The Chinese word for "graboid"
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Last night the movie Tremors 4: The Legend Begins was on TV. This is the prequel to the other three Tremors movies, and I had never seen it, so in the interest of learning the fictional-historical background, I watched it. For those lacking a classical education, the Tremors movies are about monstrous worm-like creatures known as "graboids" that emerge from underground to terrorize the population of the tiny desert town of Perfection, Nevada. A Chinese family figures prominently in Tremors 4, and from time to time one of them speaks Chinese. By dint of careful observation I am therefore able to report that the Chinese name for graboids is 土龍 tu³ long² "earth dragon".
P.S. I think that a Chinese dub of any of the Tremors series would be hysterically funny. Whether the film industry shares my sense of humor and will take on this project remains to be seen.
Greg said,
August 25, 2008 @ 2:40 pm
I enjoyed Tremors, but by the third one was thoroughly unimpressed. Is it worth seeing the fourth one beyond this interesting linguistic aspect?
I'm not sure whether a Chinese dub, or a Chinese dubbing with subtitles re-translated from the Chinese would be better. I think, maybe the latter.
Bill Poser said,
August 25, 2008 @ 3:03 pm
Well, for late night TV while doing some other stuff Tremors 4 was fine. It is set in 1889, so they don't have the fancy vehicles, armament, and other technology used in the other three, which you may or may not like.
Sili said,
August 25, 2008 @ 3:25 pm
So now and a Chinese earth dragon is too long?
What I want to know is where the coda is. Is is gra-boid or grab-oid?
Bill Poser said,
August 25, 2008 @ 3:35 pm
I think I hear gra-boid, but you can investigate yourself by renting the movie. I assume its on DVD.
HP said,
August 25, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
I think that a Chinese dub of any of the Tremors series would be hysterically funny.
I would think that such a thing could be found on The Pirate Bay or one of the other torrent tracker sites, where oddly dubbed and poorly labeled films are the norm (says the man who just watched Der Todesrächer von Soho in Italian with no subs). Of course, I'm at work so I can't go digging around on websites of questionable legality at the moment, but it can be fun to cinch up your firewall, strap on your anti-malware apps, and disappear into the Internet's Blade Runner-esque black market in search of treasure.
If you're looking for linguistic diversity in your over-the-top trashy exploitation cinema, I can recommend Ebola Syndrome, which featured dialogue in — at least — Cantonese, Mandarin (maybe? — Taiwan), English (four kinds: Chinglish, British, American, South African, and Afrikaner), and Zulu.
John Cowan said,
August 25, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
What Chinese language were they speaking?
Bryn LaFollette said,
August 25, 2008 @ 6:02 pm
The first film featured the late great Victor Wong who some may know from his iconic role as Egg Shen in Big Trouble in Little China (another classic)! Was the Chinese family in Tremors 4 supposed to be related related in some way with his character from the original?
Joe said,
August 26, 2008 @ 2:40 am
I always thought it was grab-oid, but it's been a long time since I watched any of them.
And I must say, earth dragon is perhaps as sensible a translation as anyone could give a word like that. Though it's too bad I don't know if they have a word equivalent to wyrm. Something like that could also work.
Bill Poser said,
August 26, 2008 @ 2:44 am
@John,
They're speaking Mandarin, which isn't all that likely for 1889 Nevada. Most Chinese immigrants in those days were speakers of some variety of Cantonese. My guess is that they got the actors to make up the small amount of Chinese dialogue and got whatever they spoke.
@Bryn,
I think that the Chinese family in the current setting is supposed to be descended from the Chinese family in Tremors 4. They end up running the general store. In Tremors 3: Back to Perfection Walter Chang has retired or died and his niece Jodi (played by Susan Chuang) has taken over. She is a cute young woman who has been to business school and is trying to run the store in a modern, rational way, with business plans and graphs and suchlike. One of my favorite scenes in Tremors 3 is one in which one of the guys has been swallowed by a graboid and another guy cuts it open and the first guy emerges all covered with slime and gore. Jodi stands over them and with her best effort at a stern look says: "You guys really need to be supervised."
KYL said,
August 26, 2008 @ 11:01 am
Bill, while many of the Chinese immigrants of the 1880s spoke Cantonese, a large number (maybe half?) were from Fuzhou, and so spoke some form of Min (either 闽南语 or 闽东语, not sure which, which I believe are also called "Fukienese" or Amoy in English). A small number spoke Hakka (客家话). A Chinese family in Nevada during that time could have spoken any of these varieties. (I would not even rule out some variety of Mandarin, as quite a few traders/teachers from Northern China were known to have made their way into America back then.)
Of course, it was unlikely that there would have been a Chinese _family_ in Nevada during that time at all. By the late 1880s, anti-Chinese legislation and policies meant that few Chinese women could immigrate (so as to "encourage" the Chinese men to leave). The number of Chinese families in America during that time were exceedingly few.
Josh Millard said,
August 26, 2008 @ 11:49 am
Did they ever name the things in the original film, or was "graboid" coinsed later in the franchise?
I think I hear gra-boid, but you can investigate yourself by renting the movie. I assume its on DVD.
I think it's safe to assume it was never on anything but DVD.
Jon Weinberg said,
August 26, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
More on KYL's point: From the outset, Chinese immigration to the U.S. was almost entirely male, though not because of explicit immigration restrictions. Census figures indicate that in 1880 there were only about a thousand people in this country, of Chinese ancestry, who had been born in the U.S. to Chinese parents. (By contrast, there were about 100,000 people of Chinese ancestry here overall.) If we figure that a "Chinese family" included one or more children born in this country, then there were substantially fewer than a thousand Chinese families in the entire country at that time — and the figure in 1889 was no larger, because an 1882 statute essentially shut down Chinese immigration.
Jon Weinberg said,
August 26, 2008 @ 1:50 pm
Lookin' things up: The 1880 census lists 5400 Chinese in Nevada in 1880 (nearly 10% of the entire Nevada population, actually). If we apply the 99-to-1 ratio from my previous post, then we'd figure that the total number of people of Chinese ancestry, living in Nevada in 1880, who had been born in this country, was in the broad neighborhood of fifty. So — substantially fewer than fifty Chinese families in Nevada. But that probably overstates the numbers, because the assumption that the 99-1 ratio applies evenly is probably wrong.
Bryn LaFollette said,
August 26, 2008 @ 5:42 pm
Josh Millard: Did they ever name the things in the original film, or was "graboid" coinsed later in the franchise?
It was actually Walter Chang (Victor Wong) who suggests the name in the original film (not long before he gets eaten by one of the monsters in a rather grisly fashion not unreminiscent of Quint's doom in Jaws). He and another character are bouncing around ideas for naming the new creatures, and that's one of the suggestions. It wasn't until the sequals, I think, that the term was picked up as the proper appelation, although I think there are tentative attempts to use that name in the original film. All in all, I think the tentative manner in which they try out using the newly coined term in the original film to be a pretty interesting socio-linguist illustration of the adoption of new terms for things (literally) when there isn't a known consensus on the newly coined term. The sequals could then be seen as having established that consensus of usage! :)
Bill Poser said,
August 27, 2008 @ 3:05 am
It is true that various dialects other than Cantonese might have been found in Nevada in 1889, but Mandarin was much less common than the Yue and Min dialects and Hakka. And the presence of a woman and child is indeed not very likely. On the other hand, graboids probably weren't very common either.:)
KYL said,
August 27, 2008 @ 10:11 am
Just a quick note to point out to folks who may not be familiar with the term that Yue = Cantonese (I've rarely seen it referred to as "Yue" outside of mainland China).