...
2. Taipei find: a dictionary of Chinese-Japanese false cognates: The fact that Japanese and Chinese both share the use...

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Tags: Beijing, Chinese, code, t-shirt

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This entry was posted on 土曜日, 6 月 14th, 2008 at 7:20 pm and is filed under projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.