Category: Chinese (中文)

肚皮舞 (dù​pí​wǔ​)

By Simon

The other day I discovered that the Mandarin word for belly dancing is 肚皮舞 (dù​pí​wǔ​). As I knew the meanings of the individual characters, I could guess the meaning of the word, even though I hadn’t heard it before. 肚 (dù​​) is stomach or belly, 皮 (​pí​​) is skin, and 舞 (wǔ​) is dance.

I don’t remember seeing 肚 (dù​​) written down before, though was familiar with the phrase “我肚子饿” (wǒ​ dù​zi​ è) = I’m hungry (lit. “I belly hungry”). According to the MDBG Chinese dictionary, 肚 (dù) means belly, 肚 (dǔ​) means tripe, and 肚子 (dù​zi​) means belly / abdomen / stomach.

Related words and expressions include:

  • 肚臍 [肚脐] (dù​qí) / 肚臍眼 (dù​qí​yǎn​) – navel
  • 肚子痛 (dù​zi​tòng​) / 肚痛 (dù​tòng)​ – stomach ache / belly-ache
  • 大肚子 (dà​dù​zi) -​pregnant (“big belly”)
  • 爆肚 (bào​dǔ​) – deep fried tripe
  • 眼饞肚飽 (yǎn​chán​dù​bǎo) – to have eyes bigger than one’s belly (“eyes greedy belly full”)
  • 鼠肚雞腸 (shǔ​dù​jī​cháng​) – small-minded (“rat/mouse belly chicken intestines”)
  • 將軍肚子 (jiāng​jūn​dù​zi​) – beer belly (“general’s belly” – complimentary)
  • 香羊肚 (xiāng​yáng​dù​) – haggis (“fragrant sheep belly”)

Another word for stomach is 腹 (fù​) – abdomen, belly, stomach.ng

On the tip of my pyramid

By Simon

Last night I spoke quite a bit of Mandarin with some people from China, and while I was able to have a good conversation with them, though there were some things I couldn’t remember or didn’t know how to say. Usually when this happens I try to find another way to express the same idea, or if the people I’m talking to speak English, as was the case last night, I might say whatever it is in English and ask them how to say it in Mandarin. When they tell me, I often realise that I did know the words, but they just wouldn’t come to mind.

It’s likely that there’ll be gaps in your vocabulary, both in languages you’re learning, and in your native language, unless you memorise dictionaries. If the gaps are things you talk about frequently, it certainly helps to learn the words for them, but for other things you could use paraphrases. For example, one of the words that came up last night was pyramid. I didn’t know how to say it in Mandarin, but one of the Chinese guys did. After I got home I thought of a way to express the idea of a pyramid in Mandarin: 人造的小山，在埃及可看到的 (rénzhào de xiǎoshān, zài āijí kĕ kàndào de) – “man-made little hills that can be seen in Egypt” – not perfect perhaps, but it should get the message across.

In case you’re wondering, the Mandarin for pyramid is 金字塔 (jīn​zì​tǎ​), which could be glossed as “tower shaped like the character 金”.

Christmas

By Simon

Nadolig Llawen
Joyeux Noël
聖誕快樂
Nollaig shona doibh
¡Feliz Navidad!
Nollick Ghennal
Bo Nadal
Nollaig chridheil
メリークリスマス
Buon Natale
Frohe Weihnachten
Bon Nadal
Veselé vánoce
and Merry Christmas!

Colds, streams and rivers

By Simon

A snow-covered Siliwen Road in Bangor

It’s rather cold here at the moment with daytime temperatures not much above freezing, and nighttime dropping to -10°C (14°F) or even -20°C (-4°F) in places. As a result, some of the snow that fell last week has frozen solid and been trampled down on pavements and ungritted back streets making them decidedly icey and slippery.

I also have a cold at the moment, so I thought I’d look into how to say “I have a cold” in a number of languages. In French it’s “Je suis enrhumé” or “I am enrhumed”. Enrhumé comes from rhume (cold), which comes from the Old French reume, from the Latin rheuma, from the Greek rheuma (stream, current, a flowing), from rhein (to flow), from the Proto-Indo-European *sreu- (to flow). The Proto-Indo-European *sreu- is also the root of the Irish sruth (stream, river), the Welsh ffrwd (stream) and the Polish strumyk (brook). [source].

The Czech word for cold rýmu appears to be spring from the same source – mám rýmu is “I have a cold” by the way – as does the English word rheumatism. You can also say jsem nachlazený for “I have a cold” in Czech, which has a similar structure to the French phrase – “I am colded” or something like that.

In Welsh you don’t have a cold but rather a cold is on you: mae annwyd arna i, and the other Celtic languages use the same structure, “Is cold on/at me”: tá slaghdán orm (Irish), tha ‘n cnatan orm (Scottish Gaelic), ta feayraght/mughane aym (Manx).

