The Peripatetic Historian
Language and the Hunt for Tofu Turkeys, Taipei. December 2024, Vol. 4, no. 7.
Welcome to the December issue of the Peripatetic Historian.
This Month:
Peripatetic Field Report: Approaching the End
Book News
Life Beneath the Bluesky
Let’s get started…
Peripatetic Field Report: Approaching the End (of the Year)
Accounting for the Time not Spent Hunting for a Tofu Turkey
Loyal readers will recall that, having settled for a season in Taiwan, I have foolishly enrolled in an intensive Mandarin class. We meet for fifteen hours of ritual humiliation every week, and I spend at least ten more hours on external study.
It has been a rough ride. Mandarin is, without a doubt, the most difficult language I have ever tried to learn. Not only are the words completely unrelated to English, but the grammar is often strange.
An example: Today our class spent two hours practicing a sentence pattern that allows the speaker to express the length of time we have not been doing something. In English, one might say, “I have not been looking for a tofu turkey in my local market for four months.”
Naturally that sentence must be paired with a suitable question: “How long have you not been looking for a tofu turkey in your local market?”
Confused? Try saying it in Mandarin.
While we may tend to believe that everyone around the world shares our way of thinking, there is nothing like learning a new language to expose the differences. I know that I am going to puzzle over this particular sentence structure for some time. Not only the pattern, but the need to teach it to students as if it was something we would want to drop into casual conversation.
The closest English parallel that comes to mind might be:
Q: Did you find the screwdriver you lost?
A: I haven’t been looking for the screwdriver.
That’s good—even useful perhaps, especially if one was careless with hand tools. But remember, this structure must also express the length of time we haven’t been doing something:
A: I haven’t been looking for the screwdriver for the past year.
My inability to wrap my head around the need for a special sentence pattern designed to convey the length of time I haven’t been doing something suggests a big difference in the way Mandarin and English speakers conceptualize communication.
I add this to a long, baffling, and expanding list of linguistic differences.
Happy Thanksgiving
Had I the inclination to pursue the quest, it probably would have been easier to find a tofu turkey in Taiwan than a real one.
Chickens and ducks are the poultry of choice in this part of the world. I have yet to spot a turkey. On the other hand, the Taiwanese do amazing things with tofu, so a search might have enjoyed a happy conclusion.
I don’t intend to write any more about tofu or the American Thanksgiving holiday. According to the Substack statistics, 39% of the subscribers to this monthly screed hail from outside of the United States (26% are from the United Kingdom, and the remaining 13% are divided across 17 other countries). That’s a significant percentage of readers who probably won’t care about this topic.
However, if I were to express my intention to say no more about turkeys in Chinese, the fact that I had been writing about it for a duration of time, had now stopped, and intended to move on to a different topic, does require an entirely different Mandarin sentence pattern.
In the Land of Mountain Mists
When swamped by linguistic difficulties, it is a welcome relief to get out of the apartment and take a walk. Fortunately, the weather has turned fine in Taiwan. After three months of sun, sweat, and typhoons, we are enjoying light rain and 70 degree days.
Very pleasant.
So pleasant in fact, that Mary and I took a day hike on the Caoling Historical Trail, tucked up in the northeastern corner of Taiwan. This trail ascends beneath a Taiwanese rainforest for 8.5 km, tops out on a mountain pass, and then drops precipitously to a temple that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. For more than 200 years, this was the main overland trade route between Taipei and the coastal villages of Yilan county.
Most of it is on stone paths and steep stone stairs.
An hour’s hike brought us to a massive boulder whose flank bears four large Chinese characters: Siong Jhen Man Yan — “bravely quell the mountain mists.”
A general named Liu Ming-deng ordered these words carved in the boulder in 1867 after he and his troops suffered days of inclement conditions while trying to march over the pass. His words were a tribute to the men and women who lived in this isolated corner of Taiwan, companions of typhoons, monsoon rains, and cloying heat
Book News
A New Home on Social Media: Life Beneath the Bluesky
I have never been a fan of social media. I would not maintain a social presence were it not for the fact that my agent and publishers insist that I need to be present on one of the platforms.
For several years, my rat poison of choice was Twitter. Then Elon took over and the platform began a slow morph into “X.” Rumors mounted that if you didn’t stump up a monthly subscription fee to become a “verified X-er,” the mysterious algorithm would clamp the brakes on your account, only showing your posts to a handful of Himalayan Sherpas and Argentinian Llama farmers.
That was certainly my experience. Refusing to pay for the privilege of posting content so that X/Twit would have something to display, my audience engagement numbers plummeted. The decline was especially evident whenever I posted an item with an external link—a handy hyperlink to the latest issue of the Peripatetic Historian, for example wouldn’t travel any further than the end of the street. Suppressed. Dead posts walking.
Conspiracy theories aside, the growing uncongeniality of the platform convinced me that it was time to look for a fresh green field beneath a blue sky. And that brought me to Bluesky, an alternative founded by Jack Dorsey, one of the original creators of Twitter. I jumped across in October and found a user-centric platform, free of advertisements and the almighty algorithm. With a few clicks, one can build a network that you control, a community of people you would spend electronic time with.
Bluesky was a ghost town when I arrived, but after the November elections, millions of users abandoned Twitter and made their way to Bluesky. As of this writing it is popping like a tin of corn on a hotplate. If you are looking for a Twitter alternative, give it a try.
If you have already arrived and want to look me up, here’s a handy button that will transport you to my neighborhood:
Happy Holidays
This is the final 2024 issue of The Peripatetic Historian. When next we meet the new year will be upon us. Let us lift our glasses to 2025 and keep hiking forward through the mountain mists.
Be safe, be sensible, and I will see you next time.
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Thoughts? Comments? I have a button for that as well:
I joined Bluesky—thanks for the tip and link. Almost 900 followers is good, Richard.