Sauce Like This: A New Fusion Word in Mandarin
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Jeisun Wen mentioned to me that, several nights ago when he was reading some of his friends' statuses on Facebook, one in particular jumped out at him:
人生就醬?! 在業界拼了命想擺脫菜鳥更上一層樓,骨子裡卻永遠只想當個快快樂樂可以做很多自己想做的事的大學生，每日每夜心中都醬矛盾的度過.
Here's the pinyin transcription:
Rénshēng jiù jiàng?! Zài yèjiè pīn le mìng xiǎng bǎituō càiniǎo gèng shàng yīcéng lóu, gǔzilǐ què yǒngyuǎn zhǐ xiǎng dāng gè kuàikuàilèlè kěyǐ zuò hěnduō zìjǐ xiǎng zuò de shì de dàxuéshēng, měi rì měi yè xīnzhōng dōu jiàng máodùn de dùguò.
And here's Google Translate's rough rendering of this passage:
Life on the sauce?! Rookie in the industry working like mad to get rid of higher level, they are fundamentally always wanted to be happy can do a lot of students want to do their own daily conflicts night through the hearts of all butter
A smoother and more accurate translation would go something like this:
Is life just like this?! Working like mad in business to slough off rookie status and reach a higher level, but in my bones always only wanting to be a happy university student who can do lots of things that he wishes to do — every day and every night is spent like this, my heart full of contradiction.
One can hardly blame Google Translate for rendering jiàng 醬 ("thick sauce made from fermented beans, wheat, etc.") in the first instance as "sauce," though "butter" in the second instance is a bit more dubious. The reason is that the usage of jiàng 醬 as "like this" is so new that it probably has not yet made it into any dictionaries or lexicographical data bases.
The route from jiàng 醬 ("sauce") to "like this" (or, rather, vice versa) proceeds thus: zhèyàng 這樣 (lit. "this shape / form / appearance / kind / type," i.e., "thus, so, this way, like this") –> (phonological fusion) jiàng, for which 醬 ("sauce") is used as a homophonous borrowing. Zhèyàng 這樣 ("thus, so, this way, like this") can also be extended with the suffixes –(e)r 儿 and -zi 子, hence zhèyàngr and zhèyàngzi 這樣子, both of which mean the same thing as zhèyàng 這樣, viz., "thus, so, this way, like this." Fusion prone netizens have taken zhèyàngzi 這樣子 and rewritten it as jiangzi 醬紫 (lit., "sauce-purple," but intended to convey the notion of "thus, so, this way, like this").
Fusion is by no means a new phenomenon in Sinitic. Already in Classical Chinese we find, among others 1. yān 焉 = yú 於 ("at, in") + zhī 之 ("it"), hence "at / in it," 2. hé 盍 = hé 何 ("why, what") + bù 不 ("not"), hence "why not?" and 3. zhū 諸 = zhī 之 ("it") + yú 於 ("at, in"), hence "it in" or zhī 之 ("it") + hū 乎 (question particle), hence "it?" They are also well established in modern colloquial Mandarin, e.g., 1. liǎ 倆 = liǎng ("two") + ge (measure word), hence "two (items)," 2. sā 仨 = sān ("three") + 個 ge (measure word), hence "three (items)," and 3. béng 甭 = bù 不 ("not") + yòng 用 ("use"), hence "there's no need to, it is not necessary to; don't, needn't." Sometimes, as in the case with liǎ 倆, the resultant pronunciation is new to the inventory of possible syllables in Mandarin.
Before closing, I'd like to mention one other unusual expression in the Facebook status quoted above, namely, càiniǎo 菜鳥, which on the surface looks as though it means "vegetable bird." From many occurrences in context, we know that it actually means "rookie, novice, recruit," etc. It is especially common in the army and among netizens, but it has broader applications for neophytes in many other sectors of society as well.
It turns out that the new Mandarin word càiniǎo derives from Taiwanese tshài-tsiáu-á 菜鳥仔. Wikipedia blandly explains the first two Taiwanese morphemes (the third is a diminutive suffix) as meaning "inferior, poor, not up to standard" and "a person with certain characteristics." I suspect that something less innocuous is going on here, and that niǎo ("bird") in this expression actually refers to "penis," thus calling a person a "bird" is actually a euphemism for saying that he is a "prick." A tshài-tsiáu-á 菜鳥仔, then, would mean "a little prick who doesn't know very much."
