Acronymomania, part 2
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A brief collection of "Chinese words for Adults!", with the last one being "KPI", which I had to look up in English.
A performance indicator or key performance indicator (KPI) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.
Pronounced à l'anglaise, not according to the pinyin values of the letters.
BTW, Wiktionary has a neat example sentence here:
Les Allemands ont tendance à prononcer les anglicismes à l’anglaise.
Germans tend to pronounce English loanwords in the English way.
The Chinese equivalent of KPI is jīxiào 績效 ("performance"). She probably learned KPI on the job.
Another interesting item, though not an acronym, is the one right before KPI, viz., tuōfà 脱发 ("hair loss; trichomadesis"), the pinyin for which has the same letters as that for tóufǎ 头发 ("hair"), though in a slightly different order tóufà and with a change of tone.
When you're speaking Sinitic languages, you often have to mind your Ps and Qs.
Selected readings
- "Acronymomania" (8/28/14)
- "Acronyms in China" (11/2/19) — a dozen, with references for the study of the alphabet in Chinese
- "PUA" (8/30/24) — with interesting bibliography
- "Too tired to love: new set phrases in Pinyin" (12/23/19) — popular initialisms used in Mandarin; with generous bibliography for "creeping Romanization" and digraphia
Good news! Mark Hansell is in the midst of updating his classic paper on the incorporation of the alphabet into the Chinese writing system: Mark Hansell, "The Sino-Alphabet: The Assimilation of Roman Letters into the Chinese Writing System," Sino-Platonic Papers, 45 (May, 1994), 1-28 (pdf)
David Morris said,
June 3, 2025 @ 3:25 pm
I first read that as 'Chinese words for 'adults" eg grownups, elders, men, women … (there aren't many).
Paul Clapham said,
June 3, 2025 @ 6:22 pm
The other day I was watching a video about the avalanche which destroyed the Swiss village of Blatten. One of the local officials was speaking about it. He had a French name but he was speaking German (standard, not Swiss); perfectly normal for an official of the bilingual canton Valais/Wallis.
Anyway I learned from that video that the German word for "worst case scenario" is "worst case scenario" pronounced "à l’anglaise", as Wiktionary said.
Andreas Johansson said,
June 4, 2025 @ 12:22 am
I, too, briefly wondered why you'd call an adult a KPI.
jin defang said,
June 4, 2025 @ 6:27 am
Unquestionably acronyms are useful to avoid constant repetition of longer phrases, but they've proliferated to the point where we may be speaking to each other in them to the detriment of knowledge of their inherent meaning. While working for the navy, I discovered that many senior officers didn't know what the expansions of, for example, "sosus" and "himars" were. And that the navy wasn't necessarily with the acronyms of other services. Whereas if they had the expansions, the function of these systems would've been immediately obvious.
Anonymous said,
June 4, 2025 @ 7:13 am
If you'd been working in the corporate world rather than academia, you'd probably be more familiar with KPIs :)
Chris Button said,
June 4, 2025 @ 9:51 am
I swim in acronyms. And, as a technical writer, I spend a lot of time spelling acronyms out in documents. Particularly irksome is when the same acronym means two different things!
I understand the need for abbreviations, but more descriptive abbreviations would indeed be far preferable.
Chas Belov said,
June 4, 2025 @ 8:55 pm
ATM =
Automated Teller Machine
Asynchronous Transfer Mode
Adobe Type Manager
edith said,
June 5, 2025 @ 12:23 am
@chas
Your list is correct At The Moment.
Lasius said,
June 5, 2025 @ 2:22 am
@Paul Clapham
The term GAU (or Super-GAU) isn't really used anymore.
Philip Taylor said,
June 5, 2025 @ 3:51 am
Anonymous — "If you'd been working in the corporate world rather than academia, you'd probably be more familiar with KPIs :)" — how Mark has, until now, avoided encountering the term is a complete mystery to me. I can only think that his institution must be one of the most enlightened in the world, if it has managed to avoid the introduction of KPIs. See, for example, https://www.spiderstrategies.com/kpi/industry/educational-services/