New expressions for karaoke: the phoneticization of Chinese
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My first acquaintance with the word "karaoke" was back in the 1980s, when I was visiting my brother Denis, who was then a translator for Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. He lived in the old Russian-built Friendship Hotel, a very spartan place compared to today's luxury accommodations in big Chinese cities. There wasn't much unusual, interesting, or attractive about the place (though they had bidets in the bathrooms, as did many other Russian style accommodations in China at that time), but I was deeply intrigued by a small sign at the back of one of the buildings that led to a basement room. On it was written "kǎlā OK 卡拉OK". The best I could make of that novel expression was "card pull OK," and I thought that it might have something to do with documentation. I asked all my Chinese scholar friends what this mysterious sign meant, but not one of them knew (remember that this was back in the mid-80s). It was only when I returned to the United States that I realized kǎlā OK 卡拉OK was the Chinese transcription for Japanese karaoke. It took a lot more time and effort before I figured out that karaoke is the abbreviated Japanese translation-transliteration of English "empty orchestra," viz., kara (空) "empty" and ōkesutora (オーケストラ). When I reported this to my Chinese linguist friends (Zhou Youguang, Yin Binyong, and others) back in Beijing the next year, they were absolutely flabbergasted. They had been convinced that the OK was simply the English term meaning "all right," but they had no idea what to make of the kǎlā portion.
A final note on the etymology of karaoke is my pleasant recollection of the UCLA Hittitologist, Jaan Puhvel, some years later demonstrating the origins of the word "orchestra" by doing a little jig before an admiring audience at an Indo-European workshop at the University of Texas in Austin. Much to our amusement, he showed graphically the Greek basis for our English word (orkheisthai "to dance"). I think that Jaan added a colorful Hittite aspect to his exposition, but I forget what it was. In any event, I thought it was simply fascinating that the origin of "orchestra" has to do with dance rather than music.
When I told the above story to my new students from China in two different classes ("Language, Script, and Society in China" and "Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese", plus those taking other classes), more than twenty students all together, they told me that "kǎlā OK 卡拉OK" was outmoded and that people barely used it any longer. Now, they say that they refer to it as “chàng K 唱K“ ("sing K")，”K ge K歌“ ("K songs")，or “KTV” (where karaoke takes place). They also mentioned a karaoke app called "Quánmín K gē 全民K歌" ("Everybody's Karaoke Songs").
I was stunned by how "K" had become a functioning morpheme meaning "karaoke" in current Chinese.
There's another telling detail about the current usage of written words for "karaoke" in China. When I asked students to write "karaoke" in Chinese on the board, some of them wrote "卡拉OK", but some of them wrote it thus: "卡啦OK". I was amazed, but also gratified. The difference may seem tiny, but its implications are vast.
In effect, the addition of the little mouth radical to 拉, making it 啦, wipes away the semantic content ("pull; draw; drag; haul") of the former, making it a purely phonetic symbol. This technique is very common in written Cantonese and in efforts to write other topolects. This validates a phenomenon in the evolution of the Chinese writing system that I have been predicting since the time I first began studying and teaching Sinitic languages in 1967. Namely, due to the exigencies of modern technology and communications, the phoneticization of Chinese writing is inevitable. It is happening before our very eyes (and ears).
