Mother Tongue

I have been reading Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue (English & How it Got That Way)”, which is a very interesting book about the origins of this thing called English.

Here is an interesting passage from the book;

“One final cataclysm awaited the English language: the Norman conqeuest of 1066.  The Normans were Vikings who had settled in northern France 200 years before.  Like the Celtic Britons before them, they had given their name to a French province, Normandy.  But unlike the Celts, they had abondoned their language and much of their culture and become French in manner and speech.  So totally had they given up their language, in fact, that not a single Norse word has survived in Normandy, apart from the place-names.  That is quite remarkable when you consider that the Normans bequeathed 10,000 words to English.”

In England during the 300 year period when the kings and politicians exclusively spoke French while the commoners spoke English,  there use to be distinction between animals in the field whose names came from English vs. when they were brought to the table, which were then generally given French names. This difference was also reflected in the language spoken by those with skilled jobs (masons, painters) speaking French while the every day laborer would speak English.

Presentation – Part 2

The presentation I will give at the University, which I talked about in my earlier post, will have an underlying theme of complimentary opposites.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin yang is used to describe how seemingly disjunct or opposing forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, giving rise to each other in turn.

I pointed this out with the phrase, “The Art of Engineering”. There are the obvious opposites such as, East/West, Night/Day and Wet/Dry. But the yin-yang philosophy goes on further to say that;

Everything has both yin and yang aspects, which constantly interact, never existing in absolute stasis.

To illustrate this in my presentation I will draw the maps of the USA and China on a black/white board using two items that we normally think of as a tool and a toy; a phone and a yo-yo. But I will show that there is really a little bit of toy/tool in each of these items.

So here are my drafting tools: iphone, Duncan yo-yo and some suction cups that I got at the dollar store, which were all made in China.

The yo-yo and suction cups are my tools I use as a guide to draw plumb vertical lines, circles about a point and find distances that are pre-marked along the string.

And my iphone with it’s level app lets me find accurate angles between lines. And I can play Mahjong on after I get done drawing the maps.

You see most things in life are just concepts that someone else has defined for us and are not necessarily absolute if one takes some time to look at it from the other side of the world.

Japanese vs. Chinese

So I have been struggling to learn Japanese for some time now and while I know more than the average Joe I am still a long way from being very skillfull.  And now I am starting all over from zero again to learn Mandrin Chinese, which is the version of Chinese that is spoken in the Shandong province where I will be going.

Around 600AD the Japanese adopted the Chinese form of writing that uses ideographic characters that the Chinese call “Hanzi” and the Japanese call “Kanji”. For the most part, the meaning of many of the characters is the same between the two but the Japanese used their own pronunciation that is very different from Chinese. Also Japanese sentence structure is generally Subject-Object-Verb, where Chinese is Subject-Verb-Object, similar to English.

As an example, the sentence:   I climb a mountain.

In Japanese it is written: 私は 山 に 登る.

That is pronounced as: “Watashi-wa yama-ni noboru”, and literally translated as, “I mountain climb”

In Chinese it is written: 老子 爬 山.

That is pronounced with pinyin:  ”lǎozǐ pá shān“, and literally translated as, “I climb mountain”

For both Japanese and Chinese the character for mountain is written as, 山, but the pronunciation is different for each as is the sentence structure.

The Art of Engineering

One of the first things that will be required of me once I get to China is to give a 30 minute presentation to some of the faculty at the University. I’ve decided to talk about “The Art of Engineering”, a phrase that appears on the face of it to be very much yin-yang in nature. Engineering is based in numbers and facts vs Art which can be very fuzzy and subjective. What I will show with a little bit of engineering and a little bit of art that China and USA,  which we usually think of being much different, are much the same to a civil engineer.

The Engineering – I have discovered there are six numbers that can graphically be used to show the common elements of China & USA:

100.0, 73.3, 46.2, 33.3, 22.2 14.5

Step 1 – Draw two rectangles with dimensions of 100.0 x 73.3:

Step 2 – Draw two circles with radius of 22.2R:

Step 3 – Draw two more circles with radius of 22.2R 46.6 units apart:

Step 4 – Draw two circles with radius of 14.5R that are 46.6 & 33.3 away from the last two circle for China & USA respectively:

The Art – With these three circles as guides you can now sketch China and USA.

So there you go! China and USA are almost exactly the same in width and actually have the same amount of area:

China Area: 9.6 million square kilometers

USA Area: 9.5 million square kilometers

And if you look at latitude-longitude values it looks like this:

Where both China and USA are between 20 & 50 degrees of latitude.   Also the capitols of Beijing & Washington DC have a latitude of 39 degrees.

So we have a lot more in common than one might think.

A Blog is Born

This will  be the home of my blog where I will keep everyone updated with my adventures with teaching English and Engineering to Chinese university students at Linyi Normal University located in Linyi City China.  From the Linyi Normal University website:

“The university has a faculty of 2001 teachers, 1000 of whom with doctoral or master’s degrees. 685 have achieved titles of Full or Associate Professors. In addition, there are more than 300 part-time teachers and 53 foreign teachers. The university now has an enrollment of 34,455 full-time students, and this number has been among the top of Shandong provincial universities.”

Linyi is located approximately half way between Shanghai and Beijing in Shandong province, as shown on the map below. You can also find Linyi on google maps by entering the following latitude, longitude coordinates (35.1141, 118.2895), where you would normally input an address and google maps will take to Linyi.

Linyi City