Cantonese then and now
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Carmen Lee sent in two items pertaining to Cantonese.
1. This is a true story:
– Many years ago before police departments, hospitals, etc., had interpreters, a man was injured in a car accident in a Midwest town.
– He was taken to a hospital, and he kept repeating an expression /phrase /term that the doctors and nurses couldn't understand. He seemed to be from East Asia, so the hospital called the East Asian department in a university 50 miles away to ask them for help.
– A linguist from the department went to the hospital and was taken to the injured man's bedside. The man was still repeating that expression…. It was "哎吔!" "哎吔!"
I wrote about this expression just a week ago in "Cantonese word list and parser" (8/25/16):
I looked up one of my favorite Cantonese expressions, 哎吔, and found four pronunciations, all from the LSHK database: ai1jaa1, ai3jaa4, ai1jaa3, ai2jaa5. In Sheik's CantoDict, 哎吔 has the Jyutping romanization ai1jaa1 and is defined as meaning "Aiya!; a sort of [as in ai1jaa1 lou5dau6 哎吔老豆 ("some kind of daddy")]."
2.
"Hong Kong's elections explained in five insults" (Helier Cheung, BBC News, 9/3/16)
a. 'Rubbish Council
b. 'Traitors', 'Leftards' and 'Hot Dogs'
c. 'Wolf', '689' and 'ABC'
d. 'Attention-seeking extremists'
e. 'Hong Kong pig'
There's also an entertaining, informative video at the head of the article that explains a number of political insults, some of which overlap with the list of five named above. In the video, the insults are pronounced in Cantonese, written in characters, and translated into English.
My favorite is the last on both lists:
gong2zyu1 港豬 ("[Hong] Kong pig")
That's someone who, believe it or not, is uninterested in the elections, and "only cares about eating and sleeping".
Are there any mei5zyu1 美豬 ("American pigs") out there who are not interested in our own upcoming elections?
Fernando Colina said,
September 3, 2016 @ 7:14 pm
So I'm sitting at the edge of my seat… What does 哎吔 mean??
I plugged it into Google translate which translated it as "Hey yeah". I seem to be missing the joke…
Victor Mair said,
September 3, 2016 @ 7:31 pm
@Fernando Colina
I explained it in the subsequent paragraph. It's an exclamation of pain.
John said,
September 3, 2016 @ 7:43 pm
It's just an interjection which could be translated as "aaah", "argh", "oops", "oh no", etc.
Max said,
September 4, 2016 @ 2:24 am
Put me down as "puzzled" by item #1 as well.
So the true story is that a Cantonese-speaking man repeats "ouch!" at the hospital. The linguist presumably reports: "This man is saying 'ouch.'" Is that not a fairly typical thing for someone to say when injured?
And, further, "ouch" in Cantonese is one of VM's favorite expressions …?
Victor Mair said,
September 4, 2016 @ 5:31 am
It's a multifunctional exclamation (that's one of the reasons I love it; I also just love the sound) — can be the sound of groaning.
languagehat said,
September 4, 2016 @ 9:27 am
It's a very common exclamation, but it's certainly not specifically Cantonese — I heard it constantly when I was living in Taiwan.
Fernando Colina said,
September 4, 2016 @ 5:40 pm
Ok I think I get it. It might be like a Spanish speaker in a Chinese hospital saying, ay, ay, ay!
Chas Belov said,
September 5, 2016 @ 3:23 am
I've always translated 哎吔 as "oy vey."
Simon P said,
September 5, 2016 @ 7:35 am
The 港豬 expression is probably related to the 港女 gong2neoi5*2: A stereotypically shallow and annoying Hong Kong woman. I once erroneously used it to refer to my girlfriend, when we had just started dating, thinking it means simply "Hong Kong woman". She was not pleased.
The 豬 character is also very commonly used in all kinds of Cantonese insults, like a 懶瞓豬 laan5 fan3 zyu1 "A lazy sleeping pig", or just 阿豬, something like "Mr. Pig", a generic "idiot" insult. Laziness and stupidity seem commonly associated with this poor animal. I've heard the phrase 瞓豬豬 fan3 zyu1zyu1 as a cute way of saying "go to bed".
Interestingly enough, though, 做豬 zou6zyu1, to "do a pig", means to work out, the very opposite of being lazy! It's really just a bastardization of 做GYM, though, so the character has been borrowed for purely phonetical reasons, though the HK sense of humor being what it is, I suspect the stereotypical laziness of the pig factored into it.