Title

China's New Dictionary: Agricultural Cooperative Is Out, Hair Gel Is In

When saying goodbye, people in China often say "Bye Bye." But until this July there was no Chinese way of writing that. There is now: Beijing's guardians of the language have deemed "Bai Bai" the correct written form, and it has been included in the new edition of China's best-known dictionary. Actually the linguists took the matter a step further. There are four tones in spoken Mandarin, and the character "Bai" is spoken in the fourth, which has a very hard ring to it. To soften that, the linguists came up with a tailor-made, second tone "Bai.

Read More...
Keywords: 
Language