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Playtimes
T
his is an important warning. NEVER
speak while travelling. You may die of a
misunderstanding. I guarantee that if you say,
“Good morning,” with the wrong tone, it will
actually mean, “Kill me now,” in at least one Chinese
dialect.
Consider this: I used to speak basic Cantonese, but
gave it up one night after I walked into a Hong Kong
restaurant and announced that I was hungry: “
Ngoh tou
ngoh
.” My friends fell about laughing because I’d used the
wrong tones, changing the meaning to: “I have diarrhoea.”
Later, I called out: “
Maai dan
” (“Bring the bill”), but
again used the wrong tones, turning it into: “I want to buy
an egg.”
My highly amused companions, who were at the
cigar stage of the meal, sternly warned me not to call for a
cigarette lighter (“
da fo gei
”) because that phrase with the
wrong tones means “Let’s beat up the waiter.”
I’m quite sure people who create Asian languages
insert these traps on purpose. They are full of them. For
example, if your foreign host mentions that he or she has a
“
baba
”, DO NOT offer to babysit, however much you like
cuddling babies. In Japan, a
baba
is an old lady. In Chinese,
baba
means “father”. In France, a
baba
is a round spongy
object containing rum – a bit like my father. He spent a lot
of time in France, so that may be the actual derivation.
My visits to Tokyo are always tricky, since my Japanese
friends speak a sort of half-English, using just the first bits
of English phrases. Sexual harassment is “
seku hara
”, and
personal computer is “
paso kon
”. Knowing my luck, “Good
morning” is short for “Good morning, kill me now.”
British people assume that their country’s nickname,
“Old Blighty”, comes from the word “blighted” (destroyed)
and refers to the bad weather. Blighty is actually the Hindi
“
bilayati
” which means “Foreigner Land”.
Years ago, there must have been a conversation like
this:
Indian: “So, foreigner, you come from Foreigner Land
[Biliyati]?”
Brit: “Ah, so that’s how you say ‘Britain’ in your quaint
Asian tongue; let me just write that down.”
A French reader told me about a Parisian chef who,
Language lessons
Language traps are always tripping me up,
writes father-of-three
Nury Vittachi
.
in 1765, started selling a tasty liquid he called a restorer,
which is “restaurant” in French. The English thought
“restaurant” meant “place to eat out”.
At this venue, Germans were dipping
sops
(Deutsch
for “chunks of bread”) into the delicious warm bowls of
restaurant. The confused English told the world that the
new dish was called “soup”.
So the English sentence: “Sitting in a restaurant, I
drank some soup” actually means “Sitting in some soup, I
drank some bread.”
I was disinclined to accept this gross slur on English
speakers but I checked Wikipedia and found the
Frenchman was right in every detail.
But going back to meals in Hong Kong, one of my
colleagues tried to tempt my family and me to go to dinner
with him to eat a popular local dish he translated as
“chicken with white fungus”. I was tempted to reply that
there was already chicken with white fungus in the shared
fridge at my office, along with chicken with green fungus
and pork fillets with mystery grey fur.
But I just kept my mouth shut. I’ll drop him an email
and tell him that my kids these days prefer food from
Foreigner Land.
Nury welcomes your comments and ideas at his Facebook
page:
.
last word
