Mistakes in Chinese

Chinese is a tough language for foreigners. The characters are a big memorization drill and the tones in pronunciation are two hurtles.

But even for native speakers the characters can be challenge. Being a language of almost 3500 years there have been changes. Below is a list of all the characters have been used for the word "shou4", the word for longevity.

As you can see there has been a few variations over the years, so which one is correct?

Below is a picture of the big stella in front of my language school on the National Cheng Kung University. The characters on the stone were taken from a dedication written by Lee Teng-Hui, the first democratically elected president of Taiwan. One character is miswritten.

The character in question is the last one of the 4 big gold characters. As we learn in class the correct character is:


樓

this character is pronounced "lóu" and is a general world for building. In this more detailed picture, you can see one of the horizontal strokes on the right of the character is not as long as the version above.

Lee Teng-Hui should be forgiven for this mistake. He grew up during the Japanese time and spoke Hakka(a local dialect) at home and went to school taught in Japanese. During WWII he went to college in Japan and learned English
as his third language. He did graduate school at Iowa State. After 1949 and the retrocession of Taiwan back to the China/ROC, he had to learn Chinese as at least his 4th language. I think it is wonderful that his history with language is enshrined in stone now.

Below is a recent article from the Taipei Times newspaper:

beginning-of-article

Presidential Office caught using wrong character
By Fan Cheng-hsiang  /  Staff Reporter

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) took part in the nation’s first National Women’s Conference (全國婦女國是會議) yesterday to demonstrate how much they care about policies relating to women’s affairs, but there was one small glitch: The Presidential Office was caught using a wrong character on its Web site when referring to the event.

In the section of the Presidential Office Web site listing the president’s public appearances, it was written that Ma would take part in the 全國婦女國事會議, mistaking the character 事 for 是.

Although the two characters have the same pronunciation, they have very different meanings.

While the term 國事 refers to “state affairs,” or everyday issues relating to a country, the term 國是 refers to a government’s policy directions.

Despite the Presidential Office’s error, both the Executive Yuan and the Ministry of the Interior, as well as the official event Web site, have been using the correct characters whenever the event is mentioned.

An unnamed official said that no one in government had “dared” inform the Presidential Office that it had made a mistake in its selection of characters.

The ministry made a special presentation on women’s rights and gender equality during the Cabinet meeting on Thursday and announced that a National Women’s Conference was to be held yesterday and today at the National Central Library in Taipei.

The meeting, which involves the participation of non--governmental groups, academics and representatives from government agencies dealing with women’s issues, aims to outline future policy directions to improve gender equality in the country.

end-of-article

I use a similar software program to do my Chinese homework and I have made similar mistakes over and over and over and over and ....

Correction:

I talked with the Director of the Language Institute about the misdrawn character on the stone monument. As usual, I got the situation wrong. From what I understood of his explanation, in artistic/memorial settings characters can be drawn to be more "balanced" and therefore more beautiful. Extending the horizontal stroke as in the dictionary would "unbalance" the character, so as it was is better than what I thought it should have been. Wrong again.