Putting English words in Mandarin sentences is of course extremely common in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia, generally because this is thought to look cool and modern. But last month I was surprised to see Mandarin sentences with just English’s -ing added — and not one but two examples of this.
The image here is from a poster for the DPP’s presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh, that came out in March but which I didn’t see until a few days ago. It reads å°ç£ç¶æ–°ing (“TáiwÄn wéixÄ«n-ing“): “Taiwan is modernizing.” (Click the image to see the whole poster.)
The other example I noticed was in a newspaper headline about the Hong Kong pop diva Faye Wong: 明年拚è€ä¸‰ 天åŽæš«ä¸å¾©å‡º æŽäºžéµ¬çŽ‹è² ç©æ¥µåšäººING (MÃngnián pÄ«n lÇŽosÄn — tiÄn hòu zà n bù fùchÅ« — LÇ Yà péng, Wáng FÄ›i jÄ«jà zuòrén-ing. “Next year work hard to produce third child — superstar temporarily not appearing — Li Yapeng and Faye Wong are energetically working on making a baby.”)
There are several other interesting things about the Faye Wong headline, such as the way in most other contexts zuòrén (lit. “be/make a person”) means something like “be a mensch.” But I don’t want to digress too much lest I never finish this post.
In both of these examples, -ing is used to emphasize the currentness of the actions. But it is of course possible in Mandarin to stress that something is going on now — and to do so without borrowing forms from English. For example, with zà i:
- LÇ Yà péng, Wáng FÄ›i jÄ«jà zà i zuòrén
- TáiwÄn zà i wéixÄ«n
Has anyone seen or heard other examples of this -ing grafting?
sources:
- 明年拚è€ä¸‰ 天åŽæš«ä¸å¾©å‡º æŽäºžéµ¬çŽ‹è² ç©æ¥µåšäººING, China Times, November 30, 2007
- “TáiwÄn wéixÄ«n-ing” — Xiè ChángtÃng quánguó xià oyuán xúnhuà yÇŽnjiÇŽng (「å°ç£ç¶æ–°ingã€è¬é•·å»·å…¨åœ‹æ ¡åœ’巡迴演講), Frank Hsieh’s blog, March 27, 2007
For lagniappe: lyrics to the Faye Wong song “Bù liú” in Pinyin, which has lots of examples of Mandarin’s bÇŽ.
zhwj said
It’s certainly not uncommon. For example, the Mystery and Thrillers magazine cover here has a cover line reading “《天机》第二å£ç«çƒè¿žè½½ing ” (and I think they’ve used the same wording ever since the magazine launched mid-year). My guess is that it started online (or close to it, like in cutesy IM language), similar to other grammatical borrowings (的说 being another prominent example).
C. Callosum said
Personally, I do it all the time – I’m from Singapore, English is my native language and I learned Mandarin Chinese in school. Occasionally I will find that a Mandarin expression is much more apt than anything in English I can think of, and then I’ll add whatever tense/aspect/plural endings needed to make it grammatical in English. But this grafting is to a Chinese word in a majority-English sentence, not a majority-Chinese one, so my case is quite different.
I haven’t paid attention to it much, but I expect others with similar linguistic backgrounds to mine are like that. My sister does it too, for example. It’s NOT common to do this in regular Singaporean English (Singlish), though – inflectional suffixes are routinely omitted, almost as if people are using Chinese syntax with English/Mandarin/Hokkien/Malay lexical items.
dl7und said
Students are doing it on-line all the time, I’m only surprised that this is somehow “official” use now.
Thinking about it, I’m not THAT surprised…
syz said
Just playing around on Google, I find it showing up significantly in blogs by at least somewhat bilingual young people. Here are a few that seem to be real examples within Chinese (looks like it might be happening in Japanese too?! I don’t have any ability there)
是ing: http://xingying.blog110.fc2.com/blog-entry-12.html
了ing: http://recca.blog3.petitmall.jp/blog-entry-43.html
在ing: http://club.cn.yahoo.com/bbs/threadview/700012908_15__pn1.html
The last one is my favorite for the –ing construction. It’s from a bulletin board and the context that the post provides makes it clear that she’s using -ing in “å‡æœŸè¿˜åœ¨ing†to extend the time in the present.
Has anyone ever heard it in speech? All my time is spent in Beijing — never heard it here yet but will keep my ears tuned now.
Thanks for the great post.
syz
Kerim Friedman said
Here is a music video for the song “戀愛ing” which my friend pointed out to me on Twitter. Interestingly they spell out “I … N… G…” rather than saying “ing” as in English.
http://tinyurl.com/2qqf3r
Chris said
I’ve seen it too. A long while back a Chinese friend of mine sent me an SMS about an event coming up: “期待ing”, or “looking forward to it”. I’ve never heard it spoken, though, either, but after seeing that message, I’ve said it a few times, and my Chinese friends take it in stride.
David on Formosa » Links 7 January 2008 said
[...] Pinyin News reports on a new way of 寫ing Mandarin. [...]
Pat Callier said
There was a paper at NWAV 34 on online -ing. Here’s the reference from the presenter’s (my colleague Jackie Lou) website:
Lou, Jia. 2005. From English morpheme to symbol of Chinese netizenship: Exploring -ing in Chinese blogs. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 34, New York City.
site admin said
That looks like an interesting study. Apparently this -ing code switching goes back to at least 2002. One of the examples in the abstract is “高兴ing” (gaoxing-ing), a search for which yields 81,400 results in Google. Wow.
Interestingly, the song Kerim mentions uses the related “Happy-ING.”
Weili said
Being able to speak English fluently, my first instinct was to pronounce it “ing” rather than spell it out. But I can see how it would be confusing as “ing” could be confused with the Mandarin syllable of “ying”.
Nathan said
syz – yes, it is happening with Japanese too…
long time resident, Kyushu – Japan
site admin said
See also the Language Log post on this: A new way of 寫ing Mandarin.
anon said
Interesting post! “åšäººing” is an interesting construction, because it can be analysed as verb+noun (so grammatically it should have been *åšing人) but it doesn’t.
zhwj said
Pushing this back a few decades, I just ran across an example in the first chapter of the novel 《金牧场》 by å¼ æ‰¿å¿—. While in Japan, one of the characters runs across a store sign reading “美人ing” staring at it for a moment before suddenly realizing that it’s for a beauty salon. The book was published back in 1987; Zhang wrote it based on earlier experiences in Japan and Inner Mongolia, so the form has been around for a while.
steve said
Just saw this in Jusco supermarkets in China, in ads for mosquito killing. Can’t recall exact usage, anyway, mainland marketing employing the usage means critical mass has been reaching !~
Pinyin Info said
DPP politicians borrow-ing from each other? “首投ing”
Perhaps also a pun to evoke the ying of Tsai Ying-wen.