And speaking of foreign languages, now that just about all of San Francisco is in this photo database, I thought I’d see what sort of interesting Chinese text would be legible in SF’s Chinatown. My reading skills are rather poor (I probably only recognize around 200 or so characters), and when I encounter text on a real street, I don’t normally have a dictionary on me, or the time and patience to look up any of the characters I don’t know, but that obviously wouldn’t be a problem here.
One thing I remember from visiting SF’s Chinatown is that all the street names are printed in both English and Chinese. I had been curious to know what the Chinese names said exactly, since they’re often foreign names transcribed in Chinese, and at the time the names were composed, Mandarin wouldn’t likely have been the dominant dialect of Chinatown — it’d probably have been Cantonese (or maybe Toisanese? — something else for me to look up). Since the characters would have different pronunciations based on dialect, I wanted to know how they’d be mangled in Mandarin if they were indeed phonetic approximations of the English words.

So, I picked a Chinatown street at random — Grant Avenue. The accompanied Chinese text reads “都板街”, or character-by-character: “all”, “board”, “street”. I assumed the “all board” part was there for phonetic reasons, but that would make it “Dōubǎn Street” using Mandarin, or “Dou¹baan² Street” with Cantonese — neither of which comes close to sounding like “Grant”. Some more digging showed that “都板” is commonly a phonetic approximation for “DuPont”, which seemed plausible, but then why was it there? It turns out that Grant Ave. was originally known as Dupont St., and for whatever reason, the English name was changed, but the old Chinese one stuck. (Thanks to willcchang for the link!)
Now I’m curious. — Did I get lucky in picking the one weird inconsistent one, or are there other pieces of history in these names? There’s probably a handy directory of Chinese names for Chinatown streets somewhere on the web, but I haven’t searched very hard for it yet. When looking for more info for this post, I also took a quick look into SF Japantown, and found that they follow the same street sign convention — only with Japanese instead. The first one I found wasn’t quite as interesting, though. The Japanese sign for “Post Street” reads “ポスト街”, where “ポスト” is “Posuto”, an approximation of the word “post”, and “街” is that character for street again. Well, if anything, I found a new way to drain my free time.

It’s getting late here and I have work tomorrow, so I should probably quit for now, even though things are only half done.  (If you click around, you’ll see default links to people I don’t know, and generic templates that need to be filled in — that will hopefully be fixed soon.)

Thanks for stopping by!