Selected readings
- "'Between the Eyes and the Ears': SPP turns 300" (7/20/20)
- "Keep on -inging" (10/30/17)
- "The MaxPlanckForschung Cover Fiasco: How It Happened" (1/3/09)
- "Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft" (12/4/06)
- "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
- "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
- "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
- "Creeping English in Chinese" (1/23/17)
- "Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia" (9/25/13)
- "Substituting Pinyin for unknown Chinese characters " (9/3/13)
- "A child's substitution of Pinyin (Romanization) for characters " (11/9/14)
- "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia " (10/18/14)
- "The naturalness of emerging digraphia" (7/28/17)
- "Digraphia and intentional miswriting" (3/12/15)
- "Pinyin as subversive subtext" (3/17/17)
- "YouCool" (3/7/08)
- "Official digraphia" (9/13/18)
- "Biscriptal juxtaposition in Chinese, part 3" (4/24/17)
- "Biscriptal juxtaposition in Chinese, part 2" (10/15/14)
- "Biscriptal juxtaposition in Chinese" (8/17/14)
- "Zhao C: a Man Who Lost His Name" (2/27/09)
- "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17)
- "East Asian multilingual pop culture" (10/31/17)
- "'Let's' in Chinese " (10/19/17)
- "Keep on -inging " (10/30/17)
- "A New Morpheme in Mandarin" (4/26/11)
- "Zhao C: a Man Who Lost His Name" (2/27/09)
- "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17)
- "Digraphia and intentional miswriting" (3/12/15)
- "I don't feel OK" (12/27/18)
- "Sino-English graphic tour de force" (12/2018)
- "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18)
- "English as an official language in Taiwan" (12/8/18)
- "I don't feel OK" (12/27/18)
- "Pinyin without Chinese characters" (7/5/15)
- "Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)
- "The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages" (12/9/19)
[Thanks to Zihan Guo, Qinlin Li, and Tian Chen]
Victor Mair said,
September 25, 2021 @ 1:35 pm
From an anonymous contributor:
In parts of Asia, Circle K is sometimes referred to as “OK” or “OK Mart”
KevinM said,
September 25, 2021 @ 2:22 pm
When I was young, instrumentalists and singers used to practice with special records containing only the accompaniment. The series was known as "Music Minus One." So why not the shorter, and actually more accurate, "OK-1"?
David Marjanović said,
September 25, 2021 @ 3:32 pm
The other fascinating thing about 卡拉OK (which I was taught as just another vocabulary item in the late 90s or early 00s) is that the syllable kēi did not previously exist in Pǔtōnghuà, and so there was no Chinese character for it. (It wasn't too far from the sound system; the changes shuí > shéi and guǐ > gěi have happened for two particularly common words, so kēi was imaginable even though it didn't actually occur.) K is that character now.
(The syllable ōu did exist, and there's at least one commonly used character for it, but spelling it O gives context to the K and makes clear how the K is meant to be pronounced.)
Jim Breen said,
September 25, 2021 @ 3:48 pm
How is karate handled in Chinese? It's the same "kara" as in karaōke of course (empty hand).
Jonathan Smith said,
September 25, 2021 @ 4:13 pm
^ Precisely because of this gap (it seems), the playing card "K" became kǎi (~ kāi?) in northern China… maybe the syllable kei is more cromulent of late due to 卡拉OK/English. There are some northern words kēi like 'pick w/ finger' but perhaps they are "dialectal"…
Jonathan Smith said,
September 25, 2021 @ 4:14 pm
@Jim Breen
kōngshǒudào 空手道, i.e., via Chinese characters :D
ts4q said,
September 25, 2021 @ 6:24 pm
Back in 1991/1992 when I spent time in both Taiwan and Japan, KTV in Taiwan (where I'm almost sure the term started) meant specifically private rooms for hire for karaoke (as opposed to singing in an open bar in front of strangers); the equivalent in Japan was "karaoke box" (カラオケボックス).
But something else they had in Taiwan then (and I've never heard of anywhere else before or since) was MTV. Not the music channel. Rather someone took the idea of KTV for karaoke (K) and did it for movies (M): an establishment with private rooms for hire with a home cinema setup. Customers would come in, browse the range of Laserdiscs (!), hand their selection to the employee, then go to their room and await the feature presentation (the players were located in a central staff-only room IIRC). Went with friends and first saw Terminator 2 that way. But they could also be used for "privacy" by couples (the comfy sofa always had a handy box of tissues nearby).
I think not long after they were shut down as the ROC tried to comply with international copyright norms. I tried looking up MTVs a while back and it seems a few still exist in Taipei but specialising in Japanese porn. And they even have a shower in the room!
