Sheng
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Nicola at The Snark Ascending observes:
The other day at the library, I watched with horror as the kid next to me, doing his Chinese homework online, looked up the word “sheng,” yielding a list something like the following:
SHENG (n.) – river
SHENG (n.) – stoat
SHENG (v.) – to need
SHENG (v.) – to follow
SHENG (v.) – to develop glaucoma
SHENG (v.) – to give a mouse a cookie
SHENG (p.) – buttercup seen on a Tuesday at 5:08 (Celsius)
SHENG (b.) – sodium benzoate (to preserve freshness)
SHENG (x.) – forgotten actor Jeff Conaway
SHENG (n.b.c.) – E-Z-Bake Oven
SHENG (b.y.o.b.) – junk mail, especially certain ads for carpet cleaners, but NOT other certain ads for carpet cleaners, and you should know which ones are which, ass-face
SHENG (a.a.r.p.) – A little to the left
SHENG (i.h.o.p.) – Ooh, that’s good
And that’s just a small sampling. I haven’t even gotten into urinary-tract connotations, sporting-event cheers, dog breeds, etc.
Amusing — but this is one of the many cases where scholarship is at least as funny as fiction.
If you look up sheng in the MDBG Chinese-English Dictionary, you'll find (among others) the following glosses for entries with alternative tones:
frugal / save / to omit
*to be born / to give birth / to grow / raw, uncooked
*sound / voice / tone / noise
*promoted
*ascend / peaceful
*measure for dry grain equal to one-tenth dou
victory / success / to beat
flourishing / vigorous / magnificent
have as a remainder
rope
*free reed mouth organ, with wooden pipes stuck in a gourd
*domestic animal
*rising of water
*nephew
Oh, and of course 鼪 "*stoat / weasel".
Since it's not fair to ignore tone, though, you should limit the list to those that I've marked with an asterisk, which are all tone 1.
Of course, these meanings are mostly disambiguated by choice of character and/or combination with other morphemes. And it's not as if English lacked striking extended meanings or curious homophonies, like doe "female deer", dough "flour paste", "money", doh "exclamation of frustration", do "first note of the scale".
And there's the old joke that "Every Arabic word has a basic meaning, a second meaning which is the exact opposite of the first, a third meaning which refers to either a camel or horse, and a fourth meaning that is so obscene that you'll have to look it up for yourself."
But "A little to the left" and "Ooh, that's good" are hard to beat.
bulbul said,
June 3, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
And there's the old joke that "Every Arabic word…
Not so long ago at my alma matter:
– Hey, what does this root (points to a word in an Arabic manuscript) mean?
* sound of pages of Wehr turning *
– It's one of those that mean everything.
John Cowan said,
June 3, 2009 @ 8:47 pm
The part of speech abbreviations are cool too.
Jonathan Badger said,
June 3, 2009 @ 10:35 pm
In his wonderful essay "The Awful German Language", Mark Twain does something similar with the endless meanings of "Schlag" and "Zug".
Simon Cauchi said,
June 4, 2009 @ 12:15 am
@ John Cowan: perhaps you can explain the part of speech abbreviations that I don't understand. What is meant by
SHENG (p.) – buttercup seen on a Tuesday at 5:08 (Celsius)
SHENG (b.) – sodium benzoate (to preserve freshness)
SHENG (x.) – forgotten actor Jeff Conaway
SHENG (n.b.c.) – E-Z-Bake Oven
SHENG (b.y.o.b.) – junk mail, especially certain ads for carpet cleaners, but NOT other certain ads for carpet cleaners, and you should know which ones are which, ass-face
SHENG (a.a.r.p.) – A little to the left
SHENG (i.h.o.p.) – Ooh, that’s good
I can guess "b.y.o.b." (bring your own booze/beer?), but I'm stumped by the others.
