But the word “swallow” was not repeated at the end. With the use of synonyms and proper names, nothing is actually repeated. It reads fine, just like this would:
In this situation, Doe Tern can be a homophone for Dough Turn or D’oh Terne hence the man’s clarification. And I sincerely apologize if I have insulted you.
A female dear?
Ray, a sparkling drop of sunshiiine.
Ah, I see. I’d learned that in the air was done as well during my (admittedly brief) Chinese linguistics studies. Or I thought I had, anyway.
My Chinese friends and I use the “write in air” method. I’ve also seen it referred to in various textbooks, and seen it done in a couple of movies.
I agree with Terminus Est. It’s a (slightly) clumsy attempt to show a normal Chinese conversational practice, and the book is now on my list to look for.
Well, maybe so, but it doesn’t work as well because people don’t see where you start writing and it’s hard to tell where you lift up the pen.
To be honest, I think this works because in this situation, we’re asking for clarification. For whichever spoken word is being referred to, there are usually only a few possible characters, and we’re watching for the key strokes that distinguish among them. If we were just playing “name that random character!”, it would be hard.
Yes, I’ve already decided that, because I’ve read the passage. What you describe about the Chinese language is almost certainly true; I don’t doubt it. It was not conveyed in the passage, which is intended as literature, not as a lesson on Chinese homophones. It failed as literature, and it failed as a lesson on Chinese homophones. Its realism is not the point, unless the intended audience is bilingual Chinese-English readers.
Daniel
Have you ever read the Lord of the Rings?
As I understand it, folks’ objections to the OP hinge on 6 points:
I can accept points 1 and 2 and 4 no problem. 3 seems unlikely to me, given that there’s no such synonym in English (excluding taxonomic terms), and English has vastly more words than ancient Chinese. 5 seems seriously unlikely to me, and 6 seems laughable.
Yes. Do you own any plaid garments? What do you think about giraffes? How about them Lakers?
Daniel
My main objection to the OP is that it’s silly to completely and irrevocably reject a book because of an arguably clumsy attempt at more-or-less transparently conveying additional information to the reader as to the meaning of a character’s nickname, when the method presented actually reflects the way real Chinese people will try to clarify with each other what exactly is meant by various similar-sounding syllables.
Just homophones. I don’t think anyone has mentioned synonyms.
But realise that what is being talked about is much more “syllables” than “words.” Japanese–and I presume Chinese–doesn’t have individual letter sounds, just syllables. In total, they have something like a hundred different syllables, like ka, shi, su, ta, wa, etc. But, the spoken language was invented before the written language was, and when they chose to go with a hieroglyphic language set, that meant that they had to attribute characters to their words that would match the pronunciation AND the meaning.
Say that I wanted to write “water” and “ice” in my own set of hieroglyphics, but I would like to be able to have the same pronunciation for any characters they share that mean the same thing. Thus, I’ll say that “wa” and “i” sound similar enough that we’ll join them together to be “wi” (rhymes with “lie”), which will be a single glyph that looks like this. And since that’s shared, that one means “water”. “ter” we’ll replace with “ta” just since that is a more share-able sound, and we’ll take to mean “loose”, represented by this glyph. “ce” isn’t quite a syllable, so we’ll make it “su” with the meaning “contained” and represented by this.
So that gives us three characters that we can use in future words, and two words:
wita -> water loose -> “water”
wisu -> water contained -> “ice”
The syllable “water” isn’t the word “water”, it’s just a character that represents it in meaning but really needs to be paired with other characters to fashion a word. There might well be a couple dozen hieroglyphs that all mean “water” simply because other water-related words didn’t have a sound that could be perverted into a “wi” sound, and so more glyphs with different syllable-sounds were invented to make it work that still just meant “water” at heart. And there will be any number of characters pronounced “wi” that don’t mean “water”. When I create hieroglyphs for the words “wire” and “wile”, I’ll probably make them from glyphs that don’t mean “water”, but instead makes sense for those words and fit the pronunciation.
