Every morning at 8 and every evening at 6:30, I religiously delete the “news update” text sent by the mobile phone company here in Beijing. Little did I know that in the process of resenting the intrusion, I was denying myself the daily joke that comes with the afternoon update. My third-grader daughter is not so dismissive. She snags the phone once in a while and scans before I delete, pointing out the jokes she thinks I’ll get (not many). The other day there was one with a bit of grammar in it:

出租车司机深夜搭载一少妇去郊外，路上少妇递了一个苹果给他，司机边吃边说：“真好吃。”只听见少妇慢悠悠地说：“是啊，我生前也很喜欢吃的。”

Late at night a taxi driver picks up a young woman  going to an outer district. On the way, the young woman gives him an apple. The driver, eating, says “Delicious!” only to hear the woman slowly reply, ” Yes, before birth (in my past life) I liked them.”

司机听了吓得头皮发麻！接着少妇又说：“可是，生了孩子之后胃口全变了！”

The taxi driver is so scared his scalp tingles! The young woman continues, “But after I’d given birth to my child my tastes changed completely!”

The joke’s twist depends on an ambiguity that also exists for some verbs in English, but not for this particular verb. Specifically, “birth” (生 = shēng) in this phrase is ambitransitive, which means it can be either transitive or intransitive. Therefore the key phrase…

我生前
wǒ (I) shēng (birth = verb) qián (before)

… can be understood either as transitive or intransitive. The transitive form would be much like English’s “give birth”, which would make the translation something like

TRANSITIVE FORM: Before I gave birth… (“to my child” is optional and is left out)

The intransitive form of “birth”, though, is the one the taxi driver gets:

INTRANSITIVE: Before I was born… (which is a way of saying “in my past life”)

Hence the chill up his spine as he chews on his apple of the undead. Happy Halloween!

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My gut instinct is that Mandarin has way more ambitransitive verbs than English, which already has a lot compared to some other languages. Anyone know of some intrepid researcher who’s looked into this?