Sing! King! Wa! Ta!
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Sing! King! Wa! Ta! Sing! King! Wa! Ta!
The words were being hastily shouted down a phone, with loud sounds of wind and waves in the background, and the emergency call center operator could make no sense of them. Attempts at conversing with the caller failed; he seemed not to understand English. Yet the tone was unmistakably urgent: someone was in danger of his life. But who? And where?
About 23 people died in the event that led to that desperate, unintelligible phone call. It happed in 2004, ten years ago today. My vagueness about the number of victims is because no one who knew all the facts wanted to talk about the circumstances (the skull of one victim was only found in 2010).
The tragic communication failure is the dark, tragic, flip side of the Chinglish sign stories that leave us helpless with laughter sometimes when Victor Mair tells them. The signs are hilarious as well as communicatively hopeless, but they aren't a common cause of death.
I don't think there's anything evil about us because we giggle at a fire extinguisher labeled "hand grenade" or a supermarket sign saying "Fuck Vegetables"; but they are a symptom of the disastrous level of ignorance of English that is the norm for speakers of the Chinese languages. (Of course, the typical knowledge of Chinese languages among English speakers is worse, flat zero; I'm not overlooking the fact that the linguistic ignorance is bidirectional.)
What's mainly responsible for the crazy Chinglish signage is that the high degree of polysemy in both English and the Chinese languages causes the results of untutored dictionary use on written material to come out as random nonsense, worse than useless for communicative purposes.
But in addition the Chinese languages in spoken form have a radically different kind of phonology from English (hardly any syllable-final consonants; lexical tone rather than unpredictable word stress and sentence intonation), so intelligibility difficulties due to pronunciation are huge even for those who have learned some English vocabulary and syntax.
The people who died on the evening of February 5 ten years ago were illegal immigrants in England, trafficked in from Fujian and forced by gangmasters to do low-paid or unpaid menial work. In this case, their job was to go out on the vast, flat expanse of Warton Sands, in Morecambe Bay, north-west England, to gather cockles for derisory pay (under 15c per pound). It was 4 p.m. when they set out; darkness was falling, and the gangmaster had made a mistake about the time the tide would turn.
Despite warnings from locals that they did not understand, the Chinese laborers went way out on the sands to gather the tiny molluscs. The tide came racing in, and the waves were high. Some could swim, but others had never seen the sea before. A few swam in the wrong direction in the darkness. Some made it back to the pickup truck they had arrived in, but five of those died as the sea overwhelmed the truck and it got stuck. About 23 were drowned, but 15 survived to tell their story in Preston crown court. One testified that he managed to swim from the submerged pickup truck to reach the van that 29-year-old gangmaster Lin Liang Ren had arrived in, but was told to get out of the van: Lin was intent on saving himself. He was found guilty of 21 counts of manslaughter.
The man who made the phone call to the emergency services was trying to shout "Sinking water! Sinking water!", and on one occasion "Many sinking water!". Perhaps he meant, "Many people are sinking in the water." But he was not understood, and he could give no location details. Eventually his phone went dead.