I appreciate that this is satire, but the Chinese don't engage in ritual bowing. That's just not a thing. (It's most famous in Japan, but Koreans do it too in some circumstances -- in fact there was recently a controversy about a Chinese competitor in a Korean pop contest who didn't bow, and then compounded the offense by suggesting that the reason she didn't is that Korea was a vassal state, making bowing more appropriate to them.)
I did think it was funny that the American says "hello" in Korean. From the YouTube comments, apparently the Chinese characters for "ha ha ha" are only used that way in Cantonese; in Mandarin it just means "shrimp shrimp shrimp," apparently. Lot's of cultural confusion going on in this video.
So usually the way that works is that Cantonese and Mandarin speakers say the character two different ways, but it means the same thing in the written form. This means that there are different puns available in the different dialects, which are mutually incomprehensible as spoken languages; but as written languages, they convey the same meaning.
It looks like shrimp is "ha" with a long tone in Cantonese, and "xia" with a long tone in Mandarin. But it means "Shrimp, shrimp, shrimp" in both as written.
Yeah, Japanese has adopted several thousand Chinese characters and the same thing holds, although there's been some divergence of both meaning and morphology in the two cultures.
Chinese characters can also be used to transliterate sounds, in which case you ignore the meaning of the characters and just use the sounds. This happens with transliterated foreign words, for example. There was a lot of that in 19th and early 20th century texts when China & Japan were trying to deal with a lot of new Western concepts. Some they translated, some they just transliterated. So, you'll be reading some late 19th century text and run into a string of Chinese characters that make no sense if you read them for meaning, but if you sound them out they'll approximate the sound of a foreign word.
So, apparently, in Cantonese they have adopted three shrimp characters to indicate the sound of laughing "ha ha ha" and ignore the meaning of the characters themselves, whereas in Mandarin they don't do this. So a Mandarin speaker would read it "shrimp shrimp shrimp" and a Cantonese speaker would read it as laughter.
On a philosophical note, this also allows for an interesting form of philosophical argument. I was reading some stuff on moral philosophy from 18th century Japan a few months back. The fellow I was reading was disagreeing with the mainstream Neo-Confucian ideas and one way he made his point was to change the Chinese characters for some concepts while keeping the sounds the same.
I don't know how this works in Chinese, but in Japanese there are typically several Chinese characters that have the same sound. So, he would keep the sounds of the usual Neo-Confucian terms, but swap out the characters to alter their meaning.
I think the Chinese not bowing ceremonially is either a communist thing or the neo nationalism of Xi at work. We ritually bowed three times (more respectful) to my grandparents when we saw them, and still do at their grave. I'm sure it's traditionally true in Chinese culture.
6 comments:
I appreciate that this is satire, but the Chinese don't engage in ritual bowing. That's just not a thing. (It's most famous in Japan, but Koreans do it too in some circumstances -- in fact there was recently a controversy about a Chinese competitor in a Korean pop contest who didn't bow, and then compounded the offense by suggesting that the reason she didn't is that Korea was a vassal state, making bowing more appropriate to them.)
I didn't know that about Chinese culture.
I did think it was funny that the American says "hello" in Korean. From the YouTube comments, apparently the Chinese characters for "ha ha ha" are only used that way in Cantonese; in Mandarin it just means "shrimp shrimp shrimp," apparently. Lot's of cultural confusion going on in this video.
So usually the way that works is that Cantonese and Mandarin speakers say the character two different ways, but it means the same thing in the written form. This means that there are different puns available in the different dialects, which are mutually incomprehensible as spoken languages; but as written languages, they convey the same meaning.
It looks like shrimp is "ha" with a long tone in Cantonese, and "xia" with a long tone in Mandarin. But it means "Shrimp, shrimp, shrimp" in both as written.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%9D%A6%E5%AD%90
Yeah, Japanese has adopted several thousand Chinese characters and the same thing holds, although there's been some divergence of both meaning and morphology in the two cultures.
Chinese characters can also be used to transliterate sounds, in which case you ignore the meaning of the characters and just use the sounds. This happens with transliterated foreign words, for example. There was a lot of that in 19th and early 20th century texts when China & Japan were trying to deal with a lot of new Western concepts. Some they translated, some they just transliterated. So, you'll be reading some late 19th century text and run into a string of Chinese characters that make no sense if you read them for meaning, but if you sound them out they'll approximate the sound of a foreign word.
So, apparently, in Cantonese they have adopted three shrimp characters to indicate the sound of laughing "ha ha ha" and ignore the meaning of the characters themselves, whereas in Mandarin they don't do this. So a Mandarin speaker would read it "shrimp shrimp shrimp" and a Cantonese speaker would read it as laughter.
On a philosophical note, this also allows for an interesting form of philosophical argument. I was reading some stuff on moral philosophy from 18th century Japan a few months back. The fellow I was reading was disagreeing with the mainstream Neo-Confucian ideas and one way he made his point was to change the Chinese characters for some concepts while keeping the sounds the same.
I don't know how this works in Chinese, but in Japanese there are typically several Chinese characters that have the same sound. So, he would keep the sounds of the usual Neo-Confucian terms, but swap out the characters to alter their meaning.
I think the Chinese not bowing ceremonially is either a communist thing or the neo nationalism of Xi at work. We ritually bowed three times (more respectful) to my grandparents when we saw them, and still do at their grave. I'm sure it's traditionally true in Chinese culture.
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