As you get so amped up for Children’s Day that you can’t sleep, I recommend you while away the wee hours at 语音字典 / Voicedic and then let me know what you think. I just came across it via PKUCN (the language discussion board that we mention on Sinoglot occasionally) and am intrigued.
Caveat: I’m not entirely sure how you’d use it. It offers per-Chinese-character audio in seven “dialects”:
There’s a phrase in Chinese, “wǒ méiyǒu gōngfu,” which means “I have no time”.
Now, I’d been told that this was 我没有功夫, that is, the same characters that mean kung-fu. Not only that, but I’d seen it in writing, more than once. First in some dictionary somewhere and then again in some little snippet of prose on idioms in Mandarin. The latter gave the explanation that 功夫 means not only kung-fu, but anything that takes a lot of time to perfect or, alternatively, skill or effort. Wiktionary gives 要花很大的功夫才行 and 那个演员念台词的功夫不错 as examples.
A year or so ago someone left a watch in one of my classrooms. It has hanzi for the numbers, but they are a little strange:
See if you can figure out what is going on here, and then click on “Continue Reading” to see if you are right.
In Mandarin, chéngyǔ 成语 are idioms, though perhaps more poetic than those you’ll usually find in English. Sometimes the meanings are clear based on the words, sometimes not. For example one, dating back to a philosophical disagreement between Mencius and his contemporary Yang Zhu, goes 一毛不拔 yā máo bù bá, literally “one hair not pull,” or “won’t pull out a single hair” and it used to mean “stingy.” Some of them are also almost word-for-word identical to common English phrases.
There’s this joke that’s been making the rounds. It goes something like this:
两个裸男坐在石头上，打一成语。
liǎng ge luǒ nán zuò zài shítou shàng, dǎ yī chéngyǔTwo naked guys are sitting on top of a large stone, making a chéngyǔ.
The punchline is one of those that match English pretty well: 一石二鸟, two birds with one stone. Variations include 一石双鸟, 一箭双雕, 一举两得 and certainly more.
In case you missed it, the joke is that niao 鸟 also means penis. Actually, Victor Mair posted about just that recently on Language Log. In his post he quotes a post from a Taiwanese forum, which I’ll reproduce here:
The Middle Chinese word “tieu” (鳥) meant “bird”. Then over the centuries it acquired the taboo meaning of “penis” (as a noun) or “fuck” (as a verb). Because of this taboo, the initial consonant of the word for “bird” was changed to “n” in Cantonese and Mandarin (but not in the Wu or Min dialects, or in Hakka). The original term remains a cuss word: diu in Cantonese, and diao (屌) in Mandarin.
And as the commenter mentions, despite this change in pronunciation, 鸟(鳥) is still very much used to mean ‘penis’.
It got me wondering. We have that phrase in English. It’s as common as in Chinese. In fact the only thing that doesn’t let the joke work in English is that we don’t use “bird” to mean “penis” (though if my childhood conversations with the older kid next door are any indication, we certainly have many other words that get used as substitutes). Just to try it out, I told the joke in English to a couple native English speakers who would otherwise know of the Chinese pun. Unfortunately a worse joke teller you’ll never find, so I had little success.
Still, I wonder. Could this (admittedly lame) joke work in English? What’s more, are there other chéngyǔ based jokes that might have a partner in English, and if so, would those work? Humour doesn’t translate well between languages and especially between cultures. Could this be just the pixie dust that struggling expats around the world need?
I’ll leave it to you, great Sinoglot-reading masses.
The standard translation of Mandarin’s two first-person plural pronouns goes something like this:
But here’s another use I’ve come across a lot recently: zánmen used possessively (“our”) when the thing possessed most certainly doesn’t belong to the speaker.
Imagine this scene: an interviewer from a market research firm is talking with a manager about his company’s operations. He says:
咱们公司主要从事什么业务呢？
Zánmen gōngsī zhǔyào cóngshì shénme yèwu ne?
What’s your [literally: “our”] company’s main line of work? Continue…
Victor Mair received this message from a former student of his, and sent it in to us:
I just remembered one other question I’d been meaning to ask you. It’s about the character 谁. When I started taking Chinese years ago, my teachers and textbooks all told me to pronounce it “shei.” This spring, I was speaking to a visiting Chinese professor from Dalian who was teaching elementary Chinese, and she and her textbook teach the pronunciation of the same character as “shui.” When I asked her about this, she said that “shui” was more standard, and “shei” was a local variation used mostly around Beijing. Is that right? Among native speakers, who uses “shei,” and who uses “shui”?
This is a very interesting question. Continue…
Believe me, I try to be grateful for the corrections. I know the phase won’t survive much longer.
My 8-yr-old daughter is in such a happy-to-correct-Dad’s-Mandarin phase that she hand-signals proper tones in the middle of my business phone conversations; she interrupts my dinner table stories; she whispers fixes to me in the back of cabs as I talk with the driver. Continue…
I was given a copy of a second-hand spoken Chinese textbook last Christmas. But this isn’t your ordinary textbook; it was published in Shanghai in 1940, and is very much ‘of its time’.
The book, Introduction to Spoken Chinese (華言拾級) was written by J. J. Brandt, who also wrote Literary Chinese, Wenli Particles and Modern Newspaper Chinese. Anyway, it’s really good fun because some of the language used hasn’t really passed the test of time, as the example sentences seem aimed at wealthy expats with plenty of household staff. I provide some below (all taken from the example phrases sections after each lesson):
1. Tomorrow we are moving; hire some coolies.
明天我們搬家。僱幾個苦力來
On May 28th at 16:30, two weeks from today, I will be holding a small informal talk at Xindanwei in Shanghai. This is the first in the new Sinoglot Lecture series. More on that below.
If you’re in Shanghai on the 28th, please come out and take part in the discussion. We’ll be talking about the Shanghainese dialect, in terms of
· its role in the lives of the locals
· its future as a tool for interaction
· the value of preservation and
· the value of standardisation
It will be an informal discussion, mostly in English, and I hope to hear your thoughts as much as you’ll hear mine.
