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Three days ago, I asked the students in one of my classes to tell me all the languages they knew. One of the female students listed Northeastern Mandarin among her languages. When I asked her to say a sample sentence in that language, she said something like "Ni de blaji hen haokan" (Your blaji is pretty). Her sentence surprised me for two reasons. First, I didn't know the meaning of blaji; second, I was stunned that she used what sounded like a bl- consonant cluster at the beginning of the word with which I was unfamiliar, since Mandarin — at least proper, standard Mandarin — does not have consonant clusters.



At that point, I asked whether anyone else in the class knew the word blaji. Out of approximately 50 takers and auditors in the lecture hall (probably about half know Mandarin), only one other female student was familiar with the word blaji (N.B.: two syllables), but she pronounced it very clearly as bùlāji 布拉吉 (three syllables). The same word is also transcribed as bùlājí 不拉及.

After inquiring, I learned from the two students that the word blaji / bùlāji means "dress" and was borrowed from Russian платье. Here's what a blaji / bùlāji looks like.

Because I was so startled by the consonant cluster at the beginning of the word as pronounced by the first student and was intrigued by the disparity between the pronunciation of the same word by the two students, I quizzed them both very carefully about how they learned the word. It turns out that the first student, an undergrad who grew up mostly in America, but with Northeast China roots, is barely literate in Chinese characters, though she is fluent in Mandarin, and had learned the word blaji strictly orally from her grandmother. The second student is from a village close to the Russian border, had stayed in China her whole life until coming to graduate school in the United States, and is highly literate in Chinese characters, having attended Peking University as an undergraduate Chinese language and linguistics major, then coming to continue the same field of study as a graduate student in America.

It is fascinating how the student who is highly literate in Chinese characters unmistakably says bùlāji for Russian платье, whereas the student who is barely literate in Chinese characters pronounces the same word as blaji.

I have found the same phenomenon among Dungan speakers in Central Asia. The Dungans are Muslims who fled Northwest China after failed rebellions during the latter part of the 19th century and ended up mostly in what are now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Dungans are illiterate in Chinese characters, but literate in Cyrillic. This has had a profound impact on the shape of words borrowed into their language from Russian, Persian, Arabic, and other languages. Here I shall give only a single example, but it demonstrates exactly the same phenomenon as does the borrowing of Russian платье into non-sinographic Northeast oral Mandarin.

For Russian трактор ("tractor"), the Dungans say трактор, despite the fact that they speak two varieties of Northwest Mandarin. In Modern Standard Mandarin, the word for "tractor" is tuōlājī 拖拉機 ("drag-pull-machine," but with the first two syllables cleverly chosen to represent the first syllable of the original.

[With thanks to Anne Huang for the website showing photographs of blaji / bùlāji.]

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