Catty
I’m all in favor of using study of a non-native language to learn more about one’s native language. And it’s mildly interesting to learn, as I go through the “Pronouns, Pronominals and Pro-words” section of my new Chinese grammar book, that a catty is (OED)
A weight used in China and the Eastern Archipelago, equal to 16 taels, i.e. 11/ 3 lb. avoird., or 625 grammes.
But what possesses the writer(s) of a Chinese grammar to use catty as a translation for 斤 (jīn = 0.5kg, so 1.1 pounds)? It’s not as if 斤 is only found in ancient alchemist recipes. You buy pork belly by the jin for crying out loud!
As background for those of you outside the mainland, I think it’s fair to say that jin is the unit of choice for buying fruits, vegetables, rice and meat. It is a mainstream measure of weight much like “pound” is in the US.
Yet here’s the line out of Chinese, a Comprehensive Grammar, a book whose praises I was singing when I first cracked the spine a couple weeks ago.
At a fruit stall selling mandarin oranges:
你买几斤？ nǐ mǎi jǐ jīn
(lit. you buy how many catties) How many catties do you want?
I praised the book precisely because I thought its careful presentation of the nèi pronunciation of 那 was evidence that the authors were in tune with real everyday language.
Now I’m doubting.
Maybe it’s catty, but catties are testing my patience.
I hope they didn’t really write 基金 for 几斤 in the book 😛
This gives all new meaning to the Midwesternism “catty corner” (meaning “diagonal”).
Oops. Red face. Thanks, Aaron. I’ve fixed it in the post, but for posterity’s sake I’ll record here that I originally typed 你买基金? in the post.
According to Wikipedia it comes from the Malay word for the same unit of measurement. I wouldn’t fault the book for using the word because it is the standard English translation for that unit.
was the standard translation back in the days of international settlements and the Empire, surely? I’ve seen catty plenty of times before, but I’m pretty sure only in an historical context.
I’ve only ever heard catty when discussing shipments/weights of things from that area of the world – I wonder if it must be a result of reading British literature (or, really, any English literature written by non-Americans).
And just as an aside, it looks like catty-corner (I personally say kitty-corner, likely some sort of reinterpretation of “cat” in catty) is derived from something entirely different:
“1838, from now-obsolete cater “to set or move diagonally” (1570s), from M.Fr. catre “four,” from L. quattuor (see four). Cf. carrefour.” (Online Etymology Dictionary)
When I learned the character for the unit, I didn’t know there was an English translation. I later heard some Singaporeans use “catty” in English. I asked them what it meant and they said it was the same thing as 斤. So although the majority of English speakers are probably not familiar with it, “catty” does appear to be the usual term in English speaking contexts where this unit is commonly used (i.e. Singaporean English).
I am from Malaysia. When very young I learnt about “kati” before Malaysia changed to metric system.
This is sounding a little more complicated than I gave it credit for. So we’ve got evidence that catty is still in use in Singapore, and was in use in Malaysia at least recently. The OED’s definition shows that originally catty did not mean 500g, but a bit more. But @Zifre seems to indicate it means precisely 斤 (which is precisely 500g in China) now in Singapore. I assume (@kien?) that it was not 500g in Malaysia because it was a non-metric measurement.
As for @Claw’s comment that catty is “the standard English translation” for 斤, I’m still dubious that that’s as it should be. Like Chris Waugh, I think catty might have been a standard translation in the past, but it was actually for a different weight. Now to be fair, it seems like that unit of measurement, 斤, was metricized from something more than 500g down to 500g, just to make the math easy. So it’s true, we could just do the same thing with catty. But in this context isn’t one of the goals of translation to convey some sense of the original? I don’t think most English speakers (outside of Singapore, apparently) are going to get any sense of the modern, everyday banality of 你买几斤 when 斤 is translated as catty.
As long as they’re in touch with real, every day Chinese, I suppose it’s all good?