There's a pretty good explanation of the "bird" / "penis" morpheme 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 on top of this, the Mandarin word "niao" is also slang for "penis".
====
Neil Kubler briefly explains the phonology thus:
====
"According to the rules of Chinese historical phonology, niao3 'bird' should have developed into modern Mandarin as diao3, but for reasons of euphemism, the 'd' was changed into an 'n'…. In any case, the Taiwanese tsiáu 'bird' would seem to have developed normally (and 'penis' is indeed lan-chiau, or at least one term for that organ is). Of course, 'xiao niao' [VHM: "little bird"] can also mean 'little boy's penis' in Mandarin, so it's possible niao3 already had this second meaning.
====
Some Beijing partisans claim that càiniǎo 菜鳥 comes from Pekingese, because cài 菜 (lit., "vegetable") can mean "bad, weak" in Beijing topolect. However, càiniǎo was not heard in Beijing until about 2000, whereas tshài-tsiáu-á 菜鳥仔 has been solidly grounded in Taiwanese for a much longer period, so I support a Taiwanese origin for the expression. I leave it to those who are fluent speakers of Taiwanese to provide additional clarification.
[Thanks are due to Gianni Wan and Sophie Wei.]
Kellen Parker said,
May 17, 2010 @ 12:37 am
I rather like that the change was made due to the taboo, only to have niǎo still end up meaning penis.
I wonder if there's any connection between 鸟/屌 and 尿 niào for urinate. Seems like there must be.
Shane said,
May 17, 2010 @ 2:28 am
The most common fusion word I know of is the Cantonese word "冇" for "没有" – I'm not sure how that word is pronounced, if it is at all, in Mandarin, though. And for what it's worth, "有冇搞錯" is probably the only Cantonese phrase I know.
~flow said,
May 17, 2010 @ 4:06 am
i find above-mentioned suspicion very interesting that 鳥 in the sense of ‘penis’ could be related to 尿 and 屌. there are countless characters that convey related or identical meanings while differing in orthography and/or reading.
i can also corroborate that 鳥 in this sense has possible roots in taiwan: many years ago a friend of mine told me about the complexities of growing up in a country that speaks many languages, but only writes one of them. now this guy was a native speaker of taiwanese, yet when he one day went to the garage to get his scooter repaired the repair man told him it’s a problem with the ‘giaoa’ (this is the pronounciation i remember, but it’s long ago), a term meaning ‘(small) bird’ to my friend. it so turned out the mechanic was talking about—guess—a *piston*. so it’s not unlikely that, to the extant that taiwanese can be readily written out in characters, both conversants would render the word in question as ‘鳥仔’, with the understanding that ‘the birdy of your scooter’ refers to a, well, mechanical part of the vehicle that moves, like, y’know.
Brendan said,
May 17, 2010 @ 4:57 am
There are a couple of words like this — 酱 (or 酱紫) is commonly accompanied by 表, as in 表酱子 — 不要这样子. My impression is that it's intended more for cutesy effect than as an actual fusion word.
fs said,
May 17, 2010 @ 6:44 am
Neologism by fusion certainly seems to be a case in which the orthography strains… what with the PRC's official lists of acceptable hanzi (and of course the unicode standard), I wonder how the next generation's answer to 甭 and the like will be written. Analogue by homophone seems to have been the historical answer, anyway.
J.H. said,
May 17, 2010 @ 7:49 am
Shane-
I use hanyu pinyin input to type Chinese, so I found a website a while back that has all the pinyin equivalents to Cantonese characters. Obviously, people would never say them in Mandarin, but I suppose they have a pronunciation in that dialect anyway. I find that quite odd, but it might just be for the sake of hanyu pinyin input.
