Hi everyone, welcome to Office Hours with the Brofessor: the show
where I say things. Today I'd like to discuss something cool that
I've been noticing in the Chinese language: reduplication.
Before we get started, I'd like to send a big shout out to my friend
and coworker Manny Gomez, who's heading back to the States today
after a whopping seven years in China! That's a long time to be
here. Pretty incredible. Awesome working with you dude, and I'll do
my best to get out and see you in Virginia when I'm in the States
later this year. Thank you also for a year's worth of listening and
advice! It's really meant a lot to me how you were always willing to
listen and offer advice when I had something to gripe about.
So to start today's discussion, what is reduplication?
Reduplication is a linguistic process whereby a word, or part of a
word, is repeated. This could be for a variety of reasons, for
example adding emphasis. In English, for instance, we can say "this
coffee is really, really good," to indicate that this coffee has
surpassed mere really-goodness and achieved something
even greater!
Chinese
likes reduplication. You hear it all the time. To continue the
coffee example, for
"really, really good" we
could say in Chinese 好好喝
hao3hao3he1—literally
"good good drink". It's also used to make nouns
diminutive, and as such is used in Chinese nicknames. Take for
example a close Chinese friend of mine, whose name is 静
Jing4
but is called Jingjing
("quietquiet")
by
friends. My name in Chinese is 白西
Bai2Xi1
"White
West". The nice old lunch lady at the school where I work calls
me Xixi as
a cute nickname.
We
can also reduplicate verbs in Chinese for roughly the same effect as
English "take a (action). For example if I want to say "let
me take a look" I could say 给我看看
gei2 wo3
kan4kan4, literally
"give
me looklook".
There's
also a lot of what I like to call "semantic reduplication".
That is, even if a word itself is not reduplicated, its meaning
is. Let's look at a few cases:
-
朋友 –peng2you3. Peng2 and you3 both mean "friend". A fair translation of this compund word could be something like "friendpal".
-
睡覺 –shui4jiao4 could be translated along the same lines as "slumbersleep". It should be noted that the second part of this word, jiao4 has several meanings, only one of them being sleep.
-
思想 –si4xiang3—both parts individually meaning to think about something. I like to translate the compound as "ponderthink".
Cool stuff. Now, why in the world does Chinese do this?
My personal hypothesis is that English would too, if it had the same
number of homophones as Chinese.
Take,
for example, names. When we introduce ourselves in Chinese, we say
not only our names, but also how
to write them.
Mine
is not a particularly
orthodox Chinese
name,
but it
does sound
like my name in English and describes me pretty well. So
when
I introduce myself, I do it like this: "My name is Bai2 Xi1.
That's Bai2, as in the color white, and Xi1 as in east-to-west."
The
reason I have to explain
is because
in Chinese, the same sound could be a lot of different words, even
down to the tone. That is, Bai2Xi1,
even
as
opposed to, say, Bai1Xi4,
has a lot of meanings, and "White West" isn't necessarily
the first combination one would think of. My given name ("first
name") in Chinese is 西
Xi1
"west"...but
the same Xi1
sound
could mean, variously:
-
俙 Xi1 "pretend"
-
傒 Xi1 "servant"
-
僖 Xi1 "joy"
...along
with 156 other things(1).
So,
when I say my given name is Xi1,
it's anyone's guess as to which of the 159 different Xi1's
it could be.
The
same principle is true in conversation. Of
course, context can help us. If I'm at Starbucks, and I say cha2
it's more likely that I'm referring to 茶
cha2
"tea"
rather than 垞
cha2
"small mound or hillock" (2). This is why lots of language
learners, not just of Chinese, find it difficult to use a foreign
language on the phone—there's no visual context, and
visual/situational context is important!
Even
in a face-to-face conversation, sometimes context and meaning are
difficult to work out. That's where semantic reduplication comes in!
Let's look back at the above example 睡覺
shui4jiao4
"slumbersleep". By itself and without looking at the
written symbol, shui4
could
mean up to seventeen different things(3),
one of which is 睡shui4
"sleep". Similarly, jiao4
could mean forty-eight
things(4),
one of which is 覺
jiao4
"to
sense, perceive, wake up, or go to sleep". Therefore, by saying
"shui4jiao4"
it becomes clear which of the many variants I mean to use. Shui4
and jiao4
both mean a lot of different things by themselves, but if we
put
them
together
we can logically jump to the meaning held in common by both.
So
that's why, I think, this cool phenomenon of reduplication is such a
big deal in Chinese, and why, even if we don't reduplicate a word
itself, we very often reduplicate the meaning.
We beat homophones with synonyms.
This
richness of reduplication is
one of the coolest, most beautiful treasures of the Chinese language
that
I've found so far.
The more I learn, the deeper my appreciation of this richness
becomes. Cool stuff. So anyway, that's all for today, see you next
time!
Sources:
No comments:
Post a Comment