Body Language
Here’s a simple action, in three steps, which I guess most people will recognise:
I imagine most English speakers will be thinking of the same expression to describe this action and, if that expression were given as a command, they would all perform the same action without hesitation.
So, I ask a simple question. How would you say this in Chinese?
Please, put the dictionary back on the shelf. No need for an online search. Just tell me how you would say this in whichever Chinese dialect or language you happen to be most familiar with and, if it’s not Standard Mandarin, please indicate which language or dialect it is. Interrogation of native speakers encouraged.
Free Sinoglot T-shirt* for the best answer.
* Subject to HQ releasing the necessary funds, arranging printing and delivery, etc.
双手交叉, so say the flatmates.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that, although I think I know what English expression you’re referring to, I cannot even come up with an expression for this in my native Dutch, let alone a Chinese dialect or language. I will be interrogating some hapless native speakers here in Taiwan…
Well, I call it 叉手, and Google agrees with me: http://www.google.com.hk/search?q=叉手
Kellen,
I’ve certainly heard that response, amongst others. Are they sure that if they were asked to 双手交叉, they would all perform the same action?
Daan,
Very interesting! If you come up with the Dutch expression, or fail to, I’d be very interested to know.
How would you say this in English?
第二个是 Cross hands 吗？ 其他两个你们怎么说？
我很好奇
This is a quite interesting question.
I would say in Chinese: 双手交叉于胸前，some people would say: 环手于胸 or just simply: 环手.
How would you describe this in English?
Another interesting thing is that: this action can tell if a person is more emotional than rational, or more rational than emotional. For example, from the picture, I may tell that Randy (Is it Randy in the picture?) is more emotional than rational. Haha.
我来串门,
The three pictures should be viewed as one action: folding one’s arms
Adrian,
Randy is most upset that you mistook him for the type of person who would wear a stripy sweater. Obviously, he is an emotional type, but the pictures are not of him. Is your reading based on left over right, as opposed to right over left? Please do tell!
山西话(西南部地区)
NO.3 包帮子(抱膀子)
as a total aside, I love the English phrase “arms akimbo”.
Thanks for that, 我来串门！
Glad you could stop by.
In Shanxi, you would pronounce it as bāobāngzi? Would you ever write the expression 包帮子？
That’s a very welcome aside, DLSZHO!
The occasional abuse of ‘akimbo’ as in ‘legs akimbo’ has always tickled me.
write as 抱膀子 pronounce as bāobāngzi
😉
In Shanxi
喝 = huò
水 = fū
墙 = qǘe
上 = shuo
干嘛？ = zōu suò?
去/走 = qiá
憨(hān) = very much or deeply 你憨好/憨好吃/憨笨
Sima: I’m not sure if they’d fold their arms if asked to 双手交叉, and I’ll never know since by asking them the name it’s now tainted. However I went one-by-one out of earshot of others and asked and each of 3 gave me the same answer to “what do you call this?” as I folded my arms as in the picture of
Randythe sweater-wearer.My three-person survey of long-time Beijingers ages ~40, ~70 and ~70: none had any idea what to call when I demonstrated crossing my arms (btw: I’m not sure this is as uniform in English as you’re leading us to believe, but then again my native intuition has gone to pot, so don’t listen to me. I am sure, though, that no native speaker would have trouble coming up with a phrase to describe the action, whether it’s folding / crossing / whatnot)
Additionally, I demonstrated crossing my legs, and all three immediately came up with 翘着二郎腿 (usually pronounced qiàozhe èr láng tuǐr in Beijing). The only explanation for why Mandarin would name one but not the other is that crossing one’s legs is considered sloppy and ill-mannered, so of course they have to have a name for it.
I remember in 红楼梦(Stone Story), there is such a sentence, 黛玉赶到门前，被宝玉叉手在门框上拦住. Then it may be called 叉手. Sometimes I hear people say 抱着手.
我来串门,
Next time I’m in southwest Shanxi and I see a man sitting on a wall drinking water, I’ll walk over ask him what he’s doing. At least, when he tells me how dumb I am for asking, I’ll be suitably insulted and fold my arms.
