#or it's rooted in a similar expression in thai and many people make this little mistake

[dummerjan]

an idiosyncrasy i see in english subs for so many thai shows is the use if the indefinite article when saying to take care: 'take a good care' i find it so charming and am so curious why that is

[unikittybigbrightworldau]

OC “Wiki Pages”: Bia

—-

Nicknames (aka): Biabell

Affiliation: Pin Oak School of Natural Science

Family: Cedric (father), Silvia (mother), Mango (caregiver)

Friends: Kira, Allegra, Zora, Carnation

Color: Light pinkish-red, slate blue, red, bluish-gray, dark greenish-brown, dark brown, brown, beige, greenish-yellow

Special Features: Red ribbons in hair, antennae, great intellect

Character Influences: Tinker Bell (Tinker Bell), Donnie (TMNT: Mutant Mayhem)

Likes: Tinkering, inventing, cartoons, comic books, Teen Titans, pop music, acorn puffs

Dislikes: When people don’t listen to her advice, when people miss the point of something

Gender: Female

Pronouns: She/her

Birthday: May 13

Quote: “I’ve got it!”

—-

Debut: TBA

Headcanon Voice: Tinker Bell from the Tinker Bell movies

—-

Bia Raposta is a character in the Unikitty: Big Bright World series. She is a nerdy environmental technician and inventor from Botania. She is friends with Kira, Zora and Allegra.

—-

Physical Appearance: Bia was a pink and slate blue caterpillar when she was little. She is a red and bluish-gray red postman butterfly. Her hair is a light blue-gray, tied into pigtail-like styles with red ribbons. Her torso is the same color, and her chest seems to stick out a bit. Her hands, face and legs are light pinkish-red. Her eyes are very dark brown with a hint of green. Half of Bia’s wings are bright red while the other half is dark bluish-gray. Bia can’t feel her wings, so she flies with flight aids. They are made of bark, tree wood and greenish-yellow leaves. They are connected to her wrists with wooden rods. When she is flying, they expand into green leaf gliders in the back, with brown wooden pipes popping out from the bottom that lift her up. 

Personality: Bia is a problem-solving and headstrong fairy who can often be seen tinkering with things. She’s an inventor who is always coming up with a plan to fix something. She is typically the first in her friend group to begin tackling a challenge and is the most level-headed of the four. Like her fellow Botanians, she aims to find ways to preserve the life of the world. She always tries to make sure her creations don’t leave behind waste or use up too much energy. She is witty and clever as well. Bia cites her inspiration from the characters she follows in cartoons and comic books, expressing lots of enthusiasm for them. She also likes to listen to pop while she works.

Bia, while skilled in inventing machinery and gadgets, isn’t a genius, and she knows it. She’s just a nerdy cartoon lover. She tends to be feisty to the point where it’s argumentative. She just wants to be heard, so she can get annoyed when someone doesn’t listen to her. Bia is aware of her limitations and wouldn’t be herself without them.

Abilities: Bia is the most intellectual of her friend group and therefore the most level-headed as well. She’s very good at repairing broken things, inventing sustainable devices and machinery, and forming ideas based on her settings. She is also noted for being very environmentally aware, even if all of her knowledge is rooted in her favorite shows. 

—-

Trivia

In many ways, Bia is similar to Tinker Bell, who is her headcanon voice.

Her surname is based on her butterfly species, the red postman, and fuses the words red and postman.

Bia is 16 years old.

Bia's favorite food or snack is probably acorn puffs, as she often takes Kira out to get some after school.

Acorn puffs are tiny Botanian fairy desserts. They are acorn nuts broken down  into pieces which are then baked into fluffy puffs.

According to Jezabat, Bia would be a big fan of Teen Titans.