I’m with Zifre, I never realized there was an English translation for this word. This is one of the places where I use the Chinese word in English unless I’m talking to someone who’s totally unfamiliar with the word, in which case I’d use “half-kilo” or, more likely, being American, I’d go for dynamic translation and use “pound” as close enough.
I was surprised to read this post, as I’ve encountered catty in literature as the English translation for a unit of measurement indigenous to the Chinese-speaking world. On the other hand, I’ve never heard “jin” used in English. A cursory search of dictionary.com also does not have jin as a standard English word.
We don’t hear the word catty much in English nowadays (at least in reference to units of measure) precisely because we don’t talk about 斤 in English often (especially since metricization).
There’s a Wikipedia article on the catty that clarifies this issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catty
Alex–I didn’t mean to be misleading– ‘jin’ isn’t English. I use it while speaking English to other Chinese speakers just because I didn’t know an English word for it–and even now that I’ve learned that there is one, I still probably won’t use ‘catty’ because I suspect no one would know what I’m talking about.
Syz said:
The exact weight that the word “pound” referred to has fluctuated and been redefined many times historically; even in recent history avoirdupois pounds and troy pounds can be seen. I don’t see why “catty” should be any different.
The historical 斤 was roughly 605g and this definition (with minor differences among its standards) is still in modern use outside mainland China and is still referred to as catty (or kati) in English. The PRC decided to redefine 斤 to 500g on the mainland, but why should this necessarily change what the unit be called in English? While this standard differs from the traditional by almost 20%, note that the difference between avoirdupois and troy pounds was also roughly the same amount.
What matters the context in which the term is used; for instance, if you’re talking about pounds when measuring the weight of gold, you’d assume troy pounds are being used. Likewise, if you’re talking about 斤 or catty in the PRC, you’d assume that the 500g standard is being used. If you’re in Taiwan, you’d assume the 600g standard instead.
The fact that most English speakers haven’t heard of the term I feel is mostly irrelevant. When learning another language you often have to also learn the corresponding culture to fully appreciate it. While metrication has changed the need to learn about exotic units of measurements in modern times, I don’t think you can really give any English translation for 斤 that captures the banality of the term without learning about the traditional Chinese units as well and the fact that they already had English names assigned to them.
@Claw: If “catty” or “kati” is still used in Southeast Asia, fine. I think it has already been established that it’s a Malay word. But I find it hard to see how the word has ever been a part of Mainland Chinese culture, and I fail to see how somebody learning Putonghua needs to learn that “斤” means “catty”, or how learning the word “catty” is going to improve their understanding of Chinese culture. Here in China the word “catty” is a relic of the old international settlements society. If the word is worth learning, it’s worth learning either because one is planning to move to Southeast Asia, or out of pure linguistic curiosity (of which there is no shortage around these parts), or for that historical context of Westerners settling in China in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
“Catty” happened to be the word that ended up being used probably because the unit was initially encountered with Malaysian merchants, but because the Malaysians used the same unit as the Chinese, “catty” ended up being used when dealing with the Chinese as well. Once the word was established in English, why should a different word for the same unit necessarily be used when dealing with a different culture?
You are wrong when you say that it has never been part of Mainland Chinese culture; the word is not a big part of it today due to metrication but it is still around (see this article, for instance: http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20111202000014&cid=1102).
@Claw: That’s an English language article from a Taiwan website. In none of the Chinese text it includes can I see either “catty” or “斤”. The photo, clearly taken in the Mainland, specifies the unit as “500g”, making it a Mainland “斤”, but I can not see the word “catty” in it. It would seem clear that “catty” is a borrowing from the Malay “kati” that was historically used by Westerners in or dealing with China in the English language back in the days of empire and international settlements. I fail to see how that would make it part of Mainland Chinese culture. Has “斤” ever been pronounced “catty” by Chinese people speaking Chinese in Mainland China? How does insisting on translating “斤” as “catty” help your average foreigner learning Chinese to understand Chinese culture when these days “catty” is only used in Southeast Asia and in an English language context on Taiwan (maybe Hong Kong and Macao too?)? If I were writing the textbook, I would simply Pinyinise “斤” and add a note that it’s a traditional Chinese unit of weight still in common everyday use, equivalent to 500g in the Mainland and the older standard of 603g elsewhere in the Sinosphere. I would only translate it as “catty” for a Southeast Asian edition of the textbook, as Southeast Asians are the only people (so far as I can tell) still likely to be familiar with the term. After all, if Americans and Kiwis of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations can expect me to cope with their silly pounds, then I see no reason why the Chinese can’t expect us to deal with jīn. At least the Chinese measures, by their current Mainland standards, like metric/SI and most unlike the Imperial/American measures, are reasonably logical.