I haven't been on the site for a while, but I seem to recall that '冇' is 'mao'. I still can't understand what half of the seemingly meaningless letter combinations mean. I suppose they could be other romanizations…
Ooh, I've managed to dig out the link: http://hi.baidu.com/%B5%A5%B5%E3%B3%E6/blog/item/2ff61324b8e06533c89559e9.html
Daan said,
May 17, 2010 @ 8:19 am
If my ears are to be trusted, I think phonological fusion is also beginning to occur, at least in Taiwanese Mandarin, for the words nǎ zhǒng 'what kind of' (-> nǒng) and nà zhǒng 'that kind of' (-> nòng). But I haven't seen them used in writing yet, so I wouldn't know what character is borrowed to represent those words.
Lareina said,
May 17, 2010 @ 8:42 am
Agree with Brendan. It sounds a lot cuter to say '表酱紫'
– 菜鸟L
~flow said,
May 17, 2010 @ 8:56 am
regarding aforementioned 表酱子 for 不要这样子: there is actually a character 嫑, which zdic.net glosses as 方言，不要。如：嫑着急；农谚：“天旱～望圪㙮云，女穷～望娘家人。”; it also gives the pronounciation biáo.
in my character collection i have, under the heading of ‘phrase’ (for characters that look like writing out part of a sentence) the entries 奀
~flow said,
May 17, 2010 @ 9:27 am
[oops! looks like i inadvertently discovered a bug in your blogging software… the first attempt to post resulted in the text being cut off at the first appearance of a character from unicode astral planes; the preview looked fine. in the attempt to programmatically fix that, i hit upon a bug in my own converting software so i guess its a draw. i now attempt to re-post using NCRs for all non-ASCII stuff. that 7bit-legacy stuff is truly a die-hard.]
regarding aforementioned 表酱子 for 不要这样子: there is actually a character 嫑, which zdic.net glosses as 方言，不要。如：嫑着急；农谚：“天旱～望圪㙮云，女穷～望娘家人。”; it also gives the pronounciation biáo.
in my character collection i have, under the heading of ‘phrase’ (for characters that look like writing out part of a sentence) the entries 奀 𠘶 𠀱 㶪 𠀰 𤘮 𠀳 𢆓 歪 𤯚 𣲮 𧗩 瓩 甭 𡍂 𠀾 𦙂 𠁃 𠁍 𣨀 孬 𨱥 𦕪 𠁋 𠁌 𠁆 覔 𣈇 𠁒 䬩 𩖲 嫑 𧶏 𠁙 𠁓 𩫇 𠏹 𠍟 𨖕 𠁞 𠁛 𠏳 𢦫 𣅌 𡘀 𠶘 𠽚 𤈕 𡝕 𡈯 𠮳 𠮴 忐 忑 㶨 㶪 𫕱 𠀿 颪 𣛓 𣖍 桛 𡍂 𡎥 𡘫 𡘏 𡥘 㝀 𣫹 𣫵 𣫶 𥩠 𥩴 嫑 嘦 𡠍 𧟰 𡭟 𡭝 𡚝 𡙵 奛 嘦 汆 籴 粜. (these characters are all accidental finds produced by perusing seemingly endless lists of characters; there must be many more examples. the casual user of chinese would never suspect the sheer number of oddities that the chinese written language has to offer. if anyone is interested, i could without much effort produce a short article ‘the oddest characters of chinese’).
i have currently no further data for most of these characters, so the collection is one of phrase supects, as it were. 瓩, as one well-known example, is definitely phrasal, but reading-wise exactly the opposite of 嫑: it is, like 浬 (for 海里) and 圕 (for 圖書館), a pretty modern character to represent multiple syllables (千瓦, qianwa, kilowatts) in a single character (something that was ruled out both by mainland and taiwan language regulations).
so the next funny thing here is that while there *is* an official character to write the contraction of 不要, it is not used; instead, a much more frequent sound-alike is used. i suspect that neither mobile phones nor many chinese no that character (tho google pinyin input does have it), so there is more than one reason not to use it. but of course, the character does have the advantage of being 100% clear in meaning, and allows to guess the sound pretty well.
~flow said,
May 17, 2010 @ 9:30 am
again, the preview looked fine. if you want to appreciate the full text, either save the post as a .html file and open it in a web browser, or avail yourself of a copy of babelpad.exe to do the conversion. i recommend to install sun-exta.ttf and sun-extb.ttf to attain full astral compatibility, but you probably already know that.
