I always enjoy visiting Engrish Funny for some translation laughs. This image, from sister site Failbook, presents some interesting cultural differences.
In English, the π symbol (meaning the number) is of course pronounced as “pi,” thus making the phrase on the t-shirt amusing to English speakers. However, the Greek letter π is “p,” with the pronunciation the same. It’s also pronounced as “p” in French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Slovak, Bulgarian and Portuguese. It seems that English is the odd one out in the way we pronounce it.
Do you know of any other languages that pronounce π “pi”?
One of the things I find fascinating about languages is connotations. Even if some languages (or even cities or countries) share the same words, the common meanings may be completely different.
Today I learned that in China, you can use the term 爱人 (àiren, literally love person) to mean your husband, wife, partner, sweetheart. A man can introduce his wife to people as his àiren, and the wife can do the same. I find this quite sweet and, as a person who severely dislikes most terms for ’significant other’ in English (including partner, other half, better half), I think it does the job quite well. There’s also the added bonus of not having to define your relationship to strangers (yes, there’s a stigma about not being married in a lot of places).
Unfortunately, the same phrase in Japan translates to the English meaning of lover. This conveys a somewhat illicit meaning, a mistress, affair, or some other kind of secret relationship. Imagine the staid Japanese coming to China and seeing people introducing their lovers in such a casual way!
Do you know of any other interesting differences in connotation?
Google’s NGram Viewer allows anybody to create quick graphs showing word and phrase frequencies in books going back to 1800. The tool searches a database of words from over 5 million books, and you can filter for American English, British English, English fiction, Chinese, French, German, and Russian.
Although it has its restrictions, such as not giving us accurate information about spoken usage, it’s a great analysis tool. One of the Wall Street Journal’s blogs did a Christmas analysis to see whether the PC phrase ‘Happy Holidays’ has infiltrated the world of books. A quick graph generation later, and it seems that ‘Merry Christmas’ is still way out in front. It also seems that around 1900, people started capitalising the ‘merry’.
When I filtered for British English only, it seems that ‘Happy Holidays’ is almost never used. The tool is case sensitive, though, so there has been some use of ‘happy holidays’, but these could have been in more general sentences, rather than as a greeting. In British English, ‘h/Happy Christmas’ is much more common than in American English, and ‘happy Christmas’ was almost as popular as ‘Merry Christmas’ at a few points in time. It seems that the use of ‘happy Christmas’ is on the decline recently, though.
In other Christmas-related news, while Father Christmas and Santa Claus are about equally popular in British literature (and both much more popular than the Easter Bunny), American literature uses Santa Claus almost exclusively (with Father Christmas being about as common as the Easter Bunny).
This is an old skit, but it’s smart, funny, and brings up a good point about people speaking their own languages while in foreign countries. Sure, sometimes you don’t have any other choice, but… Anyway, just watch the video and tell me what you think in the comments.
Most people think of language as a way to communicate and describe the world around us, but have you ever considered how much our language affects how we see the world?
I read a great article on the Wall Street Journal about just this. It’s not something that I really think about unless it’s put in front of me, but language really can affect how we interpret the world.
One of the most interesting parts of the article talks about how some cultures (up to a third of languages!) don’t have words like left and right, and instead talk about direction in absolute terms (north, south, etc.). In these languages, you would talk about things like your east leg, or your northwest arm, depending on which direction you were facing. If you’re thinking about absolute directions all the time, you are most likely going to be better at finding your way around. Also fascinating was that for people who speak languages where no blame is given to accidental wrongs (e.g. someone knocking over a glass), it is more difficult to remember who did it. For example, in English we would say that ‘Jack knocked the glass over’, but in Japanese or Spanish, they would just say that the glass had been knocked over. I wonder how much this has perpetuated the tendency in English-speaking countries to lay blame on others for things that happen to us.
Does language shape culture, or does the culture we live in affect the language we use?
There are many words in other languages that don’t translate directly into English, or succinctly describe a thing or situation which would take far more words to say if I tried to do it. A new website is collecting these ‘untranslatable’ words and presenting them to the world daily. Better Than English is taking user submissions (and I guess a few submissions by the admin/s) and discussing words from all over the world. Here are some of my favourites:
Zechpreller- a German word to describe someone who leaves a restaurant or a bar without paying the bill. Utepils - a Norwegian word to describe sitting outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer. Tocayo- a Spanish word meaning a person who has the same name as you (I met someone who has the same first and last names as me, so she is now my tocayo instead of just being ‘the other Wendy Wong’).
If you have any favourites of your own, feel free to submit them in the comments, or directly to Better Than English.
