mandarin at the karaoke

(leia em português: mandarim no karaokê) — by mati ★

← back to marticles

you already know 26 chinese characters. this sounds wrong, but it isn't.
— but i've never studied chinese! or japanese, that also uses those characters.
i know, i know. but even then. there's 26 characters that you already know. i think the number 26 might even give you a hint. what else would you associate with the number 26?
— uhhhhh... i dunno. letters of the alphabet? there's 26 of those, from a to z.
bingo! it's the letters of the alphabet. some chinese words are written with them, and i'll explain this to you in this rentry!


intro to the chinese writing system

if you can read chinese or you know how the orthography works, you can skip this section.

i'll be really brief here because the focus of this article isn't exactly all the intricacies and details of how chinese writing works, but there's a few things that i have to explain. so, in chinese, each one of those characters — called hànzì (汉字 in simplified, 漢字 in traditional; read note) — represents a single syllable.

note: spelling variants of chinese characters

there are two ways of writing chinese characters — traditional and simplified. they represent the exact same language and the exact same words, but they're used in different regions, kind of like english's color and colour spelling variants. if you wanna know about this in further detail, read this wikipedia article here: chinese characters § simplification, or just look for "traditional vs simplified characters" or something of that sort. the forms that i'll use in this article here are the simplified ones, as they're used by many more people in total.

for example, the word 手机 shǒujī, meaning 'cellphone', is written with two characters: the first one is for the first syllable, 手 shǒu, and the second one is for the second syllable, 机 . in most cases, each of those syllables corresponds to a morpheme (a sequence of sounds with a certain meaning; that is, a whole word like table, or part of one like the -ing in building, that turns build into a noun), so the system ends up fitting the structure of the language quite nice and neatly! for shǒujī, shǒu means 'hand' and is 'machine', so a cellphone in mandarin is literally a 'hand machine'.

except not every shǒu is going to be written with 手, because 手, besides sounding like shǒu, has a meaning — it writes the word 'hand'. other words with that sound, but where shǒu means something else, like 首都 shǒudū 'capital city', are written with another shǒu — here namely 首, literally 'head' but in a large majority of cases, used metaphorically in compounds as something like 'main' or 'first'. what i want to say here with all of this is that the chinese writing system is logographic: each character represents a morpheme, that is, an item that has meaning, except when they don't.

the cricket, an animal made of cric and ket (or not)

— but what do you mean by "except when they don't", mati?
well, well, well. not every element that has a meaning in chinese has only one syllable — it would actually be insanely bizarre to expect that, any language has words and morphemes of different sizes. yes, the general pattern is for there to be only one syllable, but there's some with two, a few others with three or more. one of those is the word for 'cricket', 蟋蟀 xīshuài. the and shuài don't mean anything at all; they have as much meaning as the "cric" and "ket" in the english word cricket. but it's written with two characters, not one! it's 蟋蟀.

oh my god, now what? i said that "each character represents a word or a part of a word that has a meaning", but the "cric" and "ket" in cricket don't mean absolutely anything, both in english and in mandarin.

but there's a reason for this — the most important rule of the chinese writing system is one syllable, one character. this corresponds really well with each syllable having a meaning in most cases, but there's a few cases where it doesn't, and this has to be dealt with in some way. in a few native words and older borrowings, this is dealt with with two new characters that are only used in that specific word. this is also how it goes for 玻璃 bōli 'glass', 珊瑚 shānhú 'coral', 葡萄 pútáo 'grape', and there's a newer case of this too: 咖啡 kāfēi 'coffee'.

'sand throw', or better, 'sofa'

not all words are written with characters invented just for them, though. most of them don't do this actually, because it would be an absolute hassle to learn so many characters for every single word that enters the language. so what they do is, they use characters that already exist but for their sounds: something similar to when people write the word before as ⟨b4⟩, where the ⟨b⟩ and the ⟨4⟩ are there only for their sounds of /bi/ + four = before, completely disregarding the meaning of the number 4.

an example of this would be 沙发 shāfā 'sofa, couch'. if you read that word by the meaning of each of its characters, it's not gonna make any sense at all. 沙 shā is 'sand', and 发 is 'throw', and there's absolutely no way on earth — or on mars, or anywhere else for that matter — that you could join those two to make a word that means 'sofa'. this is because you're not supposed to read the characters by their meanings!!! you have to read them phonetically here. shāfā is just a borrowing from english sofa, and the characters used to write it are kind of arbitrary. they could've chosen any other two shā and to do this, but they ended up deciding on those two that you just saw — ⟨沙⟩ and ⟨发⟩.

the same thing we just saw with shāfā applies to more than 99% of foreign words borrowed into mandarin. sometimes it happens that they'll try and have a more clever take, where they mix translation with a borrowing, and this creates certain words that i personally think are my favorite, like 百香果 bǎixiāngguǒ 'passion fruit'. the 果 guǒ just means 'fruit', but 百香 bǎixiāng is english passion. at the same time though, bǎixiāng literally means 'a hundred aromas', 'a hundred fragrances'. this kind of words are called phono-semantic matchings, and here's some of my other favorites that you can look up on wiktionary: 聲納, 得來速, 酷兒, 套套邏輯.

ok, but what do latin letters have to do with all this?

— i don't understand why you've been talking about this for so long, but haven't mentioned a single latin letter yet...
calm down, wait a little, it's because i need to explain those things first. but the first situation where you'll see latin letters in mandarin is in abbreviations like CD and DNA. all latin-letter names in mandarin are borrowed from english, so CD is pronounced xīdī and DNA is dìˈēn'ēi or dì'ēnnēi (i'm sorry if anything about the specific pronunciation of the letters happens to be wrong; the sources vary a lot here because there's no standard, especially for tones). another word that's also written in latin letters, and that basically everyone knows around the world, is OK ōukèi, ōukēi. it just means "okay", but remember it 'cause it's going to be important later.

but just like chinese characters that already exist, like 沙 shā 'sand', can be used to represent only the sound shā in shāfā → 沙发, latin letters can also do this. for example, the word kiū or kiù, which comes from english cute and is a slang word that means 'cute', is written with the latin letter Q. another word, that's pronounced the same, but comes from another source — namely min nan 𩚨 khiū — is a term, mainly in taiwan, for a texture/feel of certain foods that's like a mochi, kind of like "al dente" for pasta. (read more about "Q" in this new york times article; i've already removed the paywall for you.)

and here i can finally get to the word kǎlā'ōukèi (or -kēi), which means 'karaoke'. it comes from japanese カラオケ karaoke, just like english 'karaoke' (the form of the word looks really japanese, if you think about it). it's written with four characters, because it's four syllables. the first two are quite easy: 卡拉 kǎ-lā, where 卡 would mean 'to get stuck', or another meaning that it has, but here it's just phonetic, and 拉 would be 'pull', but once again it's just phonetic here as well. now, the interesting part are the two other characters, which aren't chinese, but latin — the ōukèi in kǎlāˈǒukèi is written "OK", with two latin letters.

and piecing up everything, we get to 卡拉OK. that is the word for 'karaoke' in chinese, and i think it's amazing.

until next time!

Edit
Pub: 02 Nov 2023 03:35 UTC
Edit: 29 May 2024 12:17 UTC
Views: 535