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The name of the city I live in is Chungli, which means…
The name of the city I live in is transliterated a lot of different ways. I’ve seen it mostly as Chungli around here, yet Google Maps (and Earth) has it listed as Jhongli. According to how I was taught Pinyin, it should be Zhōnglì, but Taiwan does everything different than China, so no surprise there. Written in Mandarin, it looks like 中壢, but that’s with the traditional characters, which are only used in Taiwan. In the simplified characters that China uses, and which are the only ones I’ve studied before coming here, it looks like 中坜.
In terms of translating the name of the city, I’m not entirely sure what it means, but I have an idea. I’ve consulted with an American here who knows much, much more Mandarin than I—he’s studied it for about two years and is conversationally quite proficient—and he wasn’t able to nail it down at first. The first character, 中, usually means “middle” (the word for “China” in Mandarin is 中國, which literally means “middle country”). The second character, 壢, doesn’t have an entry in any dictionary I’ve tried, but if you remove the leftmost radical from it, which is 土 or tǔ, the character becomes 歷, which means “to pass through” or “to undergo.”
土 or tǔ means “earth” and is present in the words for “cultivate,” “soil,” “land,” and “territory.” So all together, 中壢 seems to mean something like “middle passage through the land.” And honestly, if you take a look at the geography around here, it makes sense that the city would be named that.
Makes sense, no?
Anyway, I’ll throw up some more pics soon. I just wanted to offer a more formal introduction to the city first.
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- Published:
- Sep 20 2008 / 21:52
- Category:
- musings
- Tags:
- cartography, language, taiwan, there be dragons, travel
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