—-

In Other Languages

Arabic: بيا / "Baya"

Spanish: Bia

German: Bia

Swedish: Bia

Italian: Bia

Swahili: Bia

Portuguese: Bia

Korean: 비아 / “Bia”

Japanese: ビア / “Bia”

Chinese: 比亚 / “Bǐyǎ”

Polish: Bia

Greek: Μπέα / “Béa”

French: Bia

Russian: Биа / "Bia”

Hindi: बिया / “Biya”

Thai: บีอา / “Bīxā”

Turkish: Bia

[meichenxi]

Hey! I hope you feel better soon

We haven't had a good long linguistics rant from you in a while!! How about you tell us about your favourite lingustical feature or occurrence in a language? Something like a weird grammatical feature or how a language changed

If this doesn't trigger any rant you have stored feel free to educate on any topic you can spontaneously think of, I'd love to hear it :D

ALRIGHT KARO, let's go!! This is a continuation of the other ask I answered recently, and is the second part in a series about linguistic complexity. I suggest you check that one out first for this to properly make sense! (I don't know how to link but uh. it's the post behind this on my blog)

Summary of previous points: the complexity of a language has nothing to do with the 'complexity' of the people that speak it; complexity is really bloody hard to measure; some linguists in an attempt to be not racist argue that 'all languages are equally complex', but this doesn't really seem to be the case, and also still equates cognitive ability with complexity of language which is just...not how things work; arguing languages have different amounts of complexity has literally nothing to do with the cognitive abilities of those who speak it.

Ok. Chinese.

Normally when we look at complexity we like to look at things like number of verb classes, noun classes, and so on. But Chinese doesn't really do any of this.

So what do Chinese and languages like Chinese do that is so challenging to the equicomplexity hypothesis, the idea that all languages are equally complex? I’ll start by talking about some of the common properties of isolating languages - and these properties are often actually used as examples of why these languages are as complex, just in different ways. Oh Melissa, I hear you ask in wide-eyed admiration/curiousity. What are they? By isolating languages, I mean languages that tend to have monosyllabic words, little to no conjugation, particles instead of verb or noun endings, and so on: so languages like Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai and many others in East and South East Asia.

Here’s a list of funky things in isolating languages that may or may not make a language more complex than linguists don't really know what to do with:

Classifiers

Chengyu and 4-word expressions

Verb reduplication, serialisation and resultative verbs

'Lexical verbosity' = complex compounding and word forming strategies

Pragmatics

Syntax

I'll talk about the first two briefly, but I don't have space for all. For clarity of signposting my argument: many linguists use these as explanations of why languages like Chinese are as complex, but I'm going to demonstrate afterwards why the situation is a bit more complicated than that. You could even say it's...complex.

1) Classifiers

You know about classifiers in Chinese, but what you may be interested to learn is that almost all isolating languages in South East Asia use them, and many in fact borrow from each other. The tonal, isolating languages in South East Asia have historically had a lot of contact through intense trade and migration, and as such share a lot of properties. Some classifiers just have to go with the noun: 一只狗，一条河 etc. First of all, if we're defining complexity as 'the added stuff you have to remember when you learn it' (my professors hate me), it's clear that these are added complexity in exactly the same way gender is. Why is it X, and not Y? Well, you can give vague answers ('it's sort of...ribbony' or 'it's kinda...flat'), but more often than not you choose the classifier based on the vibe. Which is something you just have to remember.

Secondly, many classifiers actually have the added ability to modify the type of noun they're describing. These are familiar too in languages like English: a herd of cattle versus a head of cattle. So we have 一枝花 which is a flower but on a stem ('a stem of flower'), but also 一朵花 which is a flower but without the stem (think like...'a blob of flower'). Similarly with clouds - you could have a 一朵云 'blob of cloud' (like a nice, fluffy cloud in a children's book), but you could also have 一片云 which is like a huge, straight flat cloud like the sea...and so on. These 'measure words' do more than measure: they add additional information that the noun itself does not give.

Already we're beginning to see the outline of the problem. Grammatical complexity is...well, grammatical. We count the stuff which languages require you to express, not the optional stuff - and that's grammar. The difference between better and best is clearly grammatical, as is go and went. But what about between 'a blob of cloud' versus 'a plain of cloud'? Is that grammatical? Well, maybe: you do have to include a measure word when you say there's one of it, and in many Chinese languages that are not Mandarin you have to include them every single time you use a possessive: my pair of shoes, my blob of flower etc. But you don't always have to include one specific classifier - there are multiple options, all of which are grammatical. So should we include classifiers as part of the grammar? Or part of the vocabulary (the 'lexicon')?

Err. Next?

