So a lot of you Firefly fans are Spanish speakers?
I sure wish we had more Chinese speakers on this board. I’d love to learn me some Chinese cussin’!
Try this link for swearing.
Sorry.
I meant to type “Try this link, BUN tyen-shung duh ee-DWAY-RO!”
Man, some of those are hilarious, especially the ones for this particular episode.
“Holy mother of god and all her wacky nephews!” 
Hey, Da-shiong bao-jah-shr duh la doo-tze!
That would be, “The explosive diarrhea of an elephant.”
I wish I knew someone who could teach me this stuff, 'cause I’m good with language, and could make this sound good!
I’m Chinese-American, and while not fluent, can understand spoken Mandarin quite well… except when it’s spoken on Firefly. Seriously, I love the actors, but their Chinese is atrocious! 
Well bring it on! We just have to figure out how to make it sound all phonetically corrrect & stuff.
I know how you feel. I can understand native Russian, but when I’m sitting with friends and an actor basically just sounds out some words and my friends turn to me and ask, “what’d he say?” I’m like, “I dunno! Sounded like gibberish to me.” It’s kinda embarrassing, because a first year Russian student can understand it, but I’m like, “I have no idea. I think he said something about there being two minutes left in the countdown, or kill them all or something.”
In the commentary, Jane Espenson says they had tapes of how the Chinese was supposed to sound, but admits that the actors didn’t exactly recreate them precisely. It’s hard to come down too hard on them for that, though, Chinese is a freaking difficult language for an English-speaker. Maybe they should have gone with a slightly easier language to swear in!
Well, that’d be a dilemma… they chose Chinese because that allowed them to swear without offending anybody. If they chose a language that was easy enough for them to speak that people would understand what they were saying, that’d kind of defeat the purpose. Besides, what other nation is likely to be a space power hundreds of years from now? Us, the Chinese… anybody else?
Couple of theories:
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For all we know, maybe the Alliance’s integration of Chinese and English resulted in a widespread dialect of Chinese that places much less emphasis on tones, something that does sound more like English speakers speaking Chinese. Children grow up with the ability to speak what they hear, so growing up in a Chinese household will let you manage tonal variations, but children growing up in a predominantly English household learning Chinese as a second language in school would probably have that sort of accent.
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We don’t have an exact timeline on how long the Alliance has been in existence, but given the Independents’ war was only 7 years ago, it seems like the Alliance is a fairly recent construction. It may have been that the adults aboard Serenity learned Chinese after their initial language acquisition stage (pre-puberty), whether in simple compliance with new Alliance rules (Inara, Book, Kaylee) or to draw less attention to themselves (Mal, Zoe, Jayne). If they learned it as teenagers or adults, they’d have the same kind of difficulties with it the actors themselves do. OTOH, Simon grew up learning Chinese as a second language, but I couldn’t say for sure how good his is.
It’s stated in the commentaries or making-ofs that Chinese is the street language that everybody learns at home, growing up, but the learn English in school.
How the first non-chinese families picked it up is not explained…
Well, damn, I must have missed that. So much for my pseudo-linguist theories.
It’s okay … I totally bought it. 
So this series of threads drove me to buy the DVD’s (as neither the library nor the dang video store has it). Previously I only saw a few eps - so I have now watched up through this episode. Thus I have no idea about future events.
But I think that Zoe’s issue with Saffron is not just her apparent submissive nature, which no doubt grates Zoe the wrong way but probably earn contempt rather than loathing if the object of submission was, say, Jayne. It’s that the object of her affection is Mal. Zoe’s Mal. She may be married to Wash (and be really, really fond of Wash) but her feelings for Mal run far deeper than those for Wash. Certainly proprietary in some sense, and not just war buddies.
Dammit, they haven’t sent me the check for the last guy who bought.
Actually, your theories could still apply. Maybe the first generation or twp of people in the Alliance learned Chinese your way (as a second language), and that’s when the accent/dialect differences occurred. “Now” (in the series) many people learn Chinese as their first language, but it isn’t the Earth-That-Was chinese, but the newer dialect.
With respect, while I agree that Zoe’s reaction would be different if Saffron had marked Jayne instead, I disagree totally on your reasoning.
What gives you that impression about Mal and Zoe?
Oh, yeah. I just had to mention that I bought the DVD set for my dad for Father’s Day. Makes three sets I’ve bought so far. It’s a great Father’s Day present and it’ll recruit new converts to go see Serenity!
That’s my thinking. Children grow up speaking what they hear, primarily from their parents. Parents who spoke to their kids in badly accented Chinese would pass the accent on.