If there's one thing that has impressed me the most about Chinese people, it's how systematic some of the things in their life are. There are a rather lot of things they just didn't bother to muck about too much with, but instead, accepted them in the same way that they don't accept democracy.
One of the things they do rather well is dates. You look at our dd.mm.yyyy format of arranging dates, compare it to the seemingly completely arbitrary way in which Americans do it by putting the month first (whatever they were thinking when they decided on that, they simply weren't doing enough of it), and you think that your method is so vastly superior and better done and so on and so forth. And then, along come the Chinese (well, actually, they've been doing this for a while now, but I've only taken notice since last September) and show you the simplest and most obvious way to do it. In fact, way back when some rather intelligent people originally made computers, they made it such that the machines, by default, displayed the dates in this selfsame fashion because it was just the obvious thing to do. (The way computers
stored dates, however, is a completely different matter and not at all obvious - most of them count the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since an arbitrary point in time, say, 12am on January 1, 1970, and then converted it to something more digestible than 1185944654360 whenever you ask for it.)
Anyway, that most obvious – and the most Chinese – way of doing dates, as you probably know, is yyyy.mm.dd. Not only that, but the Chinese also figured out that the best way to name months was not to do so. Instead, January, in Chinese, is simply
一月. The first character means 'one' and the second character means 'month'. August, therefore, as you can predict, is simply
八月, or, the eighth month. If I wanted to tell the complete date and time in English right now, I would say something along the lines of "Five twenty-five A.M. on the first of August, two thousand and seven". If I had to say the same thing in Chinese I would say
"现在是二00七年八月一日五点二十五分". Go on, admire it. I would have done it in pretty colours, but, instead, I made all the numbers bold, because I am not a thirteen-year old girl. In fact, it has been rather a long while since I've been a thirteen-year old anything, although I doubt I would've done it in pretty colours even if I were a thirteen-year old something. The first two characters in what might seem to you gibberish mean "right now"; the third is the verb "to be" and the non-bold characters after that stand for "year", "month", "day", "hour" and "minute" respectively. The system is, in fact, so systematic (for lack of a better word), that, you could have figured out the dates on this Journal even without being aware of these pieces of information, because, just as I have done with my dates, most of the time, the Chinese use the Hindu-Arabic numerals instead of characters for numbers anyway (although it would not be a very good compliment to your intelligence if you weren't able to recognize the characters for
一,
二 and
三).
Now, I was already impressed enough knowing the way they did their dates. But the fun doesn't stop there. Guess
the way they write addresses. Actually, I'll leave that one to your imagination. Writing out formats has become a bit tiresome for me now. Now that we've decided how brilliant the Chinese are, communist though they may be, can you guess the way in which they do names? I'll leave you to figure out most of it on your own, and, unlike those physics problems at the end of chapters, you might actually be able to correctly guess this one on your own. Let me just say that Chow Yun-Fat, the distinguished Hong Kong (o magic wand, turn this into an adjective) actor, would not appreciate it very much if you called him Mr. Fat. No, I rather suspect he prefers the relatively more solemn Mr. Chow.
Now, think of all the exceptions you have for numbers in English, such as the missing 'u' in forty and how eleven to nineteen and most multiples of ten have a special way of wanting to be called. Now, think about all the rules you have for correctly saying numbers in Hindi, in which all the above rules for English apply (except the lack-of-'u'-in-forty thing) with the addition of oddities such as every multiple of ten minus one except nine (19, 29, 39, 49...) has to rhyme with its
successor instead of being constructed like the rest of the numbers in its series, how the nasal inflection that you have to do to change the number from being cardinal to ordinal never sounds
quite right, how you not only have to learn the names of all of the multiples of ten less than a hundred, like you do in English, but also have to learn what each multiple of ten changes to when you start adding numbers to it (like how, 50,
pachaas पचास changes to 51
ikyaavan इक्यावन
). Now, since you obviously haven't had enough of horrible number-naming schemes, think about the rules for numbers in Arabic, in which, like Hindi, German and countless other languages, each word has a gender; but, that's not enough, because each number also has a gender, which, did you know, has to
disagree with the gender of the noun it's placed before?! Oh, but it disagrees only for numbers until 11, after which it starts agreeing with it. And you think your relationship has problems. Anyway, now take
all these rules and simply forget about them.
Any unbiased observer would observer that, unlike Japanese, each character in Chinese is no more and no less than exactly one syllable when pronounced. And there's one character for each single-digit number, from 0 to 9. These are:
零 (or 0)
一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九. They also have a character for ten (
十), hundred (
百), thousand (
千), and ten thousand (
万). (They have some others like
亿 for 100 million). The construction of numbers greater than 9 is very simple. 10 is just
十, 11 is
十一, 17 is
十七, 21 is
二十一 and 18729 is
一万八千七百二十九.
And you know the really cool thing? No, of course you don't. The cool thing is that I can write out the entire scheme for constructing Chinese numbers as a context-free grammar (CFG):
The set of terminals is {0, 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六, 七, 八, 九, 十, 百, 千, 万, ∂}
The set of productions is {S, A, B, C, D, E, F, G}
The starting thingy is {S}
S -> 0 | A | B | AB | ABA | B万 | C | CA | C0A
A -> 一 | 二 | 三 | 四 | 五 | 六 | 七 | 八 | 九
B -> 十 | 百 | 千 | 万 | 亿
C -> DEFG
D -> A万 | ∂
E -> A千 | ∂
F -> A百 | ∂
G -> A十 | ∂
[UPDATE: As it turns out, being right makes me happy; so, I've modified the previously simple CFG into one that is a little more complicated but hopefully correct. Anyone who cares to double-check is welcome to do so. Yeah, and it's not in Chomsky Normal Form, but, believe me, you like it the way it is. Also, this makes the remainder of this paragraph mostly a bunch of lies] The only significant exceptions to the CFG above are that the smaller units in B generally go before the bigger units (they prefer to say a thousand millions than a million thousands, as to most sensible people with a right state of mind) and, sometimes they add a zero (just like we call the year 1901 "nineteen o' one" instead of "nineteen one") although that too has rigidly governed rules (which help bring the rules for numbers in American English into perspective and rightly make them look more like the warnings before entering an adult website). Now, this is not to say that, with those additions, Chinese numbers can no longer be constructed by a CFG, because they can. It's just that I've simplified my CFG for simplicity's sake. And I'd personally rather be happy than right any day.
Yes, the Chinese got the dates, time, numbers, and names right, but then, they also happened to decide that using a different character for every word was a really cool idea. Just goes to show that the world has its way of balancing out a lot of things.
Labels: English