So kara + orchestra > karaoke > KTV > MTV (but not *that* MTV).
Andrew Usher said,
September 25, 2021 @ 6:30 pm
But was not the old 'karaoke' term a straight phonetic borrowing already? It had no semantic content related to the concept 'karaoke', no more than the English word does to one that has never heard of it.
Unless that new second character is one that didn't exist before, or was never used in words, I couldn't see it as a step toward 'phoneticisation' but rather just a mistake. And I may add that making the system of characters purely 'phonetic' would give up the one advantage it has over alphabetic writing (which admittedly doesn't outweigh the disadvantages).
ts4q said,
September 25, 2021 @ 6:30 pm
Hmmm… Now I wonder if MTV came before KTV: that might be the more logical evolution.
Victor Mair said,
September 25, 2021 @ 7:57 pm
That 啦 was definitely not a mistake. It was an intentional effort to mark the character as strictly phonetic, not semantic.
The whole point of the post was focused on the new terms for karaoke, which are more explicitly alphabetic than the old one.
Chris Button said,
September 26, 2021 @ 6:35 am
@ David M
Surely "kei" was already being used in OK before being used in 卡拉OK?
Jerry Packard said,
September 26, 2021 @ 9:48 am
Yes, as early as the 1971 edition of the popular ‘New China Dictionary’ 新华字典, ’剋’ kēi was listed as a lexical entry meaning ‘to reprimand.'
B.Ma said,
September 26, 2021 @ 12:10 pm
唱K is also the Cantonese term, however kei1 as a phoneme does exist in Cantonese (畸, though I had to look it up, having never had occasion to write that character before except as part of a Japanese place name).
My Hong Kong friends would say "sing K" when speaking English. But come to think of it, I have no idea how I would say "sing K" in English to an English speaker in an Anglophone country; "singing karaoke" and "going karaoke-ing" don't sound quite right.
In Cantonese the King playing card is just "King" (there's probably a character for it).
Chas Belov said,
September 26, 2021 @ 4:10 pm
I'd say "Go out for karaoke"
Andrew Usher said,
September 26, 2021 @ 7:26 pm
'Sing karaoke' and 'go out for karaoke' are both acceptable but mean different things. I'm not sure which was intended there.
ts4q:
Of course, and surely that's where the 'TV' part comes from.
Victor Mair:
I am not failing to understand your point, just adding that the character was already phonetic even if not indicated so (and arguably, indicating it makes it less of a deviation). As for the new terms, mixing the English alphabet with characters is not very consistent, but I can see your meaning that the English letters have essentially become new phonetic characters – but again that was already true with the old term including 'OK'.
Chris Button said,
September 26, 2021 @ 7:38 pm
For what it’s worth, the use of the mouth radical to nullify any semantic content appears to go all the way back to the oracle-bone inscriptions.
David Marjanović said,
September 27, 2021 @ 7:43 am
Interesting.
Of course; I failed to make that step explicit.
Philip Taylor said,
September 27, 2021 @ 10:33 am
Andrew / Chris — "sing karaoke" / "go out for karaoke". I asked my (Vietnamese) wife about this over lunch; she said "go to the karaoke". After discussion, it is clear that for her what matters is the location, while what matters for me is the singing. So I would ask "do you want to sing karaoke" while she would ask "do you want to go to the karaoke". When asked "why not 'do you want to sing karaoke'", she replied "because not everyone who goes to the karaoke wants to sing".
Andrew Usher said,
September 28, 2021 @ 6:58 pm
Pardon me for being obvious, but 'go to the karaoke' could be idiomatic English only if the local establishment offering it is called 'the karaoke'; unlikely (in most circumstances) but not impossible. To emphasise the singing part it would of course be 'sing at the karaoke'. What one may do there is 'sing karaoke', the word functioning essentially as an adjective in that phrase.
Chris Button:
Thanks. I'm not surprised; that appears to be a necessary developement in any originally-ideographic writing system.