Fluxor said,
May 17, 2010 @ 9:59 am
@Shane: 冇 is a modern character invented in Hong Kong and meant for Cantonese only. It isn't a fusion of 沒有; rather, its original character is 無, which has a colloquial reading and a literary reading. 冇 took the place of the colloquial reading.
Fluxor said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:17 am
I've seen 醬=這樣 online for at least ten years, so it's certainly not new. It's also a usage that is currently limited to Taiwan, where it originated. The reason is because 醬 (jiàng) isn't a fusion zhèyàng; rather, it's a fusion of zèyàng. The difference between zhèyàng and zèyàng is the presence of the retroflex in the former. Since Taiwanese-style Mandarin is greatly lacking in retroflex, the standard pronunciation of 這樣 (zhèyàng) becomes zèyàng on the street, which when spoken quickly, approximates jiàng.
Daan said,
May 17, 2010 @ 11:27 am
a pretty modern character to represent multiple syllables (千瓦, qianwa, kilowatts) in a single character (something that was ruled out both by mainland and taiwan language regulations).
In Taiwan, the characters 廿, 卅 (both quite common in writing) and 卌 (very rarely seen) are nowadays always pronounced as èrshí 'twenty', sānshí 'thirty' and sìshí 'fourty' rather than the dictionary readings of niàn, sà and xì respectively. If you use the dictionary readings in spoken Mandarin, or even when reading aloud, many native speakers will have trouble understanding you.
Some people argue this does not mean the pronunciation of those characters has changed, and thus 廿, for example, remains niàn. They insist speakers merely mentally substitute another word when they come across them. But to me that feels a bit forced. That may be the case for older speakers of Mandarin, but most younger speakers I know do not even seem to know the dictionary readings for those characters.
Brendan said,
May 17, 2010 @ 12:14 pm
A slight derail about the reading of 圕 — I've seen the pronunciation given as tuān before, rather than túshūguǎn — I guess the idea is that it gets the initial from 图, the tone from 书, and the rime from 馆. 瓩, on the other hand, seems to consistently be given the reading qiānwǎ, so at least the revolution hasn't been completely defeated.
@Fluxor – I've seen 表酱子 from plenty of Mainland bloggers, including people who natively speak a variety of Mandarin that distinguishes between z- and zh-. I first saw it in the wild about three years ago; suppose it's probably a more recent import. Some of the people who use it are into the whole 鈥★魰 thing, but mostly it seems to be used just for cute effect.
~flow said,
May 17, 2010 @ 1:50 pm
鈥★魰? a cute way to write 火星文, marsian characters??
~flow said,
May 17, 2010 @ 2:28 pm
zdic.net does, surprisingly, have a short entry on 圕 (http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE5Zdic9CZdic95.htm). what little is said there (tuān, ㄊㄨㄢ;“图书馆”三字的缩写。English: library) should in part be from an older version of the 《新華字典》 (not quite sure about that though); however, neither my 1954 edition nor my 1971 edition appear to mention it. my 1952 edition of the 《學文化字典》 says 「圖書館」的合體字, but does not give a reading (implying that it should be read out as three syllables). so i wonder where that information was sourced from (it does not look like zdic.net has a lot of original content as far as character explanations go; the material is good, but not authored by zdic.net). oh, and the 1957 《同音字典》 (a possible precursor to the 《新華》) has, on the last page: 〔附〕复詞的略字: 圕,圖書館 (observe the mix of short and long forms). (it also lists a character similar to 㠳 (but with 人 on the top) as meaning, guess, 人民幣). it remarks: 复詞的略字本來很多.
so none of these sources corroborate the reading tuan. except one i could readily find: google pinyin input method.
Clarissa at Talk to the Clouds said,
May 17, 2010 @ 4:20 pm
@~flow: Isn't 瓩 kokuji, a character invented in Japan (along with 瓰 瓱 瓸 甅 etc.)? (I don't know very much about this topic, so forgive me if it's a stupid question. I can imagine it migrating into Taiwanese /Taiwanese Mandarin during the occupation, and from there who knows.)