2) Chengyu and 4-character expressions + 4) Lexical verbosity

This might seem a bit weird: these are obviously parts of the vocab! What's weirder, though, is that many isolating languages have chengyu, not just Chinese. And if you don't use them, many native speakers surveys suggest you don't sound native. This links to point number 4, which is lexical verbosity. 'Lexical verbosity' means a language has the ability to express things creativity, in many different manners, all of which may have a slightly different nuance. The kind of thing you love to read and analyse and hate to translate.

But it is important. If we look at the systems that make up the grand total of a language, vocabulary is obviously one of them: a language with 1 million root forms is clearly more 'complex', if all else is exactly the same, than a language with 500,000. Without even getting into the whole debacle about 'what even is a word', a language that has multiple registers (dialect, regional, literary, official etc) that all interact is always going to be more complex than one that doesn't, just because there's more of it. More rules, more words, more stuff.

Similarly, something that is the backbone of modern Chinese 'grammar' and yet you may never have thought of as such is is compound words. We don't tend to traditionally teach this as grammar, and I don't have time to give a masterclass on it now, but let me assure you that compounding - across the world's language - is hugely varied. Some languages let you make anything a compound; some only allow noun+noun compounds (so no 'blackbird', as black is an adjective); some only allow head+head compound (so no 'sabretooth', because a sabretooth is a type of tiger, not tooth); some only allow compounds one way ('ring finger' but not 'finger ring': though English does allow the other way around in some other words), and so on.

You'll have heard time and time again that 'Chinese is an isolating language, and isolating languages like monosyllabic words'. Well. Sort of. You will also have noticed yourself that actually most modern Chinese words are disyllabic: 学习，工作，休息，吃饭 and so on. This is radically different to Classical Chinese, where the majority were genuinely one syllable. But many Chinese speakers still have access to the words in the compounds, and so they can be manipulated on a character-by-character basis: most adults will be able to look at 学习 and understand that 学 and 习 both exist as separate words: 开学，学生，复习，练习 and so on.

I'm going to sort of have to ask you to take my word on it as I don't have time to prove how unique it is, but the ability that Chinese has to turn literally anything into a compound is staggering. It's insane. It's...oh god I'm tearing up slightly it's just a LOT guys ok. It's a lot. There are 20000000 synonyms for anything you could ever want, all with slightly different nuances, because unlike many other languages, Chinese allows compounds where the two bits of the compound mean, largely speaking, very similar things. So yes, you have compounds like 开学 which is the shortened version of 开始学习, or ones with an object like 吃饭 or 睡觉, but you also have compounds like 工作 where both 工 and 作 kind of...mean 'to work'...and 休息 where both 休 and 息 mean 'to rest'...and so on. So you can have 感 and 情 and 爱 and 心 but also 感情 and 情感 and 爱情 and 情爱 and 心情 and 心爱 and 爱心 and so on, and they all mean different things. And don't even get me started on resultative verbs: 学到，学会，学好，学完， and so on...

What is all of this, if not complex? It's not grammatical - except that the process of compound forming, that allows for so many different compounds, is grammatical. We can't make the difference between学会，学好 and 学完 anywhere near as easily in English, and in Chinese you do sort of have to add the end bit. So...do we count this under complexity? And if not, we should probably count it elsewhere? Because it's kind of insane. And learners have to use it, much like the example I gave of English prepositions, and it takes them a bloody long time. But then where?

Ok. I haven't had a chance to talk about everything, but you get the picture: there are things in Chinese that, unlike European languages, do not neatly fit into the 'grammar' versus 'vocabulary' boxes we have built for ourselves, because as a language it just works very differently to the ones we've used as models. (Though some of the problems, in fact, are similar: German is also very adept at compounding.) But as interesting as that difference is, the goal of typology as a sub-discipline of linguistics is to talk about and research the types of linguistic diversity around the world, so we can't stop there by acknowledging our models don't fit. We have to go further. We have to stop, and think: What does this mean for the models that we have built?

This is where we get into theoretically rather boggy ground. We weren't before?? No, like marsh of the dead boggy. Linguists don't know it...they go round, for miles and miles and miles....

Because unfortunately there isn't a clear answer. If we dismiss these things as 'lexical' and therefore irrelevant to the grammar, that is a) ignoring their grammatical function, b) ignoring the fact that the lexicon is also a system that needs to be learnt, and has often very clear rules on word-building that are also 'grammatical', and c) essentially playing a game of theoretical pass-the-parcel. It's your problem, not mine: it's in the lexicon, not the grammar. Blah blah blah. Because whoever's problem it is, we still have to account for this complexity somehow when we want to compare literally any languages that are substantially different at all.

