Tag: Loanwords

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Culture Current Events History Technology

rèlàng

rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪 熱浪) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Currently, many around the world are being affected by heat waves, which scientists say is part of a pattern of global warming caused by human activity. As of this writing, jw.org is featuring the article “Climate Change and Our Future—What the Bible Says”. The Mandarin version of this article uses the expression “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪 熱浪)”, this week’s MEotW, to translate the English expression “heat wave”.

It seems that “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪 熱浪)” is just a simple, straightforward exact translation of “heat wave”. While sometimes, like with “zhǐnán‐zhēn ((zhǐ·nán {(points with) finger → [points]} · south 指南)‐(zhēn needle 针 針) → [compass])” (a previous MEotW), the Mandarin expression for “compass”, East and West approached the same thing from opposite directions, other times, like with “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪 熱浪)” and “heat wave”, the reality referred to is so simple and the applicable metaphors are so obvious that East and West settled on the same linguistic solution.

While “rèlàng (rè·làng heat · wave 热浪 熱浪)” is definitely not a loanword (like previous MEotW “kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK)” is), which is a word that’s adopted from one language into another language without translation, it seems possible that it’s a calque, or loan translation, which is “a word or phrase in a language formed by word-for-word or morpheme-by-morpheme translation of a word in another language”, according to one of the definitions of “calque” listed by Wordnik.

Wordnik—Chinese Field Connections

By the way, while this blog is mainly about Mandarin expressions, it’s written in English, mainly for English-speakers, and often it will compare Mandarin expressions to English expressions. Of course, it will use English words—like “loanword” and “calque”—to discuss Mandarin expressions. So, it’s good for it to have a resource to refer to like Wordnik, which claims to be “the world’s biggest online English dictionary, by number of words”. Being online, it is not constrained by the limitations imposed by the millennia-old medium of paper, as delightfully explained in this TED talk given by Erin McKean, the founder of Wordnik:

Here are a few quotes from the above video:

Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan? You can’t get a smaller ham—the English language is as big as it is. So if you have a ham butt problem and you’re thinking about the ham butt problem, the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counter-intuitive—paper is the enemy of words.

They’re like, “Oh my, people are going to take away my beautiful paper dictionaries?” No, there will still be paper dictionaries. When we had cars, when cars became the dominant mode of transportation, we didn’t round up all the horses and shoot them. You know, there’re still going to be paper dictionaries but it’s not going to be the dominant dictionary. The book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in, and it’s not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in.

[I still use the illustration about cars and horses when talking to people who worry about what would happen to Chinese characters if Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) were ever to get widely adopted.]

Lexicography [the practice of compiling dictionaries] is not rocket science, but even if it were, rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days. You know, it can’t be that hard to find some words.

This is a little-known technological fact about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm, and words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography. Isn’t that great?

If we get a bigger pan, then we can put all the words in. We can put in all the meanings. Doesn’t everyone want more meaning in their lives?

The web page for this TED talk says it was part of the TED2007 conference. I remember that after I saw it, it influenced my thinking as I subsequently contributed to some of the projects for Chinese-field unofficial language-learning resources. (E.g., “We can do this, whether or not it’s rocket science!” “We can transcend paper now!” “Including the meanings is good! Doesn’t everyone want more meaning in their lives?”) Many such resources, like the Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus Expressions (Web) resource, the Referenced Theocratic Expressions (RTE) resource, and even, in a way, the 3-line, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus, etc. material resources can be thought of as specialized dictionaries. (In 3-line, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Plus, etc. material resources, you can look up Mandarin words in the order in which they appear in certain official Mandarin publications!)

Making Good Use of Bigger Pans

Years ago, there was one project that was discussed, for creating an unofficial pocket-sized paper dictionary for Chinese theocratic terms that was to be…about the size of what we now call a smartphone, except, of course, thicker. Looking back, it’s not surprising that that project never came to fruition, partly because of the limitations of paper. Those limitations would have necessitated selecting for inclusion in the proposed pocket-sized dictionary a subset of the full dictionary also being worked on (which we now have in the form of the RTE), and they also would have led to difficulties regarding formatting and printing out for such a small form factor—it was just too small a pan.

Also, note that 2007, the year that the above-mentioned TED talk was given, was also the year that the iPhone came out. The iPad followed not long after in 2010, and pretty soon, smartphones and tablets proliferated among those in the Chinese fields, along with resources like apps, websites, digital publications, etc. that were designed for such mobile devices. When entire libraries can be contained in one’s smartphone or tablet, one is probably not usually inclined to seek out paper equivalents. Indeed, to many who grew up with touchscreen mobile devices, paper publications that don’t allow things like resizing of text or looking up information on words seem broken.

Categories
Current Events History

duòtāi

duòtāi (duò·tāi {letting/making fall} · fetuses/embryos → [[inducing [of]] abortion] 堕胎 墮胎) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

With recent legal developments in the USA, abortion has become a topic of intense discussion. The Mandarin version of a recently featured article on jw.org, “What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?”, contains some Mandarin expressions that are relevant to this topic. Of these, the primary one is of course “duòtāi (duò·tāi {letting/making fall} · fetuses/embryos → [[inducing [of]] abortion] 堕胎 墮胎)”, this week’s MEotW, which corresponds with the English expression “abortion”.

