Sunflowers and eggcorns

If you’re not up on your eggcorn lit, take a browse through the stacks at Language Log — the eggcorn section is immense. The gist of eggcornism is that a word gets respelled based on an incorrect but plausible analysis of its origins. To quote the founding post:

It’s not a folk etymology, because this is the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.

It’s not a malapropism, because “egg corn” and “acorn” are really homonyms (at least in casual pronunciation), while pairs like “allegory” for “alligator,” “oracular” for “vernacular” and “fortuitous” for “fortunate” are merely similar in sound (and may also share some aspects of spelling and morphemic content).

It’s not a mondegreen because the mis-construal is not part of a song or poem or similar performance.

In any case, Mandarin is chock full of possible eggcorns, primarily because nearly every possible spoken syllable has more than one (often many) characters that could be used to represent it.

Here’s one my daughter came up with tonight. Instead of writing

向日葵
xiàngrìkuí
“sunflower” or, sort of character-by-character: “facing-sun-plant”

she wrote:

日葵
xiàngrìkuí
resembling-sun-plant”

I would have had no idea which was right, except that she came asking me about which “xiàng” was correct. We looked it up and got 向, and she said she had always thought that the sunflower “looked like” the sun instead of “faced” the sun.

It seemed so plausible that I tried Google Images to see if others had done the same thing. Putting “像日葵” in quotes gives only 331 results. At least one of those is in fact precisely that particular misspelling of sunflower, but since it’s a user’s name on a message board, I’m not sure if it’s intended ironically. In any case it’s pretty clear this spelling is close to “the usage of one person rather than an entire speech community.”

Anyone got others? Ideally they’d be attested to in print, but in any case it would be cool to have a Chinese eggcorn database, or at least contribute to one if it’s already out there.

20 responses to “Sunflowers and eggcorns”

  1. 辣肚子 for 拉肚子. Almost every foreigner I know has made that mistake in the early days of learning the word.

  2. Syz says:

    辣肚子 is a good foreigner one, but I don’t think it would exist as an eggcorn for native speakers, since (as of course you know) it requires switching the tone from lādùzi, the proper pronunciation, to làdùzi, which is what you’d get with 辣.

  3. Karan Misra says:

    There a whole bunch, actually.

    For starters, there’s the 分/份 “misspelling”. Dictionaries will tell you that you’re supposed to use a particular one in some places. For example, 安分 is pronounced ānfèn, but uses 分.

    Another one is the correct usage of 做/作 since they are homophones in Mandarin (a misspelling between these stands out in Cantonese because these two are pronounced differently.)

    Another one that I can foresee but haven’t actually seen a lot is using the wrong fǎnyìng (反映 or 反应) depending on the context. If you think about these two, the meaning is very clear as to which one should be used, but if you’re being sloppy or lazy, it’s easy to choose the wrong one (the pronunciations are, again, different in Cantonese by tone.)

    Lastly, the most common one is choosing the wrong ‘de’. 的, 得 or 地? Well, as it turns out the younger generation in China has pretty much given up on 地 which has been merged with 的. I was once chatting with a Chinese friend only and used something like “开开心心地” and got told that no one uses 地 anymore in that sort of construct. Makes things easier for everyone, since now we only have to distinguish 的 and 得 in writing.

  4. Sorry to go back to profanity, but I’m pretty sure 操 or 逼 could qualify. I know a number of people who think those are the actual characters.

  5. Syz says:

    Karan & Kellen: But most of these errors aren’t eggcorns! Remember, it’s not just a misspelling, of which there are gazillions. The misspelling has to indicate that you understood the word to have some rather different origin than it actually has. Hence with eggcorn, it got re-analyzed as being an egg of corn, or something like that — in other words, it kind of makes sense. That’s why I can believe 辣肚子 for 拉肚子, because it makes some amount of sense to think about the stomach being spicy turning into having a case of the runs. It means that the person who writes 辣肚子 heard the spoken word, lādùzi, and thought of some untraditional association.

    Such was the case for 像日葵: my daughter really thought it was called that because it was a flower that resembled the sun.

    But for 做/作, 逼/屄, 的/地 etc. all I see is common spelling mistakes, not some misunderstanding of the origin of the word that leads to a spelling mistake. Does that makes sense, or am I misunderstanding both of you?

  6. Nope. You’re right. 拉肚子 is all I got.

  7. Karan says:

    How about this one? Many people (actually most people) misspell 印地语 as 印度语 because they are thinking about it the “wrong” way, as in “language of India” rather than “a transliteration of Hindi”. Does this count?

  8. KP says:

    I just thought of one. 西红柿 as 西红石. Maybe more of a laowai thing but I’ve spoken to native speakers who make the mistake.

  9. Syz says:

    Karan, that’s perfect! A lovely example, too. It seems pretty fair to argue yìndìyǔ will sound a lot like yìndùyǔ in rapid speech (just like eggcorn approaches acorn). And it’s a perfect misunderstanding of the derivation of the word.

  10. 慈逢流 says:

    “the younger generation in China has pretty much given up on 地 which has been merged with 的”—that’s good news. i never bought it that 地 would lend any kind of clarity to the writing and have always used 的 for it. good riddance.

    as for 做/作, it’s news for me those are read differently in cantonese, so at last there’s some justification for keeping two characters here. within the context of mandarin, however, i find distinguishing 做 and 作 an utter pedantry. i mean there are characters like 着 with a whole bunch of differing readings and meanings all put into one character and very difficult to sort out, and on the other hand i am supposed to distinguish 做 and 作 because one tends to have a slightly more concrete, the other a slightly more abstract meaning? i suggest to (1) abolish the usage of 地 as an adverbial marker; (2) abolish 做 in favor of 作 (or at least declare them completely exchangeable, as they in fact are); (3) allocate suitable characters to differentiate the various readings and meanings of 着 (which is supposed to have superseded 著): zhao1, zhao2, zhuo2, zhe.

    also very confusing and worthy of consideration is the usage of 象像相.

