Drinking Happiness In My Mouth in North Capital

When referring to proper nouns, I generally think of names like William, Ventura Boulevard, Miami, and Connecticut. In an alphabetized language like English, we are able to create an endless arrangement of letters to create the names of individuals and places. And more importantly, phonetic languages can make a name pronounceable regardless of your familiarity with it.

Chinese, as you might have imagined does not work the same way. Practically every character has meaning. So instead of proper nouns being made up of letters with sounds, they are made up of characters with meanings. Naturally, some of our proper nouns in America may have meant something in a historical context and may have been borrowed from the French, Spanish, and Native American languages, but these words no longer hold any real meaning - they are just names. “America” simply comes from Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer and discoverer of the New World.

But names in China always have a meaning. If you translate the name of China (Zhongguo) you get “The Middle Kingdom.” Beijing means “North Capital”, Shanghai means “Seaside City” and Hong Kong (Xiang Gang in Mandarin) means “Fragrant Harbor.”

In addition to the disadvantages of not having a phonetic language, Communism also plays a role in eliminating unique labels and place names that may glorify any one individual over the commune. So instead of street names like Bleeker St. or Melrose Place, Beijing has names like “Eternal Tranquility Avenue”, “Peaceful Avenue”, and “Diplomatic Gate Avenue.” The schools and hospitals have no proper names, just numbers, and the titles of universities demonstrates how China in many ways is a planned society with names like Geology University, Agriculture University, Petroleum University, and so on. Because I am a non-native speaker, it doesn’t seem that outlandish to me seeing as I learn the Chinese names of most places before I learn their meanings. But if I strictly spoke in English, I would awkwardly describe my residence as next to Forestry University, between Double Clarity St. and Campus St., and in a complex called Clear and Splendid Maple Gardens.

Another struggle is taking foreign names and finding the right Chinese characters to produce the same sounds, more or less, and often at the same time making sure those characters have correlating meanings. For example, KeKou Kele (Coca Cola) meaning happiness in my mouth, MeiGuo (America) beautiful country, and XiTeLe (Hitler) a strange force.

Chinese will continue to be a difficult language to grasp by those in the West with its characters and tones, but with the emergence of Pinyin, the phonetic representation of Chinese characters, it has become easier to learn Mandarin. Not only that, but Pinyin is needed for typing and text messaging, therefore every young person and professional must use it. I am aware of the culture and history embedded in characters and that it would put immense strain on the country as a whole to translate its libraries and historical works, but I do believe that Mandarin will someday transition into a phonetic language. Korea did it not so long ago, and I truly believe that China must follow suit as modern society commands our brain to accelerate the process of learning language in order to spend more time using it for everything else.