Category: Chinese (中文)

Word of the day – 和

By Simon

The Chinese character héIn Mandarin Chinese, the word 和 (hé) has a number of meanings. On it’s own it is usually means ‘and’, but also means harmony, peace, to be affable, the sum, and ‘of Japan’.

Here are a few words featuring this character:
和平 (hépíng) – peace; peaceful; mild
和鳴 [和鸣] (hémíng) – to sound in harmony
和風 [和风] (héfeng) – a gentle breeze
和服 (héfú) – a (Japanese) kimono
和氣 [和气] (héqi) – gentle; affable; agreeable; friendly
和聲 [和声] (hésheng) – (musical) harmony

When pronounced hè, this character means to match; to harmonize, or to write a poem in reply (和詩). It has another pronunciation – huò – which means to knead or to mix. Apparently some people pronounce it han as well, but I’ve never heard that pronunciation.

In Japanese, this character is pronounced wa, o, yawa- or nago- and means peace; harmony; the sum; the total; Japan and various other things.

Peeling the library

By Simon

Today’s word, library, comes from the Old French librairie, a ‘collection of books’, which is a nominal use of adjective librarius, ‘concerning books’, from Latin librarium, ‘chest for books’, from liber (genetive of libri), ‘book, paper, parchment’, originally the ‘inner bark of trees’, probably a derivative of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) base *leub(h) – ‘to strip, to peel’.

In French the word librarie means bookshop. A French library is a bibliothèque, which comes via the Latin bibliothēca, from the Greek βιβλιοθήκη (bibliothêkê), ‘a place to store books’, which breaks down into βίβλος (biblos), ‘book’, and θήκη (thêkê), ‘chest’.

Variations on the theme of bibliothèque are used in a number of other languages, including:

Dutch – bibliotheek
German – Bibliothek
Greek βιβλιοθήκη (bibliothiki)
Italian/Portuguese/Spanish – biblioteca
Russian – библиотека (biblioteka)

In Welsh, a library is a llyfrgell, from llyfr, ‘book’ and cell, ‘cell’, while in Irish it’s leabharlann, from leabhar, ‘book’ and lann (not sure of it’s meaning*). In Chinese, a library is 圖書館 [图书馆] (túshūguăn) = ‘map book house’.

It seems that the word library, or something like it, is not used in it’s English senses in many languages. The only ones I can find are Sesotho and Tswana (laeborari), Tsonga (layiburari) and Venda (laiburari), which appear to be loanwords from English. The Basque word for library, liburutegia, might possibly have Latin or Greek roots.

[Addendum] *lann in Irish is an archaic/obsolete word that means floor, enclosure or church. It comes from the Old Irish lann (building, house, land, plot, plate), from the Proto-Celtic *landā ((open) space, land), from the Proto-Indo-European *lendʰ- (land, heath). It is cognate with the Welsh word llan (church, parish, monastery, yard, enclosure, village), the Spanish landa (plain), and the English words land and lawn [source].

Sources: Online Etymology Dictionary, Wiktionnaire, Yawiktionary

New Cantonese phrases

By Simon

The Cantonese phrases page on Omniglot now includes quite a lot of new phrases with sound files. If you’re able to make recordings of any of the other phrases, do let me know.

I also have new phrases and sounds files for Mandarin, Japanese and Thai, which I’ll be adding to the site soon.

These new phrases and sound files were all provided by the good people at HNHSoft, who make talking phrase books for PDAs and mobile phones.

Word of the day – 月食 (yuèshí)

By Simon

Today one of my Chinese contacts asked me the meaning of 月食 (yuèshí). It’s not a word I’ve come across before and I wasn’t able to guess its meaning from the meanings of the individual characters, so I had to look it up. It means ‘lunar eclipse’ and the individual characters mean ‘moon’ and ‘to eat’. I suppose it does look like part of the moon has been eaten during an eclipse. A solar eclipse is 日食 (rìshí).

nciku

By Simon

I found a new online Chinese dictionary called nciku today, via Sinosplice. The interface is in English and Chinese. It includes a handwriting recognition system which you can use to enter characters by hand, and which seems to work well, though was a bit slow for me. There’s a handy auto complete function which suggests words and expressions when you enter individual characters. The results include pinyin, sound files, words that feature the characters, and examples of usage, including idioms. There’s also some discussion of various Chinese-related topics. Unfortunately you have to sign up (for free) to use some of the functions.