Verb-Object Construction

“Duòtāi (Duò·tāi {letting/making fall} · fetuses/embryos → [[inducing [of]] abortion] 堕胎 墮胎)”, with the verb “duò ({letting/making fall} 堕 墮)” and its object “tāi (fetuses/embryos 胎)”, is an example of a Mandarin expression with verb-object construction.

The ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, edited by John DeFrancis and Victor H. Mair, among others, tells us the following about the entries in it that are marked as having verb-object construction:

V.O. (Verb-Object Construction, Dòng-Bīn Jiégòu 动宾结构).

Many English verbs get translated into natural Chinese as a verb plus an object noun, e.g. chīfàn for ‘eat’, shuōhuà for ‘speak’, etc. It is important for two reasons to know what is merely a verb in Chinese and what is actually a verb-object construction.

First, verb-object constructions can never take a second object, i.e. chīfàn can never be followed directly by something else to be eaten.

Second, a verb and its object can be separated from one another, thus allowing

(i) aspect particles to be placed directly after the verb, e.g. chīle fàn ‘after finishing eating’;

(ii) modification of the object, e.g. chī Zhōngguófàn ‘eat Chinese food’; and (iii) quantification of the noun, e.g. chīle sān wǎn fàn ‘ate three bowls of rice’.

Sounds Like…

In addition to meaning “fetus; embryo”, “tāi (fetus; embryo | tire 胎)” also functions as a loanword that means “tire”, as in “car tire”. This is because of the pure coincidence of how similar “tāi (fetus; embryo | tire 胎)” and “tire” sound. This reminds us that with languages, as modern linguists say, speech is primary and writing is secondary. Thus, because of them sounding similar when spoken, “tire” is translated into Mandarin as “tāi (fetus; embryo | tire 胎)”, instead of as a word written with some Chinese character that looks like a car tire or something like that.

Trivia Showing Something Vital

A brief web search indicates that Norma McCorvey—who, using the pseudonym “Jane Roe”, was the plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade legal case at the centre of the recent controversy—was apparently partly raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Even if she was, though, she obviously didn’t continue to live faithfully as one. This reminds us that it’s vitally important for each of us to make the truth our own—our own ongoing decisions and actions are what determine who and what we are, not how we happened to have been raised.

Categories
Culture History

kǎlā’OK

kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

The selection of this week’s MEotW, “kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK)”, was inspired by a Twitter thread of epic linguistic and etymological nerdery that I recently came across, which begins with this tweet:

Here are some of the tweets in this thread, which summarize how “kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK)” became a word in Mandarin:

Borrowed Culture

In addition to “kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK)”, another Mandarin word which borrowed from Japanese culture, which borrowed from Western culture, is “wénhuà (wén·huà {(with) writing} · transformed (system) → [culture] | {(with) writing} · transformed → [cultural] 文化)”, the Mandarin word for culture itself. As the MEotW post about that word says:

To translate the Western concept of culture, the Japanese coined the word bunka, which is written 文化 (see Liu, Zhengtan et al. 1984, s.v. wenhua). The Chinese imported this character combination from Japan and pronounced it according to the rules of their own language: wénhuà.
—“Two Steps Toward Digraphia in China”, by Xieyan Hincha

So, people going on about “pure” Chinese culture are ignorant or in denial about the reality of how other cultures have influenced Chinese culture, and about what a great, enriching thing that can be. Anyone who has been in a group or congregation with people predominantly from a single cultural background, and who has also had the pleasure of being in a group or congregation with people from a variety of cultural backgrounds, has had the opportunity to see how the atmosphere of the latter situation can be a breath of fresh air compared to the relatively narrow—and potentially narrow-minded—cultural worldview that is sometimes allowed to be present in the former situation. Some parts of the world too are starting to realize the advantages of considering various cultural inputs, compared to trying to be productive or creative in a monocultural bubble.

Indeed, the proud “not invented here” logic of Chinese cultural purists who would, for example, reject Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) because it uses letters from the Latin alphabet would also require us to reject things like European-style punctuation, Arabic numerals, and kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK) because of their foreign-to-China origins. But, Chinese culture without kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK)? How dreary! Next, they’ll be wanting us to do long division using Chinese characters—十一, 九十九, 一千八百三十六, …—instead of Arabic numbers, and they’ll be wanting us to read and decipher Chinese writings the old-fashioned way, without the “crutch” of those decadent European punctuation marks! 😱

(Of course, with kǎlā’OK (karaoke 卡拉OK), as with anything that may involve worldly culture and music—which can possibly include some bad things along with the good things—Christians must be selective, exercising good spiritual judgement and following their Bible-trained consciences.)

As members of the international brotherhood of Jehovah’s people, and as ones “taught by Jehovah” himself, we need not be content with, let alone proud of, a particular way of doing things prescribed by human, worldly Chinese cultural tradition.—1 Peter 5:9; Isaiah 54:13; 1 Corinthians 1:31; 1 John 2:17; Mark 7:1–13.