Chinese New Year was celebrated on 1 February. This is the year of the Tiger. According to legend, Tiger was confident that no one could compete with its speed and vigour for the celestial race that would decide the order of the zodiacs. However, when Tiger climbed out of the river, thinking it was first, it was informed that Rat placed first for its cunning and Ox placed second for its diligence. This left the king of the jungle having to settle for third place.
People born in years of the Tiger are vigorous and ambitious, daring and courageous, enthusiastic and generous, self-confident with a sense of justice and a commitment to help others for the greater good. So if you were born in these years, congratulations!
My brother, Brendon, has lived in China on and off for over 40 years. His adventures and stories are the stuff of family legend. An industrial chemist and engineer, he fetched up in Qingdao and set about learning the language — he is fluent. To appease him I have tried for years to master putonghua, but I fear it is beyond my capabilities. All who study this oldest living language with the greatest number of native speakers in the world, soon learn that it is a harsh mistress. It is China’s first and last Great Wall, forbidding to natives and foreigners alike, it lives behind a barrier of ideograms, or symbols. Thousands must be mastered to achieve basic literacy. That is no doubt why the Jesuits coined the name “Mandarin”.
This one word encapsulates an entire colonial history. In the 16th century, Portuguese explorers were among the first Europeans to reach China. Traders and missionaries followed, settling into Macau on land leased from China’s Ming dynasty rulers. The Portuguese called the Ming officials they met mandarim, which comes from menteri in Malay and, before that, mantrī in Sanskrit, both of which mean “minister” or “counselor.” It makes sense that Portuguese would borrow from Malay; they were simultaneously colonizing Malacca on the Malay peninsula.
For centuries, Europeans’ impressions of China filtered largely through the Portuguese. The 16th-century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci, for instance, was Italian, but he arrived in China through Portuguese Macau. Following the twisty logic of colonialism, when he attempted to transpose Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet, he made use of both Italian and Portuguese, comparing the sounds of individual characters to the sounds of Portuguese and Italian words. Even today, “linguists go to town and try to figure [out] what Chinese would have sounded like at the time,” says David Moser, author of A Billion Voices: China’s Search for a Common Language. “They could use as a clue the way Matteo Ricci wrote the Portuguese.”
“Mandarin” is what linguists call an exonym, an external name for a place, people, or language. And exonyms often tell a history of how cultures met, fought, and interacted. Many English names for continental European cities derive not from the local language but from French — probably a legacy of the Norman conquest of England. For example, English and French both use Cologne for Köln, Florence for Firenze, Prague for Praha, and Belgrade for Beograd.
From the vantage point of English speakers, many of the exonyms for non-European places and languages come filtered through the languages of former colonial powers. Bombay and Ceylon, for example, also come from the Portuguese, whose empire once sprawled through Asia. The names imposed by colonial powers can be controversial, of course; Bombay and Ceylon have since officially changed their names to Mumbai and Sri Lanka.
Perhaps in this Year of the Tiger we might do the same, Aotearoa. That would be an ambitious, daring, and courageous thing to do!!
PS: Over the summer I read this enchanting book that tells the story of modern Chinese, “and the revolution that brought this intricate and arcane script into the modern era. Jing Tsu the author is a professor of east Asian languages at Yale, and her love for the enigma and beauty of Chinese shines through in this delightful mix of history and linguistics. Kingdom of Characters: A Tale of Language, Obsession and Genius in Modern China by Jing Tsu
Available from Bruce McKenzie’s on line book store: EMAIL books@bmbooks.co.nz