Thoughts on the Chinese language.

catch_the_sun

Another decent video, I think?

glennmagusharvey

edit: moving this PSA to the videos thread

glennmagusharvey

catch_the_sun wrote: »

Another decent video, I think?

I disagree when he says "most people" don't know about roots in English; I would venture it's not necessarily common knowledge to know them in detail but people would probably surmise even without formal knowledge that, between telephone and television and telephoto lens and "telegraphing" in videogames, "tele-" probably means something about transmitting a signal over a distance.

And I would venture a guess that these linguistic clues are more often than not embedded in one's natural understanding of English, simply from pattern recognition.

But yes this is a very neat video about constructing compound words are formed in Chinese.

And by extension, new vocabulary too. Artificial intelligence is 人工智能, where 人工 is "labor" as a noun on its own or "artificial" as a modifier, and 智能 "intelligence/ability"; in which 人 is human, 工 is work, 智 is wisdom/cleverness, 能 is capability. Artificial intelligence is thus "human-made intelligence ability".

Due to the (basically) complete lack of new any shared orthography between Chinese and western languages, meanings are often translated, as he notes.

glennmagusharvey

Related

I was actually looking into the translation of Pokémon recently. Turns out it's slightly complicated. According to Wiktionary...

It was officially known as 寵物小精靈 (Simplified Chinese: 宠物小精灵, Jyutping: cung2 mat6 siu2 zing1 ling4, Pinyin: Chǒngwù Xiǎo Jīnglíng) in Hong Kong from 1998-2016, and in mainland China from 1998-2000. 寵物 means pet, 小 means small, and 精靈 seems to basically mean elf or fey/fairy or spirit. If you've seen the infamous "Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal" hack you might recall the script saying stuff like "elf's world"; this is probably where it comes from. (Sidenote: the Japanese equivalent to 精靈 seems to be 精霊, which is "seirei" in Romaji.)

It was known as 神奇寶貝 (Simplified Chinese: 神奇宝贝, Jyutping: san4 kei4 bou2 bui3, Pinyin: Shénqí Bǎobèi) in Taiwan from 1998-2011 and mainland China from 2005-2010. 神奇 means "magical" or "miraculous" (a combination of 神 meaning "god" or "mystery" and 奇 meaning "miracle"), and 寶貝 means "precious [things]" (itself a longtime compound formed from 寶 meaning "precious" and 貝 "seashell").

It is apparently known in all regions now officially as 寶可夢 (Simplified Chinese: 宝可梦, Jyutping: bou2 ho2 mung6, Pinyin: Bǎokěmèng), which is a Mandarin transliteration of "Pokémon" which you can see in the Pinyin transliteration.

FYI: The "e" sound in Mandarin pinyin seems to be sorta like shaping your mouth to say the English short e sound but saying the English short u sound instead. The diacritics just show the different tones.

But, like that guy points out, it seems there was some picking-and-choosing done to select the best homophones for the franchise. 寶, as noted earlier, means "precious"; 可 means "can" (the helping verb) or "able", and 夢 means "dream", so (I think) the combination can be read as suggesting "precious [things] with the ability to make dreams happen".



Also apparently there's also the fan-name 口袋妖怪 (Simplified Chinese: 口袋妖怪, Jyutping: hau2 doi6 jiu1 gwaai3, Pinyin: Kǒudài Yāoguài), which was/is apparently more used in mainland China. This is a meaning translation of "pocket monster" (technically through the Japanese transliteration of this English name), because 口袋 means pocket and 妖怪 means......well, it's the exact same characters as the Japanese "youkai", so we could translate it as "monster" but those of you who are familiar with Japanese pop culture know that that translation comes with a bit of nuance. FYI 妖 means "supernatural" and 怪 means "strange" (but as a noun can mean "strange creature"). (口袋 means "pocket", and seems to be from 口 which means "mouth" but is probably used to mean "opening" here and 袋 just means "bag" or "sack".)