On the other side of things, however, if we argue that 'Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, because it makes up for a lack of complexity in Y by all this complexity in X' (and therefore all languages = equally complex), this ignores the fact that compounding and irregular verbs belong to two very different systems. The kind of mistake you make when you use the wrong classifier intuitively seems to be on another level of 'wrongness' to the kind where you conjugate a verb in the wrong way. One is 'wrong'. The other is just 'not what we say'. It's the same as the use of prepositions in English: some are obviously wrong (I don't sleep 'at my bed') but some are just weird, and for many there are multiple options ('at the weekend', 'on the weekend'). Is saying 'I am on the town' the same level of wrongness as saying 'I goed to the shops'? Intuitively we might want to say the second is a 'worse' mistake. In which case, what are they exactly? They're both 'grammar', but totally different systems. And where do you draw the line?

Here's the thing about the equicomplexity argument. As established, it stems from a nice ideological background that nevertheless conflates cognition and linguistic complexity. Once you realise that no, the two are completely separate, you're under no theoretical or ideological compulsion to have languages be equally complex at all. Why should they be at all? Some languages just have more stuff in them: some have loads of vowels, and loads of consonants, and some have loads of grammar. Others have less. They all do basically the same job. Why is that a big deal?

Where the argument comes into its biggest problem, though, is that if a language like Chinese is already as complex as a language like Abkhaz...what happens when we meet Classical Chinese?

Classical Chinese. An eldritch behemoth lurking with tendrils of grass-style calligraphy belching perfect prose just behind the horizon.

Let's look at Modern Chinese for a moment. It has some particles: six or so, depending on how you count them. You could include these as being critical to the grammar, and they are.

A common dictionary of Classical Chinese particles lists 694.

To be fair, a lot of these survive as verbs, nouns and so on. Classical Chinese was very verb-schmerb when it came to functional categories, and most nouns can be verbs, and vice versa. It's all just about the vibe. But still. Six hundred and ninety four.

Some of these are optional - they're the nice 'omggg' equivalent of the modern tone particles at the end of a sentence. Some of them are smushed versions of two different particles, like 啦. Some of these, however, really do seem to have very grammatical features. Of these 694, 17 are listed as meaning ‘subsequent to and later than X’, and 8 indicate imposition of a stress upon the word they precede or follow. Some are syntactic: there are, for instance, 8 different particles solely for the purpose of fronting information: 'the man saw he'. That is very much a grammatical role, in every sense of the word.

The copula system ('to be') is also huuuuuuugely complex. I could write a whole other post about this, but I'll just say for now that the copula in Classical Chinese could be specific to degrees of logical preciseness that would make the biggest Lojban-loving computer programmer weep into his Star Trek blanket. As in, the system of positive copulas distinguishes between 6 different polar-positive copulas (A is B), 2 insistent positive (A is B), 19 restricted positive (A is only B), and 15 of common inclusion (A is like B). Some other copulas can make such distinctions as ‘A becomes or acts as B’, ‘A would be B’, ‘may A not be B?’ and so on. Copulas may also be used in a sort of causal way (not 'casual'), creating very specific relationships like ‘A does not merely because of B’ or ‘A is not Y such that B is X’.

WHEW. And all we have in modern Chinese is 是。

I think we can see that this is a little more complex. So saying 'Modern Chinese is as complex as Abkhaz, just in a different way' leaves no space for Classical Chinese to be even more complex...so....where does that leave us?

Uhhhhhh. Errrrrr.

(Don't worry, that's basically where the entire linguistics community is at too.)

The thing is, all these weird and wacky things that Classical Chinese is able to do are all optional. This is where the problem is. Our understanding of complexity, if you hark back to my last post so many moons ago, is that it's the description of what a language requires you to do. We equate that with grammar because in most of the languages we're familiar with, you can't just pick and choose whether to conjugate a verb or use a tense. If you are talking in third person, the verb has to change. It just...does. You can't not do it if you feel like it. There's not such thing as 'poetic license' - except in languages like Classical Chinese, well. There sort of is.

