(Prompted by
this story in the Wall St Journal, found via
an entertaining post on
Language Log.)
It is probably well-known now that I like to dabble in foreign languages. I can make polite noises in more than half a dozen, though, alas, often not a lot
more than polite noises. The hardest of any one I've tried so far, by a country mile - or perhaps I should say, by a
li - was Mandarin, the
official dialect of the People's Republic of China. (And the Republic of China, too, come to that. But most people call that bit Taiwan.)
Mandarin isn't really a dialect, as such; the different flavours of Chinese are as different as English is from German, Italian and Romanian. All the Indo-European languages share roots, but today sound and work radically differently, and so does Mandarin compared to Cantonese, Hakka and Wu, say.
But it's hard to understand how very differently they work. For my travels in China 12y ago, I memorized a few useful phrases:
• "Ni hao" (hello)
• "Zai jian" (goodbye)
• "Xiexie" (thank-you)
• "Qing wen, ni hui jiang yingyuwen ma?" (Excuse me, do you speak English?)
• "Wo yao pijiu" (I want beer)
• "Wo shi chiisude" (I am a vegetarian)
• "Wo bui yu fu haishi rou" (I do not eat meat or fish)
• "Wo shi foujian" (I am a Buddhist)
(Accuracy by no means guaranteed; it was 12y ago!)
I'd have added "yes" and "no" to that list, but they don't have words for them, any more than Irish does. (This is why even non-Gaelic-using Irish people stereotypically tend to use verb phrases instead of a simple affirmative or negative: "Are you going to the pub?" "I am." Started in Gaelic, now a regional habit even in English.)
From this, it's fairly straightforward to assemble a few more handy ones - "wo bui jiang zhongwen" (I don't speak Chinese) and
the essential for dealing with importunate street vendors, especially hordes of underage ones: "women bui yao!" (We don't want!)
The only snag being that Mandarin is tonal, and every syllable means something different depending on whether you say it with a low-then-rising tone, a high-then-falling tone, a falling-then-rising tone, a high tone or a normal tone. Get one tone wrong, the whole sentence falls apart into noise. For instance, "ma" means "mother", "hemp" or "torpid", "scold", "horse" or is a sort of spoken question mark, depending on the tone of voice in which you say it. Thus a hapless Chinese speaker really cannot guess what a foreigner mangling their language means. It's not like "Allo allo": we can decode "good moaning" into "good morning" easily in English, but in Chinese, just get one tone wrong and an otherwise perfect utterance becomes "whoops my antelope is inside the hatstand". Great fun!
Thus I was intrigued to read
an academic paper on the introduction of what might reasonably be called "polite noises" into spoken Chinese. Apparently, a number of these phrases of mine, along with one I'd forgotten - "dui bu qi" (excuse me) - are recent modern introductions being pushed by the government in an effort to make Chinese people seem less impolite to foreigners, a problem anticipated to be a big one during the Olympics.
The phrases all have completely different original meanings - everything does in Chinese, it is probably the world's best language for puns and wordplay - but they were never used like this in normal life. It's a strange new idea, imitating foreign languages' strange meaningless little words which indicate courtesy to strangers. I feel like I've paid for a forgery; it's very odd. I always try to be polite and use Chinese in Chinese restaurants, even though 90% of them or more are Cantonese owned and run, but all I'm doing is - well, as the paper says:
Used by a foreigner, ni hao says, “Greetings, I am a foreigner.”
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