Philip Taylor said,
September 29, 2021 @ 1:56 am
Andrew, I don't follow your logic — quite apart from the fact that my wife is Vietnamese, with Vietnamese as her L1 yet fluent in English, and therefore in a position to state from a position of knowledge what a Vietnamese person would say in English, I cannot see why you assert that 'go to the karaoke' could be idiomatic English only if the local establishment offering it is called 'the karaoke' — it is surely idiomatic to say 'go to the cinema' or even (<lBr.E> 'go to the pictures') when the establishment in question is called the Gaumont or the Odeon, 'go to the opera' when the establishment is called 'Sadlers Wells' or 'Glynedbourne', 'go to the theatre' when the establishment is called 'the Adelphi' or 'the Globe', and so on, so why must 'go to the karaoke' require that "the local establishment offering it [be] called 'the karaoke' " ?
Philip Taylor said,
September 29, 2021 @ 2:00 am
Sorry, formatting error — Moderator, please remove immediately preceding.
Andrew, I don't follow your logic — quite apart from the fact that my wife is Vietnamese, with Vietnamese as her L1 yet fluent in English, and therefore in a position to state from a position of knowledge what a Vietnamese person would say in English, I cannot see why you assert that 'go to the karaoke' could be idiomatic English only if the local establishment offering it is called 'the karaoke' — it is surely idiomatic to say 'go to the cinema' or even (<Br.E> 'go to the pictures') when the establishment in question is called the Gaumont or the Odeon, 'go to the opera' when the establishment is called 'Sadlers Wells' or 'Glynedbourne', 'go to the theatre' when the establishment is called 'the Adelphi' or 'the Globe', and so on, so why must 'go to the karaoke' require that "the local establishment offering it [be] called 'the karaoke' " ?
Andrew Usher said,
September 29, 2021 @ 7:10 pm
I see you have some point with your examples, but
– I said 'called', not 'named'. I know this is a distinction not usually made in British English, but I meant what the place is usually referred to in conversation, not what its official name is. Hence my comment that its being called 'the karaoke' was not impossible.
– The term 'idiomatic' refers to what a native speaker would say, and you repeatedly emphasise that your wife is not.
To me it doesn't feel right to use 'the karaoke' the same way as 'the opera' etc., but local conditions may differ. Such phrases are not necessarily idioms; they may be used simply because the identity of the place is not considered important, only its function. Therefore, perhaps this difference in my mind is caused by the seeming unlikelihood of any freestanding business having karaoke as its sole purpose, unlike the others.
Philip Taylor said,
September 30, 2021 @ 4:40 am
Passing over your earlier points, Andrew (not dismissing them or ignoring them, simply focussing on the one point where I believe the evidence is clear), I think that you will find that the sole purpose of establishments branded "KTV" in the far east is the provision of karaoke facilities.
Andrew Usher said,
September 30, 2021 @ 8:47 pm
Yes, in the Far East (should be cap. when referring to the part of the world, should it not?); but I was of course thinking of English-speaking society, especially given that it's an English-language expression in question. Anyway, the point wasn't that such an establishment would be impossible, only that it's far enough from my experience not to be automatically accepted like the other cases.
Philip Taylor said,
October 1, 2021 @ 8:08 am
Ah, well, clearly we were talking about difference things. For me, karaoke is primarily an oriental activity, and Vietnam is the only country in which I have taken part in it at a dedicated karaoke location, although I have taken part in karaoke at oriental homes and restaurants in the UK. So the context in which I was discussing "singing karaoke" v. "going to the karaoke" was essential an oriental (or far eastern / Far Eastern) one.
As to "far east" v. "Far East", you are probably correct, but I am beginning to experience a backlash against the ever-increasing use of leading caps for adjectives ("Black", "Indigenous", etc) where all lower-case was until recently the norm, and as a result find myself increasingly lower-casing words and phrases that I would once have automatically capitalised.