Linguistic Notes

I know I’m a lot more interested in linguistics than just about everyone I know, and I’m brimming with anecdotes that may come off as extremely nerdy.  I'm also aware that this Chinese-intensive post is not relevant to all (both) my readers.  I do hope to impart some of the experiences that I really honestly find awesome, and maybe some of you will find linguistics cooler. Or maybe you’ll just realize I’m an even bigger nerd than you thought.

Background: Hong Kong is largely a trilingual city of English, Cantonese and Mandarin.  I am also trilingual in the same languages, and at a very different rate than the locals. The average local will speak Cantonese natively, understand most Mandarin but speak it by changing their speech in what usually amounts to a poor imitation.  The grasp of English varies widely but is generally pretty limited, especially in speaking ability.

I’m a native English and Cantonese speaker but that doesn’t mean the two languages are equal.  My Cantonese vocabulary was pretty confined to what would be spoken in a family home. I then studied Mandarin in college and lived in Beijing for two summers, where the Mandarin I developed was very utilitarian and colloquial.  The end result was that although the two languages are related, my grasp of Mandarin was actually very different from my grasp of Cantonese, and there was a slew of vocabulary that I only knew in one language and not the other, and would often have to do an awkward triangulation maneuver to figure out what to say.  I have since spent some effort improving my reading and have bridged the gap between the two languages.  Still, since I spent so much of my time speaking Cantonese while illiterate, there are many words which I could say without knowing what that meant.  This happens in English too.  Think about the word “skyscraper.” A student of English can learn that this word refers to very tall buildings – in Chinese this is just 大夏, or big building.  If you never saw the spelling, the word could be spelled scighskreper for all you knew.  You could conceivably understand the concept of a skyscraper, using it correctly in speech, without realizing the imagery in its etymology, a scraper of the sky. This etymology is also entirely self-contained within the English language, as opposed to a word like astrology, where the etymology derives from foreign languages: astra (Latin: star) + logos (Greek: knowledge).

So my Chinese experience has been riddled with these realizations.  The most shocking to me was cha siu 叉烧, the delicious barbecued pork that I’ve loved my whole life.  Never in the first ten thousand times I said this word did I realize what it literally meant. I think I even learned to read it in Beijing and knew that the second word siu meant barbecue.  I figured cha was some arcane word for pork.  It wasn’t until one day randomly on Wikipedia that I read that cha actually meant fork.  That is also a word I’ve said countless times, like in 刀叉 (knife and fork), but I guess I rarely had to read it.  Turns out cha siu is made by roasting the pork on a large two pronged fork. I had probably eaten several bushels of it without realizing the etymology of my food.  It literally means barbecued on a fork, or for short, barbecued fork. 

Last week I went around looking for a place to rent.  I came across glass rooms on the ground level with lots of pictures of rooms and numbers on them and lots of Chinese characters.  I didn’t understand what everything meant – some numbers were square feet measurements, others rental prices, others sale prices, others I still don’t know – but I knew that I could go inside and talk to people who’d get me closer to my goal of residency.  Once I stopped to actually look at the signs.  I saw this word: 租. Then a strange process went through my head.  I figured it was pronounced “zho” (rhyming with foe). Why did I figure that? I had seen the word before and knew it was pronounced zu in Mandarin. I’m familiar enough with the sound changes between Mandarin and Cantonese to know that there’s a good chance that word would be pronounced “zho” in Cantonese, which is incidentally the same pronunciation for the word for rent.  It would make sense that this word meant “rent.” But why did I recognize that character? I suddenly realized I had seen it on taxi stands in Beijing, where taxis are called 出租车 chuzu che. I had first learned the pronunciation of that word out of necessity, and already recognizing chu (go out) and che (car) I figured out what that sign meant when I saw it. So I had also said taxi countless times without realizing what it meant.  Then I thought about it and realized that in mainland China, taxi literally means “for-rent car.” Ahhhhhhhhhh. I felt like I had been given different pieces in two languages and just connected them to solve the bilingual puzzle.  Incidentally, taxi’s are called 的司 dik si in Hong Kong, a transliteration of the English taxi.

Also while renting, I was exposed to formal numbers. Numbers are among the simplest characters to write. Here’s 1, 2, 3: 一二三. However, since they are so simple, in formal contexts, generally monetary ones, separate characters are used. This way a check amount cannot be easily modified. These formal numeral characters are pretty obscure and my relatives that lived here didn’t even know how to write them. When I signed my lease, the amount of my monthly rent was formally written – thus I nervously signed off on a figure that I couldn’t read.  Luckily I could still tell the number of digits in the amount, and since the first two digits were different, I knew that the maximum amount the number could be was 9,800, which was precisely my rental amount.  So I knew I couldn’t be cheated.

Tsim Sa Tsui is a pretty happening place at the southern tip of Kowloon. I know where it is, some of what’s there, how to pronounce it in Cantonese and English but I never thought about what it meant.  Then I was reading its name on the subway and realized that Sa means sand, and Tsui means mouth. I didn’t recognize the character for Tsim but I surmised that it meant sharp because I knew that word had the same sound. So Tsim Sa Tsui literally meant sharp sandy mouth, which made sense because it was a point at the south of the land that jutted into the harbor.  Then I looked at the character for Tsim. (jian in Mandarin).  It is 尖，which I realized was the character for small on top of the character for big.  So the character depicted something that was small on top and bigger on the bottom, or essentially anything sharp.  And that reasoning is pretty sharp.

Also here’s my tips for reading characters without memorizing 10,000 of them: Learn the basic ones, then when you recognize the character as part of a larger character (on the right side), then pronounce it the same as that word but in a different tone.  Or maybe change the initial consonant sound. I’ve been using this for a few years now and I can fake my literacy level pretty well.

I always mix up Australia and Europe in Chinese.  In Cantonese, Australia is ngou zhouw, Europe is ao zhouw.  In Mandarin, Australia is ao zhou, Europe is ou zhou.  Basically they are the opposite of each other, and I never remember which is which. The way I eventually figure it out is by remembering that the first part of Australia is the same as the first part of Macau, which in Mandarin is aomen.

This is the first time outside of the classroom that I have been called by my Chinese name, 李启明. When addressing me in Chinese, my family calls me 明明 Ming Ming, and just about everyone I knew on a first name basis in China called me Cal or Chris.  Here in transactions, people ask not what your name is by how they should address you.  To this I say my last name is Lee and they call me 李先生, or Mr. Lee. In Beijing, I was interested in seeing what my landlord the second time around would call me, as he didn’t speak any English and invited me over for dinner.  To my surprise he never asked for my name and instead called me 小李, or Little Lee.  Here people have addressed me by my full name as well as 李先生, and I’ve seen Lee Christopher Alan on official documents (because the surname comes first in Chinese). Hearing this name being used seems a little surreal, as if by answering to it I’m adopting another identity.  Also surreal is hearing 李先生 in Cantonese because that was previously an address that I had only ever heard used to refer to my father.

A very good indicator variable for whether I know a country's name in Chinese is whether it was in the 2010 World Cup...

Today it really clicked on me that the word for thank you, ng goi, is also used to say "excuse me" when you want someone to get out of the way or get their attention.  Shocking that I never really understood that, and I still don't fully understand it.  Anyways I'm definitely learning every day and at a really good point in my language process, where I'm improving and it's not frustrating.  I've come to really like learning languages and getting a thrill when understanding a word for the first time, and I think I may scratch an itch for another language in the future.