  11. Karan Misra says:

    @慈逢流 I’ve actually never felt taxed by the 做/作 distinction. It was one of those things that I looked up in my dictionary when I was just a few months into learning Chinese and I thought “how am I ever going to know which one to use?”. In the end, it turned out that you pretty much use 做 everywhere and use 作 only in fixed phrases like 成语 and words like 作为, 作用 and 工作. I don’t personally like losing the distinction between 的, 得 and 地 because again it’s grammatically important (or so I feel) and again in other languages like Cantonese, these will be pronounced differently (even in colloquial it’s 嘅 ‘ge’ for 的, while the other two are ‘dāk’ and ‘deih/déi’ respectively). As for 着, I agree that it’s a complete clusterfuck and when they were introducing simplified characters, they should have separated that character out even more into more characters, though most of the confusion is whether to use zhuó or zháo in a certain context (thankfully, native speakers stumble on this as well). Lastly, with regards to 象 and 像, I agree they should be merged (into the latter) with the former character meaning only elephant. As for 相, I really wish they would use this exclusively when meaning “picture/visage”, but unfortunately there are words like 肖像, which should really be 肖相 in my opinion.

  12. Julen says:

    Hi Syz,

    That is a very nice example with the Sunflower. I am sure there would be thousands more, because Chinese characters allow for loads of wordplay and creativity. And I said “would”, because unfortunately, the computer era has largely annihilated all the eggcorns from the Chinese language. This is because, unlike Western languages, the auto-spelling function plays a major role in the most systems to input Chinese text into computers.

    Today, it would be impossible for anyone to misspell 向日葵 as 像日葵 unless:

    1- She is “less than” 7 years old and doesn’t use computers.
    2- She is “more than” 70 years old and doesn’t use computers.
    3- They are doing it on purpose and then necessarily it is not an eggcorn.

    I am sure there are still some eggcorns alive and circulating in handwritten form, but it would take a lot of trouble to find them, let alone study them statistically… I wonder, how did linguists do these things when there were no computers around?

    [fixed the list for you. -KP]

  13. Karan says:

    Found another one when reading a blog today. The author wrote 践行 instead of 饯行. You can see that the former also kind of makes sense in the sense that a farewell involves going/walking away, while the true derivation stems from the farewell being some sort of farewell meal.

  14. 慈逢流 says:

    owah my chinese is so bad, i’d even sorta understand when they tell me “there’s gonna be a jianxing tomorrow night coz fred’s gonna leave”, but i’d of course write 見行 for that. and my IME shows me 鹼性, 踐行, 漸行, 健行, 建興, 見性 and a bunch more for ‘jianxing’.

  15. shan says:

    I don’t know if these exist anymore, but when I was little, there were raincoats called 母子雨衣. Back in those days, parents often attach a small wooden board to the top tube of a bike and seat a child there to transport them (we’re talking mid-80s China :). The 母子 raincoat was an adult sized poncho with an extra hood sticking out of it in the stomach area for the head of a small child. (I don’t know if that makes any sense, but here’s a picture I found, with the kid on a much more modern motorbike http://bit.ly/bTpYZb)

    Anyway, when I was little, I always thought the raincoats were 拇指雨衣 because I thought the extra head poking out was the “thumb” of the raincoat. In actuality, of course, it’s 母子雨衣 because it’s a poncho for mother & child.

    Also, if you haven’t guessed already, I grew up in southern China where the pronunciations of 子 and 指 are not differentiated :)

  16. Syz says:

    @Julen: good pt about input methods. Arguably it’s “worse” (for eggcorns) in Chinese with pinyin input than it is for English with spellcheck, cuz with pinyin input you have to go out of your way to type the wrong thing. The default is always a well-established spelling of an existing word (although of course people often pick the wrong word). With English spell-check, on the other hand, you can type whatever you want and just ignore the red underlines if you choose.

    @Karan: 践 I associate more with 践踏 as in “trample” (e.g. on the grass) rather than “walking away”, but maybe that’s just me… This is one of those places where, per Julen’s point about pinyin IMEs, you’d almost have to ask the author if it wasn’t just a typo. On the other hand, maybe this points to an interesting case where the IME makes it MORE likely to create an eggcorn precisely because it presents multiple character options for the pinyin of a single word. The writer, faced with a choice of, say, 践行 or 饯行, has to make an on-the-fly choice about what the proper derivation is.

    @shan: 拇指雨衣 is a classic, especially with the zh/z conflation that makes it possible! BTW: there are plenty of the dual ponchos still around here in Beijing. I like how the pic you linked to uses a blue sky in front of the seashore for background

  17. Karan Misra says:

    @shan Good job. 拇指雨衣 is pretty awesome. :-)

  18. sam says:

    what about the whole 杯具 thing?

  19. Karan says:

    @sam 杯具, 洗具, etc. are completely intentional misspellings for comic effect, so I don’t think they count. I think the idea here (the way I understood it) was unintentional misspellings that invoke a different (and usually) false etymology of a word.

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