Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 11:36:19AM -0500, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Tristan wrote:
> >Even I, a native English speaker who has never spoken a language without
> >he/she/it, mucks them up, as well as brother and sister (so I normally
> >fall back on `sibling')...
>
> That's another weirdity of learning English in school - they tell you that
> there simply is no direct translation of the Swedish word _syskon_
> "sibling", and that if you desperately need to translate ie you have to use
> "brother or sister" (unless you've got a feminist teacher - she would tell
> you to write "sisiter or brother"!:-)).
[snip]

Well, native Chinese speakers (all, or most "dialects") have a problem
translating the English "brother" and "sister" -- because there are TWO
words for brother and sister -- one for older, one for younger. This is
one of the things that stood out the most to me when learning English as a
kid. Although I *liked* the generality of the English term, it gets really
annoying that when I translated them to my native tongue I have to say
"younger-brother or older-brother", or just pick one arbitrarily and hope
I didn't guess wrong :-) (and be quite embarrassed if it turned out to be
wrong.)

There are, of course, compound terms that refer to both younger and older
siblings, but those sound rather technical and are generally avoided in
casual conversations.

And if you think this is bad... just wait till I tell you about
translating "aunt" and "uncle"... *snicker* there are distinct words for
your father's siblings (and distinctions between younger/older,
male/female), your mother's siblings (and distinctions between
younger/older and male/female), AND your in-laws, plus separate terms with
the same distinctions for each uncle/aunt on your in-laws' side, etc.,
etc., ad infinitum. And this only covers relatives of the same
generation... it gets a LOT worse with grandparents, nephews, nieces, ...

(And, unlike what they tell you, most Chinese can't figure out all those
terms either... they tend to only know those terms that actually
correspond with somebody that exists in their family -- which is a
consequence of having the proper term seared into their memory through
strict repetitious reminders at every single family reunion -- and they
usually have a hard time remembering exactly what relationship the term
denotes. :-P)


T

--
There are four kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

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