Letters from China No 10

21st August 2008

Chinglish - a word meaning Chinese English which is often the bane of civic authorities and their like here. In preparation for the Beijing Olympics the city authorities tried clamping down on its use, replacing all obvious Chinglish signs with Standard English. A prime example at a market was a sign which reads in English “To sell inside the commodity space all accepting money sipe supplies examineing the price service”. The Chinese characters actually mean “All cashiers in the marketplace offer price-checking services.” As you can see, a trip to the market can mean a lot more than buying some eggs and fresh veggies.

What prompted me to raise this topic was reading an article in www.news.cn, a Chinese online news service in English. It was reporting the fact that the T8 Typhoon warning had been raised in Hong Kong with the imminent arrival of Typhoon Nuri. (Nuri means “Blue crowned parroquet” in the Malay language.) It has already killed seven people in the Philippines.

The warning system in Hong Kong is a hangover from the days of British colonial rule and barely makes sense. The warning rises from T3 to T8 with no intervening T4, T5 etc. When the T8 is issued, all government offices close, schools evacuate their children homewards, the buses stop running and, very importantly, all the ferry services, which HK depends immensely upon, are cancelled. It is also very true that Hong Kong relishes hanging on to its colonial past and still uses the names from that era for its streets and institutions. It retains its use of English Common Law and magistrates, judges and barristers all wear wigs as in the UK. So, to come to the point and to quote the www.news.cn article about the coming typhoon it said

“The arrival of the typhoon forced the cancellation of Hong Kong's most ferries connecting some of the far-fetched islands, the neighboring Macao as well as some cities. Most of the bus transport in the city was also suspended.”

Apart from the terrible English, the correct term is “the outlying islands”, but that hints a bit too much of the colonial English used a few years ago, and which is still very much in use. So, in order to avoid using this terribly colonial remnant the writer stretched his/her vocabulary and almost reached the desired “far-flung islands”, but not quite. So, however far-fetched the islands might seem to some people, they actually do exist, all 200+ of them and are happily outlying Hong Kong at this moment, albeit under the rains and winds of Typhoon Nuri.