The problem both modern Chinese and Classical Chinese shows us to a different extent is that some languages are capable of highly grammatical things, but with a degree of optionality we would not expect. Classical Chinese can accurately stipulate to the Nth degree what, exactly, the grammatical relationship between two agents are in a way that is undoubtedly and even aggressively logical. But...it doesn't have to. As anybody who has tried anything with Classical Chinese knows, reading things without context is an absolute fucking nightmare. As a language it has the ability to also say something like 臣臣 which in context means 'when a minister acts as a minister'...but literally just means...minister minister. Go figure. It doesn't have to do any of these myriad complex things it's capable of at all.

So...what does this mean? What does all of this mean, for the question of whether all languages are equally complex?

Whilst I agree that the situation with Classical Chinese is fully batshit insane, the fact is most isolating languages are more like Modern Chinese: they don't do all of this stuff. And whilst classifiers and compounds are challenging, they're not quite the same as the strict binary correct/incorrect of many systems. I'm also just not convinced that languages need to be equally complex. However.

HOWEVER. In this essay/rant/lecture (?), I've raised more questions than I've answered. That's deliberate. I both think that a) the type of complexity Chinese shows is not 'enough' to work as a 'trade off' compared to languages like Abkhaz, and b) that this 'grammatical verbosity' and optionality of grammatical structures is something we don't know how to deal with at all. These are two beliefs that can co-exist. Classical Chinese especially is a huge challenge to current understandings of complexity, whichever side of the equicomplexity argument you stand on.

Because where do you place optionality in all of this? Choice? If a certain structure can express something grammatical, but you don't have to include it - is that more complex, or less so? Where do we rank optional features in our understanding of grammar? It's a totally new dimension, and adds a richness to our understanding that we simply wouldn't have got if we hadn't looked at isolating languages. This, right here, is the point of typology: to inform theory, and challenge it.

What do we do with this sort of complexity at all?

I don't know. And I don't think many professional linguists do either.

- meichenxi out

[chromacomaphoto]

Places to Shoot in Bangkok Part 5: Chinatown

Back with another hot off the press chapter of the guide this month, and also by popular request from more than a few readers, it’s time for the full Chromacoma guide to shooting in and around Chinatown, Bangkok.

Before we even get into it, let’s address the (perhaps not so) obvious…

If you want to shoot pictures of Thai-Chinese or Sino-Thai people or life in action, you can do it pretty much anywhere in Thailand. The percentage of Thais with some Chinese blood in the family tree is absolutely massive, and probably a majority of the population of Bangkok can lay claim to this. Chinatown is simply a close knit epicenter of such people all living in a very tight area who have probably had their roots there the longest. It’s the real heart of the Thai-Chinese community and offers a really nice and visibly different little flavor to the Bangkok mix. It’s a good spot to try and catch some very ‘National-Geographic’ –esque sort of shots, if you know what I mean. Cliches here are also rife for the same reasons. On a recent shoot there, I even took a photo of part of a tuk-tuk (and a monk), usually these motifs are off-limits to me (as a resident here) as otherwise trite stereotypes but to be fair… it’s all justified by the plot somewhat down in Chinatown and you just get swept up in the flow of it all sometimes.

Indeed, I thought it might be good to go into some detail although this one is definitely a bit trickier than usual this month as it covers a pretty large geographic area and is that much harder to pin down to a simple ‘right vs wrong’ way kind of approach. As if such a thing really exists anyway. This is just a recommendation and some tips as always.

With that statement firmly in mind however, I would still like to introduce you to ONE way of doing Chinatown that I think should prove photographically rich in terms of opportunities.  This is an approach that I have used myself several times and I think it might be a nice way for somebody not familiar with Bangkok (or perhaps just even the area) to try as a photographic adventure.

To start with, I’m going to ‘flip the script’ (or whatever the cool kids say these days) and start at the back, from the river  end with a loop and few suggestions before taking you back that way. Yes, that means starting your little Chinatown photographic sortie from the river boat (regular readers will probably already be aware that I like being on boats on the Chao Praya river). You will need to get to pier number 5 (N5) AKA Ratchawong pier. This is north of Saphan Thaksin (where the BTS skytrain meets at the river boat terminal there) by a few stops and south of Wat Arun by a similar distance. The orange flag express boat stops there (but only if there is somebody waiting at the pier or you make it clear that you are heading to the back of the boat to disembark there before it gets close!) as does the tourist ‘hop on-hop off’ boat.