I’ve heard several expats in Hong Kong use ‘catty’ in English conversation when talking about buying produce in the markets–I noticed since it struck me as odd. All had some exposure to Cantonese textbooks, which presumably introduce the term. I don’t know how widespread that habit is, but at least some HK expats have adapted it.
I would imagine that conversations would get confusing if they used the Cantonese pronunciation of 斤 instead of English “catty.” “I bought 5 guns of celery today….”
It occurred to me earlier this morning (because I’ve got end of semester paperwork to get done and the deadline approaching – priorities) that one major difference between the Mainland and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan is that HK, Macao and Taiwan hosted expat communities continuously through the 20th century, but the Mainland expat communities (with a small exception being the Communists, fellow travellers, and those who married Mainlanders and chose to remain) came to rather an abrupt end in 1949 and were replaced with completely new expat communities starting with Reform and Opening up at the end of the 1970s. This continuity in HK, Macao and Taiwan would explain the persistence of “catty” there – there’s always been older expats to teach new arrivals the word. But the interruption on the Mainland meant that when expat communities started to sprout again, there were only a tiny handful of older expats who had been living in China at the time “catty” was commonly used in the expat communities. It would therefore make sense for Cantonese textbooks in HK to use the word “catty”, because expats in HK learning Cantonese are going to be exposed on a very regular basis to both the English word “catty” and whatever the Cantonese pronunciation of 斤 may be.
@ze: thanks for adding the HK comment. Interesting. If I had to guess from the romanization of the name, I’d hazard that Yip Po-Ching, the first author of the grammar, has HK ties. So maybe that’s the ultimate source of catty here.
@Chris: really good points (and surely more important than grading or doing one’s job). Sima linked back to this comment in the new post, pointing out that there are probably other catty words hanging on in these communities as well.
@Claw: Actually 斤 was redefined to 500g by the Nanjing government in 1929, long before the establishment of the PRC.
@ChrisWaugh:
Reading all the way through the comments, I was getting increasingly frustrated that nobody was providing the explanation that you eventually reached at 11.21!
It’s such a shame that Western expat communities in the mainland tend to be cut off from the vast amount of accumulated wisdom and culture in Hong Kong and beyond. Chinese =/= China.
It seems that “catty” is the source of the somewhat more familiar word caddy as in “tea caddy”.
Cool. For a second I was imagining, then, that “golf caddy” might have the same origins, some deeply classist phrase about treating the guy who carries your clubs as a small storage box. Alas, it appears to be unrelated (from French cadet)
While we’re reviving a slightly older post…
The conversation about metricising 斤 sent me back to a very old series of posts from 2008. If you guys are interested in the variation of the value assigned to 斤, there is are similar things going on with 尺 and 寸 for measuring length. Here are those—three—posts covering 斗口, 尺, 分, 米 and 寸.
Also for what it’s worth, 斤 isn’t just for markets. A trip to the vet means weighing your dog. Every time we went through this, the scale would read something like 4.5kg and then immediately the conversation would begin with “9斤”. It always baffled me that kg was used on all the scales but then when discussing the number a bit of mental math was required to make it 斤.
“Every time we went through this, the scale would read something like 4.5kg and then immediately the conversation would begin with “9斤”. It always baffled me that kg was used on all the scales but then when discussing the number a bit of mental math was required to make it 斤.”
Ditto for people’s weight. People stand on the scale, read their weight in kgs, then immediately double it to get the modern standard 斤.