Elizabeth Braun said,
May 17, 2010 @ 8:17 pm
I'll look out for this one, thanks!
I'm glad also to know what the 'cainiao' business means.
Ellie said,
May 17, 2010 @ 11:02 pm
@rflow: So you're saying that the character composed of 不 on top of 要 is the standard character for the contraction, and 表(biao2) is the work-around people use for the contraction because they don't know the standard character or because their typesetting programs (like mine) don't have it? What is the status of 别 (bie2), which I was taught as a beginning chinese student is a contraction of 不要(bu2yao4)? Do people who have 别 in their vocabularies also use 表?
Thanks!
Fluxor said,
May 17, 2010 @ 11:37 pm
@ Brendan: I've never seen it used with mainlanders, but then again, I don't peruse mainland blogs a whole lot. As Confucius said, "Simplified characters are like a thousand needles in my eyes." Based on your observation, it appears the usage has migrated across the strait. I do agree its use appears to be typically associated with those that like to "cutiefy" their language.
~flow said,
May 18, 2010 @ 12:37 pm
@Daan—your remarks remind me of the fact that a number of dialects distinguish between so-called ‘colloquial’ and ‘literary’ readings. of course, saying this is in fact linguistically somewhat old-fashioned, as it makes ‘speech’ (spoken language) look like it’s bolted on top of or an afterthought of ‘writing’ (written language), whereas it is probably much safer to say that ‘language’ is primarily ‘speech’, and ‘writing’ has evolved to linguistically communicate without using ‘speech’. some people say Lǐ Bái, other people say Lǐ Bó to refer to the famous Tang dynasty poet. when people write that name, they will invariably write it as 李白. you may analyze that as saying, ‘some people prefer the colloquial reading of 白 in this name, while others prefer the literary reading’, but of course this puts writing before speech.
to avoid that, one could reword the statement as ‘when people are confronted with a text that contains the sequence 李白 and recognize the poet’s name, some prefer to render / communicate / pronounce that part of the text as Lǐ Bái, while others prefer Lǐ Bó’. so that means ‘reading a text’ means (not always, but commonly) not to act like a taperecorder in replay mode, but rather ‘to appreciate and interpret the written form and deliver an oral rendering / equivalent that is appropriate for the setting, acceptably close to the written form (otherwise, it would be an interpretation / translation of sorts) and acceptably understandable to listeners’ (the last part is of course just a common purpose, not a prerequisite; a tourist guide may read out loud those characters to her longnose audience just because she can, not because they can make anything of those sounds).
hence, even knowing my dictionary insists that 廿, 卅, 卌 have the readings niàn, sà, xì, i may be pragmatically forced to render those as èrshí, sānshí, sìshí, or listeners will not understand me. conversely, reciting a Tang poem on stage and choosing to incantate 卅 as sānshí instead of sà may lead to anything including flying tomatoes, laughter, and praise for revolutionary spirit. so it is not that there is a ‘reading’ that is somehow ‘inherent to the character’; this is a mirage produced by the fact that our understanding is a result of a society of minds that have historically shaped language and writing so it can perform its task. characters as such are, after all, but ink on paper.
older people likely have an educational experience that is more classical, and closer to the experience of standing in the limelight and having to deliver a solemn rendering of a Tang dynasty poem. i would guess that even those of the silver generation who insist that ‘卅 has the reading sà’ (which is correct, with the correct understanding of ‘reading’) will chose to read that character as sānshí when on the cellphone to inform their fellow silver traveller they just got notice their flight will be on ‘民國九十九年八月卅日’, if that happens to be scribbled on the slip their travelling clerk left them with. they may also substitute 号 for 日, so in a way, the characters 八月卅日 will be imbued with the ‘reading’ ba yue san shi hao.
