Re: CHAT: Fun with Chow Mei!
| From: | J Y S Czhang <czhang23@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, March 21, 2004, 21:30 |
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In a message dated 2004:03:21 10:57:38 AM, markjreed@MAIL.COM writes:
>Today I was at the local take-out Chinese establishment waiting for my
>favorite dish, "Singapore" Chow Mei Fun (spicy thin rice noodle dish
>which I'm told has little to do with Singaporean cuisine). Now, their
>menu is bilingual - English/Spanish, since there are many Hispanics
>in this area. (Not trilingual; the only Chinese on the menu is in
>the item names, and they're all Romanized). And the dish I was
>waiting for was listed on the Spanish side as - you guessed it -
>Chow Mei Divertido. :)
>
>Naturally I thought this was hysterical. [...]
Oh yes this definitely a howler and a half. Even a few of my
Spanish-fluent friends say it is hysterical, but point out - naturally - that it only
works if one is bilingual and have some idea of Chinese food. Carlos comments that
this mainly limits this "in-joke" to urban Spanish-speaking bilinguals in
_norteno_ areas. A Brazilian friend retorts that he could understand and
appreciate this joke, too. Carlos fires back some rhetorical question (in mangled
Portuguese) asking why Brazilians always have to have to put a word in sideways...
AiYaH! with friends like these, who needs enemies or enemas...
--- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* Hang Binary,baby...---
Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)
<A HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A>
Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...
...languages are "naturally evolved wild systems... So language does not
impose order on a chaotic universe, but reflects its own wildness back." - Gary
Snyder
"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
a chapter on pidgins & creoles, John McWhorter,
_The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_
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