Kellen,
You’ve obviously done this before! I’ve had the same response from some people, but usually followed by doubts. Others have said they would never say that.
syz,
I’m glad some people have had trouble coming up with a phrase!
Interesting that crossing one’s legs brings such an clear response. I’m reasonably sure that “arms akimbo/hands on hips” would also be fairly quickly described: 双手叉腰 or 两手叉腰.
Maybe “to fold one’s arms” isn’t as universal as I imagine. I’d love to know if there are any native English speakers who either don’t know this expression, or would use another expression. Likewise, is there anyone out there, whose native language is neither English nor Chinese, and who doesn’t know how they would say this in their mother tongue?
JW,
I’ve just had a quick look at a couple of translations of 红楼梦 (Chapter 21) and got the following:
“Lin Tai-yü went in pursuit of her as far as the entrance, when she was impeded from making further progress by Pao-yü, who stretched his arms out against the posts of the door.”
Project Gutenberg, Translated by H. BENCRAFT JOLY
and:
“…but she was prevented from going any further by Pao-yü who spread his hands out on the frame of the door…” G W Bonsall
Neither of which proves very much – I can well imagine someone blocking a doorway by standing with their arms folded. I’m sure these are not the only translations out there. Maybe someone who has another English version can find this expression in the first two or three paragraphs of Chapter 21. I’d also be interested if this scene were in a TV production, but I’ve not been able to locate it in the 1987 version.
All that aside, would 叉手, on its own, not be more like a polite or respectful greeting with one hand cupped in the palm of the other? And in the above lines, doesn’t 叉手在门框上 suggest something very much like the above translations?
Thanks everyone for the great response. Please do let me know if you have any other ideas.
In the meantime, I’ve asked some other native speakers of Dutch, but no one was able to tell me what they would call this. Do we have any commenters here with native languages other than Dutch, English or a Sinitic language, who are having trouble coming up with an expression to describe this? (Or anyone whose native language is Dutch and knows how we would describe this?)
I was hanging out with quite a few native speakers of Mandarin yesterday, but completely forgot to ask, so stay tuned for news on the expression used in Taiwanese Mandarin – or the lack of it!
As an aside, I’ve always found it interesting to ask people what they call this thing often found in theme parks, where you can have your photo taken by sticking your head through a hole. I’ve never met a single person who could give me a good word to describe that thing in any language, and I’ve asked quite a few native speakers of Dutch, English, Spanish and Mandarin. Even some theme park employees didn’t have a clue.
Note 1: Rollercoaster Tycoon is of no help either, since it does not include this thing – I’ve checked 😉
Note 2: Imagine how long it took me to find the picture I linked to above using Google without knowing what to call such a thing!
说吧！
I could not really use Chinese words or sentences to describe that exact action…
Fire away, I am waiting?!
袖手不理
This is more figurative than anything else. Literally, xiushou would mean to keep your hands in your sleeves (the long sleeves of antiquity, I suppose), thus not reacting to a given situation. In practice, I hear it used to describe the attitude that comes with crossing the arms (which is what I’ve always heard this called in U.S. English, “to cross one’s arms” rather than to fold.
翘手
Alternatively, I hear this a lot (from Hong Kong natives, but in Mandarin) more to describe the physical action of crossing arms.
Im a little surprised that people don’t know what to call this, since the people i asked were fairly certain of what to call it in a very sort time.
Robin,
I like 袖手不理 and 袖手旁观. There’s certainly a clear sense of inaction.
Do you think most Americans would say “to cross one’s arms”, rather than “to fold one’s arms”? Are there any US English speakers out there who would use “fold” or is it just another quaint British expression that had not come to my attention as such?
A quick survey of arm-folding/crossing over the weekend, giving English explanations of what they say in their mother tongues:
Several French speakers: We say, “to cross the arms”
One Spanish speaker: “to cross the arms”
Several Chinese speakers: “oh, yes, it’s…oh, what do you call it?”
One Russian speaker: “I don’t think we have an expression for it.”