A lot of phrases in English are understatements, as if we don’t want to commit too much to what we’re saying. One of them that springs to mind is easy on the eyes, which is another way to say someone is good looking, sexy, beautiful.
In Chinese, there is the opposite. The word they use for ‘ugly’ is 难看 (nánkàn), which is, literally, hard to look at. Ouch. The Japanese also have the wordバックシャン (bakku-shan) for someone who appears hot from behind, but not from the front.
Do you know any other interesting phrases for someone who’s not so easy on the eyes?
*Note: looking up ‘ugly’ on Google Images isn’t really that good of an idea.
Quentin Tarantino’s film Inglourious Basterds taught us all the important lesson that the wrong hand signal could well get you killed (if you were pretending to be a Nazi in the wrong place and time). In the film, someone gets gunned down because he uses the wrong hand signal for the number three.
A lot of people use the middle three fingers to denote the number three, though some use other combinations. In the town in Germany mentioned in Inglourious Basterds, people use the thumb and first two fingers. In China, many people use the last three fingers (similar to the A-OK hand signal). I found myself using the latter yesterday when buying three bananas. It used to feel wholly unnatural to me, but it suddenly doesn’t feel so weird any more. Strange.
Which signal do you use for three?
*Out of interest, you can also use ‘finger’ as a measure of alcohol. If you hold your finger horizontally against the bottom of the glass and fill it to the depth of the top of your finger, that’s ‘one finger’. So, three fingers would be a pretty strong drink!
I’ve just read an article about the often difficult practices of apologising in Japan. The article itself is focussed mainly on corporate responsibility-taking, but it talks about some interesting facets of Japanese apologies, which are of many different degrees, including the depth of bow accompanying them.
The art of apology is an intrinsic part of Japanese culture. When you ask a shopkeeper for help, or when you bump into someone on the inevitably crowded trains, you say “sumimasen.” A direct translation of this phrase is “excuse me,” but a more a more accurate rendition is “I am so sorry to bother you.”
Apologizing is as common as saying please and thank you. It is a way of maintaining harmony in social situations. If you are the first to leave work in a Japanese office, you say “Osaki ni sitsuree simasu,” which means “I commit the great rudeness of leaving first.”
It also gives some extreme examples of historical corporate apologies:
Japan has a long history of corporate personal apology in Japan. In 1985, following the crash of Japan Airlines flight 123, the president of JAL Yasumoto Tagaki assumed full responsibility for the accident, the worst single-airplane incident in aviation history. Of the 524 passengers only four survived. Takagi went to the extraordinary length of personally visiting the families of the victims. It was only after he had fulfilled this obligation and offered one last public apology that he resigned. Another JAL employee, a maintenance manager apologized in a more extreme manner: he committed suicide.
Some apologies don’t actually apologise, either. Sometimes they include remorse and regret, and sometimes even compensation, without ever actually taking responsibility and giving apology. Do you think these are valid apologies?
Some parts of culture are so deeply ingrained in countries that it becomes very difficult for outsiders to get a grip on them. How is apologising different in your country?
In the same way that I’m fascinated by westerners getting terrible Asian character tattoos, I am deeply interested in the reasons that Chinese people pick their English names (or anyone who chooses a name in another language, actually). Of course, not everybody has an English name, but it’s rare that you find a younger person who does not.
Unsurprisingly, young Chinese people take this as an opportunity to express their individuality. In a country of well over a billion people, there are only a hundred or so popular last names, and similar first names are common. This means that it’s not uncommon for people to meet, go to school with, or work with someone with exactly the same name (I even met another Wendy Wong recently!). Choosing an a name that reflects some of their personality can be quite important to some, which leads to some interesting choices. Adjectives and nouns are also quite common names in Chinese, but they can sound odd to English speakers.
Interestingly, English names can also go back in the other direction, as Chinese people call their friends by a ‘Chinesified’ version of their English name. I had a colleague called Echo, but everyone called her Ai-ke when speaking in Chinese.
I recently found out that another colleague, Gills, intended to call himself Giggs (after footballer Ryan Giggs), but something went wrong along the way. I’m not quite sure what. Some other fantastic names I’ve come across in China and Hong Kong have been Paper, Mars, Forrest Gump, Chocolate, Ocean King, and Person.
For some further reading, check out In China My Name Is by Valerie Blanco and Ellen Feberwee. It’s a book dedicated entirely to Chinese people and the stories behind their English names.
Google’s 
There are many words in other languages that don’t translate directly into English, or succinctly describe a thing or situation which would take far more words to say if I tried to do it. A new website is collecting these ‘untranslatable’ words and presenting them to the world daily. 
Quentin Tarantino’s film 
In the same way that I’m fascinated by westerners getting 
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