~flow said,
May 18, 2010 @ 1:47 pm
@Clarissa at Talk to the Clouds, @Ellie—i have very little data on the origins of characters. some popular facts are that 働 is a japanese kokuji, that 凹 was invented in the Tang dynasty, that 曌 was made by or for empress Wuzetian, and that
~flow said,
May 18, 2010 @ 2:03 pm
[see, this will keep happening in this board if you insist to discuss chinese writing subjects. one more try… sorry for the inconvenience but some characters will not show up correctly in any browser. you can visit http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl and paste the numerical part of the NCRs (numerical character references), which is the letters and numbers following the "x" and preceding the ";" in those funky "& #xAB45;"-ish notations. there are several more options you have; one is to pester the editors of this great board to get the issue fixed.]
@Clarissa at Talk to the Clouds, @Ellie—i have very little data on the origins of characters. some popular facts are that 働 is a japanese kokuji, that 凹 was invented in the Tang dynasty, that 曌 was made by or for empress Wuzetian, and that 𤣥 was made up during the Qing dynasty to avoid the taboo of writing 玄. wikipedia seems to indicate that 瓩 is in fact a japanese kokuji, which is plausible as japan (and with it, taiwan) was technologically worlds ahead of the mainland for a long time. chinese students have and still do flock to japan, however difficult the sino-japanese relationships are, to obtain science degrees. from there, i guess, they likely brought back the concept of the kilowatt and the cute way of rendering a thousand watts as 瓩 (this is not quite correct, since, confusingly, in japan, 瓩 stands for kilogramms, not kilowatts. i just discovered this and realize more research is needed). anyhow, there are oogles of terms, and some characters, that were thought up in japan (terms like 經濟 and 情報 among them) and then backported to china.
for some time (for sure during the mainland republic, 1911—1949; maybe earlier, maybe later, also depending on social stratum and geographic location) the genuinely japanese idea that since 人 ‘means a person’ you can also ‘call it a person’ (and read it with two syllables: ひと, or however many syllables are needed) seemed like a good idea to many people in china, and a number of these 合體字 were imported, maybe invented, and promulgated. it is known that in buddhist contexts, characters like 䔶 to stand for 菩提, itself a rendering of the sanskrit word bodhi, were used for a long time, samples being found on dunhuang texts (notice this makes foreign influence, once more, likely).
regarding 不要→表|别|嫑, i can only state that personally i would not want to write 別 (which is in my lexicon) if what i want to communicate is the meaning 不要 along with the reading biao. 別 is much too common in usage, has its own semantics (close to 不要, and probably deriving from it to be sure—explaining that 別 derives from 不要 is fine in class, but let us not ignore the 新華字典 starts its lists of meanings with 分離 and gives 不要 only place 5 of 6 meanings, which tend to be ordered roughly acc. to perceived predominance).
i feel your question, ‘‘Do people who have 别 in their vocabularies also use 表?’’, while it does make sense, can, in general, only be answered tentatively, using statistical tools. however, in this specific case, things are much simpler: i can hardly imagine a native speaker of 普通話, 國語, mandarin, whatever you call it, who does *not* have 別 in their lexicon. this would be like claiming there are native speakers of english that do not know and occasionally use lexical items such as ‘though’, ‘for’, or ‘if’. it logically follows, since we’re discussing native speakers of mandarin here who were found to be using 表 for 不要, that the answer to your question must be a clear ‘yes’.
you also ask whether ‘‘the character composed of 不 on top of 要 is the standard character for the contraction’’, to which i am afraid the answer must be ‘no’. to the contrary, 嫑 is a rarity, an oddity, hard to find in dictionaries and input methods alike, not met with in personal or official communications, presumably not known to a vast majority of native writers. OTOH, i find it truly cute, included in the all-important unicode standard (sorry, it was this kind of ‘official’ i had in mind—嫑 is ‘standard’ in that it did receive a code point in unicode; it is not ‘standard’ in any kind of modern mainstream usage), and so very much clearer than 表 for this purpose. i find it a pity to see it not used.
Claw said,
May 18, 2010 @ 4:50 pm
@~flow: Stating that there exist literary and colloquial readings doesn't necessarily imply that writing comes before speech. In fact, literary readings very much have a basis in speech. Many of the literary readings of characters come from what you would get if phonological changes in the evolution of the particular Chinese language were entirely consistent. This is hardly ever true though, which is why colloquial and literary pronunciations end up diverging for certain words (especially commonly used ones).
