Chinese Communist Party biscriptalism
Language Log 2018-02-11
Hard core communist journal for Party members gets hip with English in the title of an article:
"@中共党员: 你该get的精神品质和追求!" (Qiúshì 求是 ["Seeking Truth"], 2018, #3)
I will translate and explicate the title fully below. For the moment, it needs to be emphasized that this article was published in the CCP's leading theoretical journal, Qiúshì 求是 ("Seeking Truth"), which is said to be "yòu hóng yòu zhuān 又红又专 ("both red and expert", i.e., "both socialist-minded and professionally competent"). It appears in "Dǎodú 导读" ("Guided reading"), a column on the official website of the journal. As far as communism in China goes, you can't get more serious than this.
Let's take a closer look at the title of the article:
@Zhōnggòng dǎngyuán: Nǐ gāi get de jīngshén pǐnzhí hé zhuīqiú!
"To Chinese Communist Party members: The quality and pursuit of the spirit that you should get!"
What you "obtain / receive" with this Chinese use of "get" are skills, objects, knowledge, and so forth. Here are examples of two clauses employing "get" that were supplied by one of my informants:
If I wanted to buy a new computer and I finally bought it, I can say "xīn diànnǎo get 新电脑get". If I learn to drive and I finally learned how to drive well, I can say "kāichē jìshù get 开车技术get".
As for "@" in the title of the article, it is obviously also a borrowing from English, though it's not even a word, but a symbol standing for the English word "at". Years ago, I heard "@" pronounced as "aite" in various combinations of tones in Mandarin, but now I hear most people saying "at" as in English. Its current, widespread usage in Chinese is to indicate to whom remarks are being addressed.
Notes on the pronunciation of @ in Mandarin by a correspondent:
There are many different pronunciations of @ in China. Usually, when you say quān A 圈A ("circle A") or quān 圈 ("circle"), people can understand you because it mostly appears in an E-mail address. This is also how most people name @. Some people don't know that @ is "at", but pronounce it something like "at", for example, āi 挨 or àitè 艾特. But, in recent years, more and more people know the real meaning of @ and they pronounce it as “at”.
Naturally, it would have been very easy for the editors of the journal to write the title in unadulterated Mandarin, e.g., "Zhì Zhōnggòng dǎngyuán: nǐ yīnggāi jùbèi de jīngshén pǐnzhí hé zhuīqiú 致中共党员：你应该具备的精神品质和追求." That they chose not to do so, but were very much in the faces of their Party readers with two hip English terms in one ideological article title is another powerful piece of evidence documenting how deeply ingrained English usages and script are in contemporary Chinese culture — despite the fact that the government periodically inveighs against there being too much English in Chinese:
"Chinese Endangered by English?" (3/15/10)
"Is Q a Chinese Character?" (4/15/10)
"A Ban on Roman Letter Acronyms?" (4/21/10)
"English Banned in Chinese Writing" (12/23/10) — with links to articles in the media about the banning of English
It won't work. Not even the officials of the almighty Communist Party can prevent Chinese citizens from using English, especially not when they themselves are fond of it (see, for example, what I wrote about Huang Youyi, the highest ranking translator in the PRC, in the first, third, and fourth articles cited just above.
[h.t. Jichang Lulu; thanks to Fangyi Cheng, Jing Wen, Jinyi Cai, Zeyao Wu, and Yixue Yang]