Timely Snow

James Fallows has a couple of interesting discussions about the use of foreign words in Chinese, here and here.

He points to the fact that “Carrefour” isn’t translated phonetically, unlike, for example, the practice in Japan. (Although, I’ve not been very impressed with that as an aid to communication. I remember spending a frustrating time trying to figure out where some Japanese tourists hiking in Switzerland wanted to go, and many of the examples I’ve heard of, such as something like “mycar” for “car” seem bound to cause trouble).

Fallows points out that many foreign words enter Chinese via Cantonese (presumably through Hong Kong) and may have a closer phonetic correspondence there.

I want to discuss a phenomenon, though, where Chinese basically chews up and digests foreign words in a process that you can see play out over a matter of a few years.

I’ve seen this happen with a number of technology-related words over the last 20 or so years. When I first came to Beijing, the word for a cellphone was “大哥大”—da4 ge1 da4, or “godfather” in the Tony Soprano sense. Supposedly, this is because people here first saw them in Hong Kong movies where the lookout would use a cellphone to warn the big boss that the cops were coming. That was in wide use until perhaps 5 years ago, when someone laughed at me when I used the term. Now it’s called 手机—shou3 ji1—or “hand machine,” which is a far more descriptive term.

What was once a “CD 盘”—CD disc—CD pan2, is now a ‘光盘”—guang1 pan2—bright disk,from the word for laser.

“email” is now much more commonly 电子邮件—dian4zi you2jian4—electronic mail. And so on.

The process seems to be that a term initially comes into Chinese with adherence to the pronunciation in the foreign language. Over time, like Pinocchio, it becomes a “real” Chinese word, made up of meaningful characters. I read somewhere that something like this happened with “telephone,” now 电话—dian4 hua4—“electric speech.”

Why is this a good thing? Although it’s annoying to us foreigners, one must presume that a language primarily serves communication among native speakers. Imagine a child learning the term “triangle” vs. another learning the term 三角形—san1 jiao3 xing2—“three corner shape.” Of course, “triangle” means that, too, but so few American preschoolers speak Greek that it’s likely to be lost on them.

The digestion of foreign words into meaningful, compositional Chinese names is a powerful way in which the Chinese language absorbs new technology and ideas. In some cases, including commercial ones, clever people manage to translate terms in away that keeps something of the original pronunciation while producing a meaningful Chinese word. A former student argues that the word for “radar”—雷达—lei2 da2—”thunder answer/inform” is a “real” Chinese word, and the word for [military] “tank”- 坦克—tan3 ke4—from “flatten” +”subdue” might be,too.

And there are commercial names that do this as well. One particularly refreshing example is Coke, 可口可乐—ke3 kou3 ke3 le4—something like “tasty and enjoyable” or “tasty cola.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 7:06 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.