Engrish?

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by ScaryMonster, Sep 6, 2009.

  1. ScaryMonster I’m the whispered word. Valued Senior Member

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    Is it the structure of the sentences in Mandarin that causes this sort of translation mistake?
    It seems that many “Engrish” signs bare no resemblance to the ideograms they are meant to translate.
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2009
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    What makes you think it's a mistake?
     
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  5. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    It would help if you explained the han zi. The only ones I can read are zhong xin, "middle heart," which I guess is a typically poetic way of saying "center."

    I gave my dogs steak bones this morning so I just had to clean up some curled poo.

    I don't know how to answer your basic question since you seem to understand Chinese offhandedly and therefore probably know the language better than I do.

    But yes, even though Chinese uses a subject-verb-object syntax, which makes it feel comfortable to Indo-European speakers (unlike, say, Japanese syntax, which is topic-description), the familiarity can be misleading since its grammar is substantially different from Indo-European in many other important ways.

    Start with our articles and inflections, which must seem like a waste of breath to the Chinese, who so often forget to stick them in. Then go on to our tiny set of prepositions with which we have to describe every possible relationship, something they do more precisely with an inexhaustible supply of nouns and verbs. And adjectives and adverbs--again why can't we just use verbs like they do?

    There's a reason they became known as "Chinamen" when they first came over to work on the railroads. That's a literal translation of zhong guo ren. Even though we say "businessman" and "serviceman," for reasons even I can't understand--much less explain to a foreigner--we invoke an arbitrary need for an adjective and say "Chinese man" instead of "Chinaman."

    But the biggest problem is probably in the definition of a "word" itself. Dian hua, is that two words, "electric speech"? Or is it one word, "telephone"? Okay now that you've got that one, how about ji qi jiao ta che? Five words, "gas engine leg pace vehicle"? Two words, "motor bicycle"? Or one word, "motorcycle"?

    It's tempting to say those are all compound words and that it's a matter of choice whether to count them singly or multiply, as with English babysitter vs. baby-sitter. But then what do you do with a "word" like dong xi, which means "thing," and can't be deconstructed into "east-west."

    Since every Chinese syllable comprises a single word, Chinese people often translate their speech one syllable at a time. The results can be amusing.

    BTW, "Engrish" is Japanglish. Japanese has no L so the people often mispronounce foreign L's as R's. In Chinglish it's the other way around: "Amellican." At least in Cantonese, the first Chinese people we were exposed to. Mandarin has an R although it's not very similar to ours.
     
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  7. Doreen Valued Senior Member

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    Just being a nuisance, but if it is not very similar how can we say they have an R? They don't have that letter, so we must be talking about the phoneme. If this sound is not like our R, what makes it an R.

    I feel almost ashamed to have brought this up, but
    1) you know a lot so perhaps I am missing something
    2) it seemed absurd what you said.

    This combination became a rather compelling itch.

    My apologies.
     
  8. visceral_instinct Monkey see, monkey denigrate Valued Senior Member

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    Fraggle, what is a topic-description syntax?
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Actually there are two sounds in Mandarin that are transcribed R. One only occurs in the syllable er, where the E is pronounced like the U in American English "up." But since one of the words pronounced er means "child," it is used as a diminutive suffix so the sound is common, particularly in Beijing dialect. Often the e is elided and the R is just tacked on to the end of another vowel, so dian ying, "movie" ("electric shadows") becomes dian yir.

    This R is actually nearly identical to American English R--which means it's not like the flapped, gargled, trilled, etc., R in most other languages. (The British only pronounce R our way at the beginning of a syllable, elsewhere it's flapped or silent.) Linguists needed a Latin letter to transcribe this sound so they picked R because at least it makes sense to English speakers.

    The other R is almost indescribable. It occurs as a consonant at the beginning of a word, but it is also used as a vowel. It's like pronouncing an American R and a French J at the same time, somewhat similar to Czech Ř. It's written R at the beginning of a word, but I when it's a vowel. So rou, "meat," sounds a little like French jeau, and zhi, "paper," sounds like you're just drawing out the sound JJJJJJJJJJJJ with no vowel.

    I can't say why they picked R to transcribe that sound but they only had 26 Roman letters to pick from and they didn't want to use diacritical marks. That's why they had to use X for palatalized sh and Q for palatalized ch.

    Neither of these R phonemes exists in Guangdong (Cantonese), the only other language of China that most of us will ever encounter.
    Hmmm. I wish the internet had an audit trail. I can't find the original Wikipedia article in which I encountered the term. You can't Google anything including the word "syntax" or you get a million articles about computer language.

    In our subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax (including other languages in which the order is different) we have a word identifying the person or thing that acts, a word describing the action, and (optionally) a word identifying the person or thing upon which the action is performed. In topic-description syntax, a few words are used to set up a topic, which can be a person, object, idea, scene, activity, etc. Then more words are used to point out its feature(s) of interest, such as condition, truth, proximity, time, place, relationships, etc.

    Of course a person who knows both a topic-description language and an SVO language can translate the thought from one to the other, adopting the appropriate syntax, so we're not made aware of the fundamental difference between the two thought processes. We translate Nihon-go ga dekima-sen as "I don't speak Japanese," but the original syntax states something more along the lines of "Japan's language: state of being spoken is false."

    This is why it is so incredibly useful to know more than one language, and the less similar the better. Each language comes with a way of thinking, and the more ways you can think, the smarter you are.
     
  10. visceral_instinct Monkey see, monkey denigrate Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, thanks for explaining Fraggle.

    So if I wanted to say 'I have a grey kitten' in Japanese the actual sentence would be something like: 'Grey kitten: state of existing is true'?
     
  11. mugaliens Registered Member

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    So sorry, but I not touch your curl-poo garden with a ten foot poe.

    With what little I learned in fifth grade, somehow that rings true.
     

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