ArthurDent said,
June 4, 2009 @ 1:02 am
Can't claim expertise in this area, but I can guess at a few of them:
b.y.o.b — you are correct. Bring your Own Booze.
a.a.r.p — May refer to the American Association of Retired Persons. They are the most likely to have bothersome itches.
i.h.o.p — International House of Pancakes. "Ooh that's good" would aply if you have a sweet tooth and you just had a stack of blueberry pancakes with bacon and saugages bathed in oodles of real maple syrup. . although how it relates to the previous "A little to the left" is difficult to reconcile. Of course, the sexual overtones would provide a more occam-razor-ready explanation, but my innate shyness keep me from exploring this possibility.
Alex said,
June 4, 2009 @ 5:16 am
I remember reading about a poem some Chinese bloke wrote (in Chinese), using only variants of the sound 'Shi', of which there were more than enough. Reminds me of that.
Zubon said,
June 4, 2009 @ 7:51 am
I believe Alex means Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.
JLR said,
June 4, 2009 @ 8:18 am
From the episode "Bart gets an elephant":
Homer drives into a deer statue.
Homer: Doh!
Lisa: A deer!
Marge: A female deer!
greg said,
June 4, 2009 @ 8:48 am
Oh man, that's just mean to Jeff Conaway. I still fondly remember his role in Babylon 5
[links] Link salad wakes up in San Francisco again | jlake.com said,
June 4, 2009 @ 8:55 am
[…] Sheng — Language Log on the richness of Chinese lexicography. Funny and interesting stuff. […]
language hat said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:17 am
Cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. – act of putting, sending, sowing, raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground, throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast iron buttons which have been made bright by contact with cliff faces, the stench of congealing badgers suet, the luminence of glue-lice, a noise made in a house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a leprachauns denture, a sheep biscuit, the act of inflating hare's offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of a sewage farm windmill, a corncrakes clapper, the scum on the eye of a senile ram, a dustmans dumpling, a beetles faggot, the act of loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a fiddlers occupational disease, a fairy godmothers father, a hawks vertigo, the art of predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard-mincer, a blue-bottles 'farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge mill, a fair day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoats stomach-pump, a broken-
(Really, after Flann O'Brien others should retire gracefully from the competition.)
language hat said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:18 am
Great heavens, I hadn't even noticed that "stoat" shows up in O'Brien's list as well! Stoat: the universal signifier?
Dan T. said,
June 4, 2009 @ 10:09 am
Though "Doh!" as an annoyed grunt is distinguished from the others by tone (even though, unlike Chinese, English is not normally a tonal language).
Nathan said,
June 4, 2009 @ 10:38 am
"Doh!" also ends with a glottal stop, innit?
Molly said,
June 4, 2009 @ 11:00 am
Ironically, A Word A Day, to which I also subscribe, is focusing this week on words with multiple meanings. Today's word:
I bet stoats do some growling too. Truly, the universal signifier.
Jim said,
June 4, 2009 @ 3:01 pm
"I remember reading about a poem some Chinese bloke wrote (in Chinese), using only variants of the sound 'Shi', of which there were more than enough. Reminds me of that."
There is one where every word is "xi", which can get romanized as "shi" – something about the western rhinocerous playing – I think Zhao Yuan Ren wrote it for fun back in the 30's.
"And there's the old joke that "Every Arabic word has a basic meaning, a second meaning which is the exact opposite of the first…"
I once saw someone complain about Englsih words the same way, using the example "bill", which was supposedly self-contradictory because a dollar bill was what you used to pay a bill – ignoring the plain meaning of the word as a piece of paper regardless of whatever contradictory things are written on diferent bills.
Troy S. said,
June 4, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
As a student of Persian, it's often very difficult to see how some Arabic roots take on such disparate meanings. For a concrete example, I can think off the top of my head: قطر in its various measures can mean the country Qatar, the radius of a circle, a drop of water , a row, a train, an ammunition belt, tar, or thick. Some of them seem related with a little imagination, but it's still dizzying for a non-native.
I also seem to remember the Chinese students I worked with complaining about something that sounded like "Sher" having too many meanings.