In German “I have a cold” is Ich bin erkältet (“I am becolded?”), with erkältet coming from kalt (cold).

In Mandarin Chinese you say 我感冒了 (wǒ gǎnmào le) or “I catch cold [change of state particle]”.

Double dutch and lost dragons

By Simon

I’ve been playing with Xtranormal today and have made a couple of new films:

Double Dutch (in Dutch and English)

Where’s my dragon? (In Mandarin and English)

When you use Mandarin the system refuses to accept some of the characters you type in, including some common ones like 谢 (thanks). I tried substituting pinyin for the problematic characters, but found that this only works in some cases. Then I came up with the idea of substituting other characters with the same sounds, and it works well. For example 谢谢 becomes 泄泄 (泄 [xiè = to leak) and 话 (huà) – language, becomes 画 (huà) – picture. It’s not ideal, but it works and I’ve learnt some new characters, or re-learnt ones I should already know.

If I can work out how to add subtitles, I might do so, but it should be possible to work out most of the non-English bits from the English bits.

I’ve also posted these films on YouTube.

Chinese puzzle

By Simon

Chinese characters

Can any of you decipher the Chinese in this image?

The larger characters appear to be “仙露明珠方 朗潤松風水月北” (xiān lù míng zhū fāng lǎng rùn sōng fēng shuǐ yuè běi).

The smaller characters on the left appear to be “??扵甾香饭石生?” (??zāi xiāng fàn dàn shēng ?) – I’m not sure about the first two or the last one.

I know what parts of it mean, but not the whole thing.

[Update 21/11/2010]: according to a friend or a friend, the characters are “仙露明珠方明润，松风明月比清华。 于留香馆，石生画。” This is from 《小窗幽记》 (xiăochuāng yōujì) in 《醉古堂剑扫》 (zuì gŭ táng jiàn săo), Volume 12, Paragraph 121.

Xtranormal

By Simon

Today I came across an interesting-looking site called Xtranormal that use text-to-speech and other clever stuff – they call it ‘text-to-movie’ – to make animated films.

You just choose your characters and setting, and then type in the dialogue. You can also play with the cameras, animate the characters, and add other effects.

What interests me particularly about this program is that you can choose voices in a variety of languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Dutch, and I think this could be a useful language learning and teaching tool.

Here’s a short bilingual (English and Mandarin) film I put together:

[Update] It didn’t accept quite a few of the Chinese characters I tried to use, so you can only use very simple phrases. Here’s another short film in French and English:

Chinese gooseberries

By Simon

Kiwifruit

I discovered today that the kiwifruit is known as 獼猴桃 (míhóu táo) or macaque peach in China. It is the edible berry of the woody vine Actinidia deliciosa native to southern China, and the name kiwifruit was dreamt up by marketing people in New Zealand in the 1950s, before which it was called the Chinese gooseberry in English.

In Chinese it’s also called:

  • 獼猴梨 (míhóu lí) – macaque pear
  • 藤梨 (téng lí) – vine pear
  • 陽桃 (yáng táo) – sunny peach – now used to refer to star fruit
  • 木子 (mùzi) – wood berry
  • 毛木果 (máo mù guǒ) – hairy tree fruit
  • 奇異果 (qíyì guǒ) -“unusual/wonder fruit” – the most common name in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which also sounds like kiwi

[Source]

Many other languages call it a kiwi, or variants of that name, eg kivi, kiivi, ciwi, etc. Do you know of any other interesting names for it?

If you want to talk about more than one of this type of fruit, do you say kiwis, kiwifruit, kiwifruits, or something else?

Weeds

By Simon

Yesterday I finally started work on my garden, and one of the first things I did was a bit of weeding. The large crop of dandelions and other weeds in my lawn will take quite a while to remove, but in the meantime I thought I’d look at the origins of a few garden-related words.

Weed comes from the Old English word wēod (grass, herb, weed), which is related to the Old High German word wiota (fern), and probably comes from the Proto-Germanic word *weud-. The verb to weed comes from the Late Old English weodian [source].

Words for weed in other languages include: chwynnyn (Welsh), fiaile (Irish), 野草 [yěcǎo – “wild grass”] (Mandarin), mauvaise herbe (French – “bad grass”), 雑草 [zassō – “crude/miscellaneous grass”] (Japanese).

Dandelion comes from the Middle French dent de lion (lit. “lion’s tooth”), a calque translation of the Middle Latin dens leonis – the leaves are shaped a bit like lion’s teeth.

Folk names for dandelion include tell-time, which refers the practice of blowing the seeds – the number of breaths needed supposedly being the hour, and the Middle English and French names piss-a-bed and pissenlit, which refer to its diuretic properties [source].