Lv Xing

(Go to View - Encoding - Unicode (UTF-8) to read this entry properly.)

This is especially for Chris and Rene, to answer the two's incessant, "What is lv xing?" on Chris' tagboard.


Dear you two and everyone else,


"Hanyu pinyin" (or "Chinese language phoneticization") is a system of romanizing the Chinese language.


The one-line introduction above is for ang mohs (literally "red hair", or caucasians) like Tim, for especially you two don't need me to tell you that. We started learning hanyu pinyin in Primary 3, didn't we? Along with the chinese characters 汉字 we learned to read and write.


(I suspect that with all the TV you watch, you two are better in your Chinese language than me.)


As most of us hanyu pinyin literates know, there are 6 vowels to the romanised Chinese:


a o e
i u ü


Note the last vowel that is a u with 2 dots on top. Since we already have a normal u, let's call that last one "the other u".


Now, the other u, or TOU, is a very sad u. Because while the other 5 vowels are all represented on the QWERTY keyboard, TOU is nowhere to be found. It is not romanised with one of the 26 English alphabets, sob sob. Since hanyu pinyin is very widely used as a language input method in computers, and there are millions of computer users who use the qwerty to input language into the computer - quick maths: 1.2 billion population x 15% middle class in China, and plus a small number of hanyu pinyin users from bopomofo usage places like Taiwan - TOU is certainly missing out on a massive lot of action.


TOU missing out on whatever is definitely its own sob story that we don't care about. But TOU being nowhere to be found on qwerty also becomes the problem of 180 million computer users who want to use hanyu pinyin to input chinese words with the TOU vowel.


What do the uninitiated users of Chinese language input software do?


They type the alphabet "u", for both u and ü. Which confuses the computer into throwing out words with the "u" vowel, not words with TOU vowel. Try typing "nu ren" for "woman", and it is unlikely you'll get the 2 chinese characters for "woman". Same for "lu xing", for "travelling".


The initiated, i.e. yours truly, and some of you who are reading this too, chanced upon the replacement for TOU that all chinese input software developers agreed upon, but never did make it a point to communicate properly to users.


(Or, I suspect it is only the Singaporeans who don't know this, because many of us only use Chinese Star when we needed to type Chinese song lyrics)


The replacement for TOU is... *tadah*... a "v"!


The roman alphabet "v" substitutes TOU, in software like IME, Chinese Star and NJ Star. Try it. The next time you need to type chinese and you come across phrases like "woman" or "travelling", type "nv ren" and "lv xing". These phrases jump out quickly, and you save your hair from frustrated pulls.


So, I was following Xiaxue's blog, and everytime she called herself a "mei nu", I wanted to laugh because instead of "pretty girl", it reads off as "pretty slave" to me. Her blog's so "in" you've got to read it. But I sort of stopped following already, because I can't stand her crudeness.


But I digress.


From you two girls' question of what is "lv xing", I realised too, that while I was busy banging on the key board complaining about my horrible manager half a year ago, it is very likely that no one knew what the nickname was all about. The nickname was Envren, remember? Say this in hanyu pinyin, "e - nv - ren." Got it? It means evil woman!


(Yar, now I realise the word envren looks glamorous, alright. Like one of those expensive brands - think LVMH and Volkswagen - which you can never pronounce right.)


Hee. If you haven't already know, then congrats! You learnt something new, and best of all, it's free of charge.