In the case of 無 in Cantonese, it ended up diverging from its expected reading of mou4 (it historically has a 陽平 tone) and instead became mou5 in the general case (I don't remember where I read this, but I believe it was to align with the tone of 有 — yau5). The mou4 reading is still used in several fixed expressions (so you could make the argument that 無 diverged into two distinct words — idiomatic mou4 and general mou5), so 冇 was invented for explicitly expressing the mou5 reading. The fact that mou5 evolved to be used in the general case doesn't mean that mou4 is in any way artificial.
Claw said,
May 18, 2010 @ 4:57 pm
Incidentally, 無 in Cantonese actually diverged into a third word — m4 (commonly written as 唔), which is used very much like 不 in Mandarin.
Claw said,
May 18, 2010 @ 5:18 pm
Fluxor said:
冇 wasn't invented in Hong Kong actually. It's been around for quite a while. There are dictionaries going back to the 19th century (possibly earlier) that have the character. The Hong Kong government merely helped to formalize it in Unicode. It's also used in other southern varieties of Chinese too, such as Hakka and Gan.
~flow said,
May 18, 2010 @ 6:01 pm
@Claw—maybe when i wrote that ‘speech comes before writing’ i was really trying to explain something to myself. let me clarify.
we use terms like ‘literary reading’ and ‘文讀’ mainly to describe a phenomenon in (chinese) language that some characters in some dialects can have different phonetic values in different lexical items, values which can be traced back to different historical stages and can also represent borrowings from another dialect. this is akin to the way many characters in japanese, like 京, can have more than one reading (kei and kyou) which are also modern reflexes of borrowings from other linguistic groups that happened at different times (and different groups to be sure).
now while i do not have problems with using these terms in these ways (if i delivered an acceptable account of what they are commonly used for), i just wanted to make the point that they are very philological in nature. to a westener who wants to learn cantonese or fuzhou dialect this sounds like, say, ‘omg, this character has different readings that appear under certain circumstances and i have to learn all that! how difficult this is!’ and they would be right.
yet a native starts out with learning all those sounds and words and what they mean and so on. only when having absorbed quite a bit of vocabulary that will also contain items that are examples of 文白異讀 do they learn that different syllables can happen to coincide in writing, given the nature of the writing system.
i did not mean to imply that a so-called literary reading is only used in literature. i do not know enough about the phenomenon to be sure but my impression is that the colloquial readings represent a lot of everyday vocabulary, while the literary readings tend to pop up in more advanced, technical vocabulary, but certainly also in everyday speech, and are, of course, even used by illiterate people. they would presumably also have evolved without any kind of writing and maybe in fact did in a majority of cases in the *virtual* absence of writing, as writing was and is simply not available / practiced by considerable parts of the people.
this means that ‘literary reading’ is a well-motivated, but still unfortunate way to label this specific phenomenon—which is also known in english, french, german, italian and so on (ex.: ‘In fisica, *l'obiettivo* è *oggetto* di studio dell'ottica’, ‘in physics, the *object* is an *object* (topic) of optics’)—because it sounds so, well, ‘literary’, which it is in great parts not. it is a speech phenomenon, first and foremost.
Claw said,
May 18, 2010 @ 6:22 pm
@~flow: Ah, I understand your point now. 'Literary readings' are indeed speech phenomenon, and it looks like we were trying to say the same thing. I just didn't initially see that you were merely arguing against calling them 'literary readings'. Now that you've stated it plainly, I agree with you that the terminology can be misleading.
Chas Belov said,
May 22, 2010 @ 4:15 am
Google Translate could use some more Cantonese speakers to help it out. 有冇搞錯 is oddly translated as "Felt a bit odd," where I understand it to mean "Don't make trouble!" or "Stop causing trouble!" (which I proceeded to contribute); although literally it appears to mean "Did you make a mistake?" that's never how I've heard it used).
As for 廿, 卅, they are pronounced in Cantonese as yah and sa'ah respectively. I once shocked a Cantonese-speaking cashier (pleasantly) by saying "Nidou yah man." (Here's $20) as yah is very Cantonese.