Shanghai Metro

By Simon

There’s apparently a plan to train the staff of the Shanghai Metro in basic phrases in five major Sinitic languages in order to provide information about fares and directions to non-Mandarin-speaking domestic tourists and visitors, according to a blog post on the Shanghaiist.

In response to this plan, the director of the Shanghai Language Works Commission said:

“We have contacted the Metro management today, stating that the program could violate the country’s language policy to promote the use of Putonghua.”

“There are at least 1,000 regional dialects in China, not including more branch dialects in different regions. The right way to solve communication barrier is to speak Putonghua.”

“What about passengers who speak other dialects? Using only the five dialects would not solve the problem.”

Inspite of this, Shanghai Metro plans to continue with the training scheme and are thinking of extending the service to Shanghai South Railway Station Metro stop. The languages in question are Cantonese, Wenzhou-hua (Zhejiang), Wuhan-hua (Hubei), Changsha-hua (Hunan) and Fujian-hua (a.k.a. Hokkien). Presumably these are the most common languages spoken by visitors to Shanghai, though the post doesn’t discuss the reasons for choosing these particular ones.

Word of the day – 差不多 (chàbuduō)

By Simon

差不多 (chàbuduō)

The phrase 差不多 (chàbuduō) is one of my favourite phrases in Chinese. It literally means “lacking not much” and can be translated as “more or less”, “near enough”, “almost” or “about”. It’s used frequently in Taiwan, and also in China I think, and seems to embody quite a common philosophy, i.e. there’s no need to do everything perfectly, as long as things get finished, so don’t worry too much. That’s my impression anyway.

A longer version of this phrase is 差不多就可以 (chàbuduō jiù kěyǐ), which means “near enough, that’ll do”. Quite good English equivalents are “close enough for government work” and “near enough for jazz”.

You can see a good example of chabuduoism from Taiwan on Pinyin News.

I found an equivalent expression in my big book of Welsh idioms: yn rhywle o’i chwmpas hi (lit: “somewhere around it”).

Do similar phrases exist in other languages?

Chinese names

By Simon

The Chinese versions of candidates’ names in some Massachusetts ballots apparently have some unfortunately comical or negative meanings, according to an article I came across today. For example, one candidate’s name could be translated as “Sticky Rice” or “Uncooked Rice”, another’s as “High Prominent Noble Educated” or “Stick Mosquito”.

I’m trying to work out what character were used for these names. Any ideas?

Which Mr Wang do you mean?

By Simon

On the news this morning they mentioned that China is suffering from a chronic shortage of names, which leads to many cases of mistaken identity. They gave an example of one man who was arrested by mistake – it was one of his neighbours with the same name who the police were after.

The ordinary people of China are traditional known as 老百姓 (lǎobǎixìng), which means ‘old 100 surnames’. This comes from the ancient tradition that citizens adopt one of a hundred single character surnames. Today there are up to 450 surnames in use in some areas of China, such as Beijing – though fewer in other areas. Here is a list of the current top 100 Chinese surnames.

According to an article on this topic in the Telegraph, the most popular surname in China is 王 (wáng), closely followed by 李 (lǐ), which between them account for 14% of the population or some 185 million people.

One solution being considered is to allow children to take the surnames of both parents. The Chinese government is also considering allowing a greater range of characters to be used as surnames, and also for the use of ethnic minority surnames, which are usually replaced with Chinese surname with a similar sound.

Word of the day – 衛星

By Simon

weixing/eisei - satellite in Chinese and Japanese

The Chinese word for satellite, 衛星 [卫星] (wèixīng) means literally ‘guard(ing)/defend(ing) star’. When I came across this word the other day while working on a Chinese version of a website, it took me a few moments to work out what it meant. Eventually I deciphered it from the context and the second character, which I knew meant star. The same characters, 衛星, are used in Japanese, but they’re pronounced eisei.

One of the things I like about Chinese is that when you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can often guess its meaning from the meanings of the individual characters.

According to this Online Etymology Dictionary, the English word satellite first appeared in writing in 1548, when it meant “follower or attendant of a superior person”. It comes from, via French, from the Latin satellitem (nom. satelles) “attendant”. It was first used to mean “man-made machinery orbiting the Earth” in 1936, when such things were theoretical. The first artificial satellite, a name used to distinguish them from natural satellites like the moon, was Sputnik 1, which was launched in 1957.

The Welsh word for satellite is lloeren, which comes from lloer, moon. In most of the other languages I’ve checked, the word is satellite or something similar.