User Comments - bodawei

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Fantastic research on QinYuan, thanks Baba. Very enlightening.

If you want to see stylised characters you should try the Maki one. The qi (the character) and the 'pinyin' is pretty much stylised out of recognition. :)

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'the google trends that I was using'

thanks for the run-down on Google trends. I have heard of it, seen people quote it on this site, but not used it myself. I'm not 100% clear why it couldn't (in principle) use the same counting rules as 'hits at this point in time' but I guess that the data requirements would be too large. I hadn't thought of this before, but that would suggest that there is no 'archive' of Internet material, in the sense that we have paper archives.

Archives are considered something of a public good (using the word in its economic sense) - this justifies taxpayer support and explains those Public Archives you see around the place. I wonder if they have extended their operations to on-line material? If not, the written/photo/audio/visual material will periodically disappear. I think that already quite a bit of personal material that I thought was important in the 1980s and 1990s for example (emails, letters, photos, my work) will have been tipped into oblivion.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'voice to text software'

And I am guessing that this is not used a lot in any case because of dialect and accent challenges, particularly with older people.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Oh - I've got to do a refresher. I have never noticed the handwriting option in Baidu. Well spotted.

'Some people, notably old and young users, might not be familiar with the existing input methods mainly based on Pinyin'

I am not sure why they say 'young users' - the earliest books kids see in China have pinyin. It is hard to imagine that many kids these days write characters before they learn the pinyin. I would think that it is easier for little kids to hit key strokes than manage hand-writing of characters with a mouse or touchpad.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

'I presume you mean Siri, right?'

No, not Siri. I just have an iPod Touch so I don't have Siri. I'm talking about the reading function that seems to work in any app. Just highlight any text and there is the read option. They never had spoken Chinese before, and now you can even choose between dialects.

Posted on: Introducing One's Spouse

'Why this change post-1949?'

Something to do with the CCP rhetoric on sexual equality? I was quite surprised to hear this myself and haven't double checked it; a group of 30 something people told me this. I would have felt better if it had come with the 'modernization' movement, which started much earlier in China. Sounds like something that might have come along in the 1920s.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

' am equally skeptical of dismissing them just on the basis of not having heard them.'

This has raised a lot of interesting points, for me anyway. I started by 'dismissing' (your word) the word by saying you don't hear it, and then by suggesting that it is not the best way to communicate about this thing we call a bakery. At one level I stand by that. But there's nothing wrong in introducing new words into a language. So if one new business starts calling itself a 面包房 or a 蛋糕店, good for it. I haven't seen much evidence of this (haven't heard the word much, haven't seen it much on shop hoardings, etc.), but as you rightly point out, my lack of street sightings is of little consequence. This is quite interesting both from the point of view of two cultures that do not quite align, and in terms of a developing language.

The consumption comparisons - would like to see the counting rules. do they count my sweet corn bings? Do they count moon cakes? We have pikelets in Australia - rather like a number of bings. There is also a local product that is quite close to a meat pie (sold in a bakery in Australia.) I doubt that this product is included in 'consumption of bakery products' when comparing countries, specially if the data was compiled outside China. There is a wide range of food in China that probably could be termed a bakery product that is sold in a range of different kind of outlets. So far the Chinese have not adopted the 'bakery' holus bolus, even when they call their shop a bakery. But they eat a lot of things that we would sell in a bakery.

Posted on: Introducing One's Spouse

I can clarify that it is only post-1949 that women have kept their own family names after marriage. Prior to that they would take their husband's name. (According to Sichuan sources.)

She would be Xu Taitai - this language no doubt dates from pre-1949 times. I think that this is consistent with Vera's answer.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Ok Baba

Real data. (We should all go and have a rest after this.)

I checked two places nearest to where I live:-

1. Name: 巧思. Closest to what we call a 'bakery' - it sells, bread, cakes and biscuits. It has a logo, a stylised 巧思　

then 巧思包子 , and in one corner:二十年传统制面工艺

It doesn't sell 包子! Sells sweet drinks on the side, no coffee.

2. Name: 米旗

The 米旗 is stylised (I had to ask what the characters are) and they are beside an even more stylised romanized Maki (which on the business card is Maky).

This shop sells bread and cake as well, but as far as I understand it only decorates cakes on site (like the chain QingYuan which I am more familiar with.) There may be drinks for sale (forget) but no coffee.

Business name: 成都米旗食品有限责任公司

Slogan 享受美味享受生活 (enjoy delicious, enjoy life)

No reference to either 面包 OR 蛋糕 outside, or inside. But on the wall, inside, it has the English word 'Bakery'.

Two others, Mori, and QingYuan are like the second one, but they also sell drinks. Both sell coffee.

Trust this is not taken as a commercial endorsement of either shop - I am giving these details only in the interest of learning the language.

Posted on: Difficult Cake Choices

Tom and Jerry, Ren n Stimpy, you make me work hard Baba. I should learn not to open my big mouth. :)

But (here I go again, can't help myself) I think you'd get a bigger number if you searched 蛋糕店... This is based on a short walk this afternoon, I saw a shop calling itself 蛋糕店. Didn't see any 面包房.

Maybe going over old territory here, but I imagine (stress imagine) cakes, and bread, being made in a big factory somewhere here, and then being distributed to various types of outlets, none of them much like a bakery. Bakeries in Australia still produce stuff on-site, well not sandwich bread, but lots of other products. So even if there were 100,000 面包房 here, they are still not bakeries. I'd punt on more 蛋糕店 than 面包房. And I don't even eat cake! Or bread.

I'd also bet on more than 100,000 outlets that DO produce their own bread and cake and other kinds of sweets, producing on-site, but not calling themselves either 面包房 OR 蛋糕店. But that's enough imagination. I'm going to walk over the road and check wht the nearest 'bread' shop calls itself.