Number taboos in a Chinese elevator
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This elevator panel image was sent to me by Nick Kaldis:
It's immediately obvious that floors 4, 14, and 24 are missing because:
sì 4 || sǐ 死 ("death")
The absence of 18 is not so easy. It's because:
18 || shíbā céng dìyù 十八层地狱 ("eighteen levels of hell")
Note that the word for "level [of hell]", viz., céng 层, is the same as that for "floor [of a hotel or other multi-story building]".
For those who are interested in an exhaustive cosmology of Chinese hell, I highly recommend this virtuoso Wikipedia article, which has these sections:
Alternative names (21 more common different names)
Conceptions and terminology
Ten courts of King Yanluo / "King Yama" (यम राज/閻魔羅社, Yama Rājā)
Eighteen levels of Hell — each one described in two versions (e.g., Báshé dìyù 拔舌地獄 ["Hell of Tongue Ripping"] and Nílí dìyù 泥犁地獄 ["Naraka Hell"]) and as mentioned in the late Ming novel Journey to the West (Diàojīn yù ["Hell of Hanging Bars"])
For the heavily annotated translation of a medieval vernacular, prosimetric tale of a Buddhist saint who goes down to the terrifying depths of hell to rescue his mother, see the "Mùlián biàn wén 目連變文" ("Transformation text on Maudgalyāyana") in Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For the judicial landscape of the Buddhist Chinese hell, see Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
When I was studying Classical Chinese at the Middlebury Summer School in 1969, I stayed in the Delta Upsilon (ΔΥ) fraternity as a temporary dormitory. Since we had a Chinese only pledge (we spoke Mandarin, not Classical Chinese, except when reciting old texts!), we had to come up with a Chinese name for the building we were staying in. We called it "Dìyù táng 地狱堂" ("Hell Hall"). It was appropriately very hot that summer.
Selected readings
- "A medieval Dunhuang man" (7/17/23) — with valuable bibliography
- "Applied Quadrophobia" (11/14/17)
[Thanks to Zhaofei Chen]
Philip Taylor said,
November 29, 2024 @ 11:46 am
I have certainly witnessed at first hand the omission of the number 4 in Chinese floor numbering contexts, but failed to appreciate that other floor numbers too may well have been omitted. Mea culpa …
Fritz Newmeyer said,
November 29, 2024 @ 1:16 pm
In my building in Vancouver, and in many others, there is no floor numbered 4, 14, 24, etc. There are four apartments per floor in my building. They are numbered, for example, 1501, 1502, 1503, and 1505.
Philip Taylor said,
November 29, 2024 @ 1:23 pm
The terrifying thing about Wikipedia's account of the "Eighteen levels of Hell" is that I very much fear that all 18 tortures described therein have been applied in real life …
David Morris said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:01 pm
It's still the 4th apartment or floor even if it's labelled something else. Without elevators, how many flights of stairs do I have to climb to reach the '5th' floor?
Here in Australia, I saw an apartment block which had something like 12A, 12B and 15, avoiding both 13 and 14.
Lothar von Falkenhausen said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:08 pm
As far as I remember, some buildings in Hong Kong additionally omit the 13th floor to cater to the superstitions of Westerners. (Of course, highrises without a 13th floor are ubiquitous outside of China. One wonders where the custom of skipping unlucky numbers in numbering building floors originates; it may not be a Chinese invention.)
Cuconnacht said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:32 pm
My cousin's apartment is in the 14th floor of his New York City building, just up from the twelfth floor.
Chas Belov said,
November 29, 2024 @ 4:40 pm
Interesting that the superstition has made it's way into Vancouver construction. I was aware of the large Chinese population there.
As for whether a fourth floor exists or not, sometimes buildings have un-numbered utility floors in between occupied floors. I believe that's happened with 13th floors and wonder whether it has happened with 4th or 14th floors.
Jim Breen said,
November 29, 2024 @ 5:35 pm
4 is often skipped in Japan too, for the same (死) reason. When I first lived there in the 1980s our local "Coin Landly" (sic) had its washing machines numbered 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, …
David Marjanović said,
November 29, 2024 @ 8:58 pm
That said, how many do you have to climb to reach the 1st floor?
AFAIK, it's only in the US, the former Soviet Union and China that floor counting begins at 1, so that usually you don't need to climb stairs to reach the first floor. Elsewhere, counting begins at 0 – floor number 0 is called ground floor in BrEng, Erdgeschoß, Erdgeschoss* or Parterre in German, parter in Polish, and rez-de-chaussée in French**.
* Not pronounced the same.
