Funky English

In my minority literature class, recently we've been reading books by Chinese immigrants like Kingston's "China Men" or Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club." What's fun about these books is the way the authors make word puns or play with the multiple meanings that arise going back and forth between English and Chinese. Unlike English, Chinese is a tonal language in which one sound can have many different meanings, depending on the tone. So the author will point out, that "Ro - Lo- Bo" to use a fictitious example, can mean second uncle or frog prince or tea ceremony.

However, the truth is that these second meanings aren't even noticed by Chinese speakers. Tones are tones, after all. A word with a different tone is a completely different word, with no relationship to the first. I know this because, when trying to learn Chinese, I often have trouble with words that sound alike.

In Chinese, there are words that sound exactly the same, but have different characters, and there are words that have the same characters, but sound different. Then there are the words we foreigners get mixed up, that have different tones, or sound the same to us, but which are never confused by native speakers. If you drop off the tone and write the word in blank pinyin, or an English approximation, a learner of Chinese, or someone who's not been brought up with Chinese as a first language, can readily see the substitutions and word games. For example, "Yao" can mean "I want", "to bite", and "medicine". So, "Wo yao yao yao," means I want to eat medicine. This is hilarious to foreigners or learners of the language. Chinese people, however, don't get the humor.

Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston can only use these word puns because they were brought up in America but in a Chinese family - and the only people who can fully appreciate their little jokes, or have the same kind of fun with the language, are other people who can look at Chinese with an English mind-set.

I often find the very opposite of this phenomenon with my Taiwanese girlfriend, who hears connections between English words that I've never considered before. For example, when I'm cold, I say "Brrrr...." which to her sounds like "Bird." She never knows why I say "bird" when I'm cold. Even though I've explained it to her, she always thinks its funny to translate back into Chinese, "Xiao Niao" - Little Bird. When I was growing out my facial hair, she asked how to call it. I said, "Beard." She translated into Chinese, "PiJiu", or "Beer", which is what she heard.

One day after staying in watching movies, my girlfriend said "We are tomatoes on a couch!"
It took me awhile to figure out that this was what her memory and translation had retained from a phrase she learned in class, "Couch Potato."