Richard said,
June 4, 2009 @ 3:54 pm
In Thailand, one of my fellow foreign teachers who had minimal interest in learning the Thai language, remarked that "mai" seems to mean everything! In a tonal language where vowel length is phonemic, it could mean 'wood', 'new', 'not', 'burn', 'is it?', a suffix for flora, 'mile', 'intend', along with other colloquial uses. Who knew?
language hat said,
June 4, 2009 @ 4:18 pm
I also seem to remember the Chinese students I worked with complaining about something that sounded like "Sher" having too many meanings.
Shi shi shi shi…
Frank said,
June 4, 2009 @ 6:40 pm
Reminds me of the French:
Si six cent scies scient six cent cigares, six cent six scies scieront six cent six cigares.
Nigel Greenwood said,
June 4, 2009 @ 7:04 pm
@Frank: Si six cent scies scient six cent cigares,
The pedant in me compels me to correct the spelling to Si six cents scies scient six cents cigares,. The other occurrences of cent are correct!
Nigel Greenwood said,
June 4, 2009 @ 7:07 pm
Seeing Dongle & Sheng as consecutive topics on LL, I assumed that the former referred to the Mandarin Chinese phrase dong3 le ("[now] I understand!"). It seems I was wrong …
Leolo said,
June 5, 2009 @ 1:34 am
Correction : 'cent' should be singular. Number in French are only plural when the are the unit. As in 3 cents (3 hundreds (think currency)).
Seadog Driftwood said,
June 5, 2009 @ 1:37 am
"#language hat said,
June 4, 2009 @ 9:18 am
Great heavens, I hadn't even noticed that "stoat" shows up in O'Brien's list as well! Stoat: the universal signifier?"
Of course, "stoat" is the universal signifier! Stoats are flexible and opportunistic enough to get into anything, even seeming irrelevant discussions…
I wonder which of the SHENG1 words are related, and how their meanings diverged…
Aviatrix said,
June 5, 2009 @ 1:48 am
But do you know how to tell the difference between a weasel and a stoat?
—
Answer: A weasel is weasily distinguished because a stoat is stotally different.
(My father loved that joke, and in his memory I tell it at every opportunity.)
Nigel Greenwood said,
June 5, 2009 @ 5:44 am
@Leolo: Correction : 'cent' should be singular. Number in French are only plural when the are the unit. As in 3 cents (3 hundreds (think currency)).
Was that suposed to be a correction of my pedantry? If so, it's incorrect: six cents scies has an s, but if the hundreds are followed by another numeral (six cent six scies) the s is dropped. It's just one of those lovely rules of French spelling.
Leo said,
June 5, 2009 @ 5:59 pm
Actually most people just three variations of sheng
sheng (tone 1): sound, give birth to, rise (all from the root "generate, arise")
sheng (tone 3): save (money), Province (all from the root "be alert, examine")
sheng (tone 4): leave (a derivation of 'save money', as you save, then you get something left), be victory (from generate > grow > prosper > be victory)
Everything else is historical relic rubbish (Chinese has a heritage of 3000 years).
Spelunker said,
June 5, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
Did you that there is actually a homonym that sounds exactly the same in both Chinese and English?
燕 (yan) = swallow
咽 (yan) = swallow
If you ever discuss eating small birds in China, you might possibly say a sentence that includes this term for someone who really wolfs it down; "The banquet guests watched him swallow the swallow"
In Chinese it's remarkably the same: "宴会客人看他把燕子咽下去."
Philip Spaelti said,
June 5, 2009 @ 9:41 pm
@Spelunker: Did you that there is actually a homonym that sounds exactly the same in both Chinese and English?
If we're on that topic: Japanese has "matsu" (a conifer) and "matsu" (wait). Compare English "pine"/"pine (for)".
Translatable puns.
Tung said,
June 6, 2009 @ 7:13 pm
hmmm….. what about "yi"? :p
Aaron Davies said,
June 8, 2009 @ 1:14 am
I've seen the same thing (as about Arabic) said about Sanskrit (in a comment here, actually, IIRC): "Every Sanskrit word has four meanings: itself, its opposite, a sexual position, and 'elephant'."