Although it is something that I am somewhat loathe to include within these chapters, I feel it is particularly hard to cover this without the inclusion of an actual map so here it is. Allow me to explain it and read these words carefully before you look at the map in detail. The arrow markers I have laid out are MERELY A SUGGESTED OUTER BOUNDARY route that I highly recommend you to follow. However the key idea here is that you should randomly pick and choose to cut through as many alleys, back ways and side streets that link through to this main outer perimeter walking route outlined below as possible. If you just follow the arrows, everything will be fine but the real joy of discovering Chinatown is all the little hidden cut throughs and what they have in store for you. It would be a shame to miss them.

This might seem like an odd way of doing things, for example somebody might well wonder why I haven’t got an arrow going straight down Yaowarat Road, as the main artery of Chinatown. The route I have actually allows for you to shoot looking down it but a lot of it looks the same and once you have walked down the first hundred metres, the next few hundred don’t look much different. However, the side streets and alleys that hook up and link this main road to the outer route I show on the map are all really varied and eclectic with lots of stuff to see that is well worth exploring just ever so slightly off the more obvious main routes. That’s kind of the point. To highlight the kind of technique I mean. I have given a little example early on in my map here to start you off. Once you disembark at the pier, follow the people the obvious way out to the first street you emerge out into. There will probably be a few Bangkok buses strangely parked up there on the left and a tuk-tuk or two on the right.

If you walk up that road just a little way to the first left turn and walk down that way….you’ll find tiny little alleys off to the left with real Chinatown slices of life lying in wait for you. Some of the entrances look so small and dark that you would be forgiven for thinking that you are not allowed to enter them but you’ll see the odd person popping in and out of them here and there and it soon becomes clear that you can explore further.

Some of them are even functioning as street restaurants, out of the sun and heat. The people will certainly not be expecting to see you but as a foreigner with a camera in hand obviously wandering around ‘semi-lost’ taking photos, they’ll ignore you soon enough and if you just smile…you’ll be fine.  Just behave respectfully as always. Then follow the arrows back down to the main road where you started, take the first left back up Ratchawong road and you’re all set. This is the kind of zig-zagging that I am talking about. I am merely giving you a basic map route to try and keep heading along otherwise you could just zig-zag yourself into nothingness or get stuck, miss the main sights and sounds etc. You get the idea.

Carry on like this in such a fashion, follow the general arrows and make little detours off to the left and right following your senses. Feel free to ‘cut through’ and miss out a section if you wish, but just at least stick to the general  arrows and direction all the way around. It’s great fun and the ‘deeper’ you go, the less tourists you’ll see.

Film shooters are gonna be needing some flexible ISO’s as the bright/dark contrasts can be a challenge for any camera or photographer. It goes from barely being able to clearly see inside an alleyway to Ultra Sunny f22 in a heartbeat and often within the same frame. ISO 400 at minimum would be best, only go higher if it’s a murky monsoon season kind of day. Normal lenses work fine but a bit wider isn’t a bad idea with so many people and places dying to be squeezed into frames everywhere you turn.

You’ll no doubt see that it’s basically a loop that will eventually circle back around to the same pier (N5) and then you can decide which way to hop back on the boat from there. The reason that I am suggesting this is that most tourists will be starting at the other end of the Yaowarat road and probably being accompanied by a tuk-tuk ‘guide’ (cough). I saw a lot of these the last time I did this loop. You can always tell as the 7/11’s down that way have more foreigners in, often overly laden with backpacks and briefly enjoying the free air con whilst buying fluids. The ‘guides’ are often hanging around waiting for them outside. I think you’ll do better photographically to be a little further away from that, at least until you are nearing the end of your expedition.

If you’re a market sort of person, be advised that there are some great markets inside this loop, including Sampheng (day and night versions) but be very careful of your belongings and bags/wallets if you are gonna be deeply absorbed in taking shots in such places. Good people watching and photo opportunities there though for sure.

That is about it. It is certainly not the only way to ‘do Chinatown’, photographically speaking, but it’s definitely not a bad way to start. There will always be too much here to shoot it all, life moves fast in this part of town so try and catch what tiny, but hopefully beautiful, little moments of it you can.

CCP