Spoken Abbreviations in China

For any of you who stopped by Mingtiandi today looking for an update on China industrial real estate, let me start by apologising for disappointing you.  Although we took a trip to Jiaxing today to visit three industrial parks and meet with the investment promotion bureau of the city government, the most interesting ideas that came up today actually are about language, not about real estate.

Besides helping me to learn about China’s many industrial zones, working at RightSite has also given me many opportunities to brush up on my Mandarin and learn new vocabulary. I guess that I must be getting good at this stuff because I have started to notice what is to me a pattern in using abbreviated place names in spoken Chinese. These abbreviations are not only used to refer to single geographic locations, like a province or a city, but also for more informal areas such as groups of cities or sub-regions in a province.

The example that came up today occurred when at lunch with the leaders of Jiaxing’s investment promotion bureau we began discussing the differing styles of economic development practiced in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. (Both of these province border Shanghai and make up part of the Yangtze River Delta, however, their governments take different approaches to fostering economic growth).

In comparing the northern region of Zhejiang near Shanghai (where Jiaxing is located) with the southern area of Jiangsu province which adjoins Shanghai to the north, our hosts referred to northern Zhejiang province (Zhejiang beibu 浙江北部) as “Zhebei (浙部),” and spoke of southern Jiangsu (Jiangsu nanbu 江苏南部) as “Sunan (苏部).”  Terms neither my local coworker nor myself had ever heard before, but seemed to be part of their normal conversation.

I was ready to cast this aside as some local quirk, except that we had encountered a similar case last week.

In meeting another investment promotion official in Shanghai, we were introduced to another similar spoken abbreviation for place names.  When comparing their city to its competitors in Jiangsu province, an investment  official from Jiading referred to the nearby cities of Wuxi, Suzhou and Changzhou as “XiSuChang” — taking the “Xi” from Wuxi, the “Su” from Suzhou, and the “Chang” from Changzhou. This kind of naming convention can be seen other places in referring to Chinese geographic locations, such the Hujingping highway (which connects Shanghai – also referred to by the character Hu — with Nanjing — thus the “Jing” character). You can also see an example in the name of the Sutong bridge in Jiangsu which connects Suzhou with Nantong.

Of course if you trace this thread back a little further, the name for Jiangsu province itself comes from the name of two cities in the region, Nanjing (customarily abbreviated as “Jiang”) and Suzhou — which contributes the “Su” in Jiangsu. Still further back, this same linguistic approach can be seen at work in the names of provinces like Hubei, Henan and other place names in Chinese.

In one of my many previous careers I studied linguistics for a couple of years, and learned to speak Vietnamese and Thai. However, I haven’t encountered another language that takes this particular type of “dice them up and splice them back together” approach to place names.  If any of you have other examples of how this convention is used in Chinese, or instances of it being used in other languages, I would be interested to hear about them.

Now I have to get back to helping China’s emerging cities link with the world on RightSite.

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