One Japanese speaker: “to cross the arms”
One Greek speaker: “to cross the arms”
Chinese speakers have offered me the following, in various combinations and with varying degrees of certainty:
抱臂，交叉手臂，抱个膀儿，双手交叉胸前，环胸，抱夹，抱膀子，叉手
I was told this was called 雙手交叉 after the native speaker of Taiwanese Mandarin I asked today had thought about it for a few seconds. But she then said people were far more likely to use words like 袖手旁觀 to describe situations in which people fold their arms, rather than merely saying that they had folded their arms. She also commented that in traditional families, it would be considered highly unusual for women to fold (/cross) their arms.
After almost going crazy this weekend over not knowing what to call this in Dutch, I realised we would probably say “je armen over elkaar slaan”. Note that this does not directly translate into either “crossing” or “folding” your arms: “slaan” means “to hit”. As a native speaker without any teaching experience, I haven’t the slightest clue why we use that particular verb in this context 😉 Anyway, I’m pretty sure all native speakers of Dutch would fold their arms when told to do that.
Several people have suggested to me that 双手交叉胸前 would be the most accurate way to say this but, because it’s such a mouthful (it seems perfectly designed to tax my pronunciation) they would rarely say it. One woman claimed that this would be the ‘normal’ expression for folding the arms, in her hometown of Yantai, Shandong.
I guess the full expression in English would be “to fold/cross one’s arms across one’s chest”, but we generally drop the last part. That would then be a parallel to 双手交叉, which Kellen’s flatmates seemed so sure of and has come up for you too. The strange thing seems to be that whoever I ask, they usually suddenly doubt themselves or say that even though such an expression is ‘right’, they probably wouldn’t say it.
What everyone I’ve spoken to has done is to tell me what the posture ‘means’. Some suggest it’s defensive/protective, others that it’s arrogant/proud, or simply rude, others pensive or even relaxed. Those are all of the main meanings I would associate with the action too, I think. But the meaning would be very much dependent on the situation – the expression is quite neutral.
It seems that 袖手旁观 is very far from neutral – the meaning of the action is being made quite clear.
I wonder whether anyone can think of other expression like this in Chinese, where the action takes on such a clear meaning, or whether anyone feels that ‘folding the arms’ might reasonably be understood by English speakers as ‘inaction’ in the same way that, say, ‘scratching the head’ might be understood as ‘thinking hard, puzzlement’.
From my student, Gianni Wan:
Dear Professor Mair,
This is not cha shou 叉手. The correct cha shou is here:
http://www.laomu.cn/wenmi/2008/200812/wenmi_77202.html
I remember when I was little my grandpa used to cross his arms in the sleeves to keep warm, instead of using gloves. He called it caoshou with his native Henan accent. So the characters might be 操手 or 抄手 (accidentally or not, in Sichuan 抄手 means Wonton! Zhang Laoshi may know more). Wikipedia mentioned the second one:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/zh/%E6%89%8B%E5%A5%97#.E4.B8.AD.E5.9B.BD.E5.8E.86.E5.8F.B2
Discussion about garments must be included in my dissertation, for gloves are not indigenous of China.
Note also, the character 操 ‘to hold, to take’ was stigmatized, may be after Cao Cao or something. It’s not a phenomenon only in China. In some hispanoamerican countries, the everyday words coger ‘to take’, pisar ‘to step on’ means ‘to have sex’, and concha ‘seashell’ means ‘vulva’. They just not have a character to stigmatize.
Cheers,
Gianni
Ah, but Gianni’s wife, Jing, who is a real Beijinger, disagrees with him:
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Jing disagrees with me. She says it is cha shou. So maybe it’s an example of topolectal variance. The Beijing-based Mandarin was not spoken by the generation of my grandpa.
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Gianni is from Shaanxi.
Interesting. I wonder if the chashou given in the link above was the original meaning but then was applied to folding one’s arms.
edit: I just asked the flatmates to name the hands-in-sleeves bit. They said they’re not sure but believe it’s called the same as folding arms.
Source tells me that in Cantonese it is 交叉双臂
In Southern Taiwan fold your arms is 雙手抱胸 and 手插腰 (not 叉) is hands on hips. 😀