Well, I mean if you want to complain about a book spending excess time on enlightening you about the languages and peoples, though it have nothing to do with the tale at hand… At least this is dealing with a language that actually exists, no?
People have been suggesting that the characters were using synonyms to clarify which of the homophone pair they were using.
See, what YOU just wrote, THAT is enlightening about the language. The passage I quoted above has none of that information in it. It wasn’t enlightening, it was clumsy exposition. Perhaps the writer thought it wasn’t clumsy because of her knowledge of Chinese, but she didn’t explain any of that to the reader. As I said, unless the intended audience is her fellow English-Chinese bilingual folks, it was poorly done.
Daniel
If he knows Chinese all that well, it could very well just not have occured to him.
I don’t know about “xiao” or small, but in explaining “yen” it is perfectly possible to say “yen zi”. In fact, that’s what I would do. Actually I would transliterate it as “yan zi”, but you would probably read that as “yan” as in “yan can cook”, when it sounds more like how you would pronounce “yen”.
Normally, “yan” alone could mean a lot of things, including the bird, but “yan zi” is more specific - it means the bird. So it’s perfectly normal to say “yan zi de yan?”, which when translated would mean “swallow as in swallow?”. That of course makes no sense, but there you go. At least it’s better than saying “examine as in swallow”? (“yan” can also be translated as “test” or “examine”. Or rather, it sounds exactly the same as the word for test or examine.)
“yan” can mean bird. “yan zi” also means bird. But when explaining exactly which “yan” you’re talking about, “yan zi” enables the listener to identify which “yan” we’re talking about.
Perhaps a more helpful, although less authentic, translation would go something like
“My name is Yen Ling”.
“Yen as in yen zi, the swallow?”
“Yes, that’s right. Yen as in yen zi”
Of course, then people would pick on swallow being repeated. Or you could try “Yen as in yen zi (i.e. swallow)”?
To my ears, though, that passage is a perfectly normal way of introducing yourself and which characters make up your name. For example, when I’m telling people my chinese name, I would go something like
“My name is build strong. Build as in construction, **strong **as in strong healthy”.
Literally translated and bolding the equivalent bits, it would read something like
“My name is jian qiang, jian as in jian zhu, qiang as in qiang zhuang.”
If I simply said “jian qiang”, people might think the “jian” was the iconograph for “healthy” (understandable, as the sound is generally translated as strong with undertones of healthy, “jian” as in “jian kang”, which is better translated as “in the pink of health”)
… you know, this is a lot simpler when you have a chinese name.
That would’ve been fine: it would’ve made it clear that the characters were using synonyms within their language, and would’ve been a much more elegant way of getting the idea across. The passage as written (and others; this was just an example) appear as though people are translating words for the benefit of other native Chinese speakers, when it’s very clear that the author is really translating them for the purpose of non-Chinese-speaking readers. It’s very poor exposition.
Daniel
I don’t see how Tabby_Cat’s suggestion is any better. If run through the LHOD filter it would become:
What on earth is your stake in this, dude? That’s an ungenerous reading, one that’s biased by personal antipathy, and I don’t know you from Adam. Try again, or better yet, find some other Wheaties to piss in.
Daniel
I have no stake whatsoever in this, dude. As I said, I haven’t read the book. I’m just applying what you said in your OP, where you imagined translating everything into English, to what you later deemed acceptable. Doesn’t seem to be terribly consistent.
What about my reason for rejecting the book (mentioned in post #4): unnecessary use of adverbs. It’s literature, dude. Clumsy use of language is a perfectly justifiable reason for rejecting it.
You find the passage in question unobjectionable. Daniel and I don’t. Taste in literature doesn’t have to be terribly consistent. Why fuss over it?
ETA: I also find Tabby_Cat’s suggestion far more felicitous than the original.