** where par terre just means "on the ground" and is not used as a name
Victor Mair said,
November 29, 2024 @ 10:21 pm
Mark Metcalf sent me photographs of the elevator panel in his apartment building:
G L 3 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
and in an airBNB where he stayed:
G 2 3 3A 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 12A [defaced] 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
F said,
November 29, 2024 @ 10:40 pm
DM — Wikipedia has a nice map of what countries use which floor numbering convention: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storey#/media/File%3ACountries_numbering_floors.svg
Phil Bowler said,
November 29, 2024 @ 10:53 pm
Is that elevator in the PRC? Where I stay, in Dongbei, I’m on the 4th floor (of a 10-storey building), the floor is numbered as 4 in the lift, features thus in our delivery address, and nobody has ever mentioned its unhappy association. The word I hear for ‘floor’ is ‘lóu’. Are mainland inhabitants, or just Dongbeiren, less superstitious?
David Morris said,
November 30, 2024 @ 3:03 am
>That said, how many do you have to climb to reach the 1st floor?
In Australia, one. We enter on the ground floor (G), and climb one flight to the 1st floor.
Philip Taylor said,
November 30, 2024 @ 4:40 am
Very sorry to see that, immediately prior to this message, Language Log reported that there were 13 comments. I would have hoped that the infrastructure, noting the topic of the thread, would automatically have re-written that as "12a comments" !
David Marjanović said,
November 30, 2024 @ 1:00 pm
The map is amazing! Georgia is more European than Finland, it seems…
That's dedication.
poftim said,
November 30, 2024 @ 3:51 pm
One time I stayed in a hotel in the UK where the floors (and room numbers) were lettered G (ground), F (first), S (second) and T (third). I stayed in room S23 or something. That system (which I didn't immediately figure out) would have quickly broken down if the building was any taller.
Robert T McQuaid said,
December 1, 2024 @ 1:07 pm
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) occupies the thirteenth floor of many office buildings, using superstition as a cover. Check the demise of Frank Olson.
Coby said,
December 1, 2024 @ 4:19 pm
In older buildings in Spain, the floor numbered as 2 is sometimes the fourth story up, rising above planta baja, entresuelo and principal.
BZ said,
December 2, 2024 @ 11:13 am
When I was a student at Penn I seem to recall there being a 0th floor in the Moore Building (which was slightly below ground, but distinct from the basement). However, I cannot find any reference to such a floor now.
liuyao said,
December 3, 2024 @ 4:09 am
@Phil Bowler, I wouldn't say it's very common on the mainland. In my mind it's more associated with Hong Kong business practice, and mainlanders would make fun of it when they go into an elevator that has this. Maybe newer apartment buildings are more likely to have this?
Four by itself is not a taboo: there are Four classical novels, the Four Books, Four great inventions — to this day people like to come up with Four Greats if they can — not to mention that most verses from the Classic of Odes, and ones composed for the most formal occasions (such as epitaphs), are in four syllables, so that we have a plethoera of four-character phrases. If your uncle is the fourth eldest in his generation, you'd call him Fourth Uncle, without feeling bad about it (make sure to get your tone right).
Philip Taylor said,
December 3, 2024 @ 10:01 am
Liuyao — " If your uncle is the fourth eldest in his generation, you'd call him Fourth Uncle […]." Interesting. My wife's (Chinese/Vietnamese) aunts and uncles are referred to in English as "Uncle number two", etc., not "Second uncle", but this perhaps reflects the difference in word order between Chinese and Vietnamese.
Pedro said,
December 4, 2024 @ 5:02 am
Not quite the same phenomenon, but whatever happened to the Western practice of skipping over i when numbering lists with letters? We used to say a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, j, k, …
Something to do with i and j having been the same letter historically. Did we skip u and w for the same reason? When did this practice stop? Is it connected to Microsoft Excel?
Matt Anderson said,
December 4, 2024 @ 11:26 pm
@Phil Bowler
I’ve seen a good number of buildings in the PRC (one example would Guanghualou at Fudan in Shanghai, I’m pretty sure) that skip floors with 4 in them, but I think I’ve only seen buildings that skip floors with 4 and also 13 in HK. I’ve never been in a tall building in Dongbei, so I have no idea if Dongbei is less superstitious or something.
I’ve never noticed a skipped 18th floor, but I might not have been looking out for it.
Matt Anderson said,
December 4, 2024 @ 11:29 pm
Somehow I didn’t see liuyao’s comment when I posted the above. All of what liuyao says makes sense to me
Matt Anderson said,
December 4, 2024 @ 11:36 pm
@Philip Taylor
This distinction of “uncle number four” vs “fourth uncle” isn’t really there in Chinese. You could translate the Chinese term to English as either
Philip Taylor said,
December 5, 2024 @ 4:01 am
Pedro — "We used to say a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, j, k, …" — May I ask "who are 'we"" ? As a Briton, I have never previously encountered this practice.