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.
man i am proud of you…your mandarin will be soooo good when you re back.
dude that is a mess. ditto @ cihan
Mess of FUN!
Man I got a Taiwanese flag all up on my junk. W00t.
nice that look really cool man…like the flag! Whatever but you rock.
CLEARLY, it means, “to go to middle earth.”
if you see a rohan horse, jack it off and send me the semen.
@Emily: Dude, #1, COMMENT AWARD. #2, the first thing I came up with, no joke, was “the history of middle earth” for the definition. My friend just raised an eyebrow while cocking his head. Evidently this is not a likely translation.
I had my reasons, though.
I remain insanely jealous of your world travels.
Are you aware that you now live in a Street Fighter II character?
Wow that flag is awesome. I was actually anticipating its appearance on your blog.
First day of mandarin class today…what what.
@Mike: Blast; I was hoping for a disambiguation page on Wikipedia to enlighten me, but found no such thing. I did come up with this chap, though. The more you know!
Oh, and searching for all the different transliterations of Chungli on Flickr is fun, but doesn’t yield anything about SF.
I used a bit of poetic license (Chun-Li is the SFII character, not Chungli).
I always was more of a Mortal Kombat guy myself….