{"id":3326,"date":"2010-04-13T19:05:13","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T11:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=3326"},"modified":"2018-08-28T11:49:54","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T03:49:54","slug":"omg-its-hanzified-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2010\/omg-its-hanzified-english\/","title":{"rendered":"OMG, it’s Hanzified English"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TaiwaneseIn Taiwan, the new movie Date Night<\/em> has been given the Mandarin title Yuēhuì o mài gà<\/span><\/em> (約會喔麥尬\/约会喔麦尬). <\/p>\n

Yuēhuì<\/span> is simply the word for “date.” The interesting part is “o mài gà<\/span>” (喔麥尬), which is a Mandarinized form of the English “oh my god.” (I wonder if this, being written in Hanzi despite still being basically English, would pass China’s new need for supposed purity<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Most people here — especially those younger than about 40 — would simply write “oh my god” (or, less frequently, “o my god”) in English in the middle of an otherwise Mandarin text. (I’ll spare everyone the chart of Google searches; but it backs this up.) But brevity is standard in movie titles here, and “喔麥尬” is a lot more compact on a movie poster than “oh my god.” This, however, raises the question of why “喔麥尬” instead of the equally concise “OMG”. I don’t know the answer to that. But the path of lettered words in Mandarin<\/a> is certainly not without twists and turns. <\/p>\n

Like most other uses of Hanzified English, the results are not entirely faithful to the original sounds. <\/p>\n

Mandarin’s ou<\/em> would be a closer phonetic fit than o<\/em> for the English “oh”.
\nThere’s Ōu (區\/区), a surname. But most of the time this Chinese character is pronounced qū<\/span> (being one of those many Chinese characters with multiple pronunciations<\/a>), so that certainly wouldn’t work well. There’s ǒu<\/span>, which has a more clearly phonetic Hanzi (嘔\/呕), but which has to do with vomit (ǒutù\/嘔吐\/呕吐<\/span>). Another possible choice would be ōu<\/span> (歐\/欧); but that is associated mainly with Europe and doesn’t get used much as a phonetic component in non-Europe-related loan words outside the word for ohm: ōumǔ<\/span> (歐姆\/欧姆). <\/p>\n

Mài<\/em> (the Mandarin word for wheat), unlike most other Mandarin morphemes pronounced mai<\/em> (various tones), gets used phonetically in lots of various loan words, such as Màidāngláo (McDonald’s\/麥當勞\/麦当劳), Màijiā (Mecca\/麥加\/麦加), Dānmài (Denmark\/丹麥\/丹麦), and Kāmàilóng (Cameroon\/喀麥隆\/喀麦隆). So its use is to be expected, though semantically there’s no link. And mài<\/em> is certainly a better fit for the English my<\/em> than it is for the Mc<\/em> of McDonald’s, the Mec<\/em> of Mecca, the mark<\/em> of Denmark, or the me<\/em> of Cameroon. <\/p>\n

For ga<\/em><\/span> there’s not a lot of choice. 咖 is often seen in the phonetic loan gālí<\/span> (curry). The biggest problem here is that the same 咖 is also used as kā<\/span> in a different, common phonetic loan: kāfēi<\/span> (coffee). There’s 嘎; but, like 尬, it’s not exactly a well-known character. <\/p>\n

Anyway, I could go on for a long time listing various possibilities. But the main point is that Chinese characters just don’t do well at this sort of thing<\/a>. <\/p>\n

As for Pinyin, I suppose the orthography could get interesting: o mài gà<\/span>, o màigà<\/span>, omài gà<\/span>, or omàigà<\/span>. But a Pinyin orthography would probably simply encourage people to write this in the original: oh my god<\/em>. <\/p>\n

BTW, you may wish to try the following experiment. The gà<\/span><\/em> in o mài gà<\/span><\/em> is most often seen in writing the word gāngà<\/span><\/em> (尷尬\/尴尬), which means awkward\/embarrassed<\/em>. Ask native speakers of Mandarin to write gāngà<\/span><\/em> in Hanzi for you by hand without using a dictionary, a computer, or any other form of assistance. I bet that most people — even those with university degrees — won’t be able to write this common, ordinary word correctly.<\/p>\n

And for lagniappe, the character 尬 is also sometimes seen in written Taiwanese as the equivalent of Mandarin’s jiā<\/span> (加\/add). I spotted an example of this just the other day on a cafe sign (in the sense of “buy something and ga<\/em> something else for a special price”) but didn’t have a camera with me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Taiwan, the new movie Date Night has been given the Mandarin title Yuēhuì o mài gà (約會喔麥尬\/约会喔麦尬). Yuēhuì is simply the word for “date.” The interesting part is “o mài gà” (喔麥尬), which is a Mandarinized form of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,12,15,41,106,28,95,32,3,31],"tags":[678],"class_list":["post-3326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-chinese","category-chinese-characters","category-english","category-hanyu","category-languages","category-linguistics","category-mandarin","category-taiwan","category-writing-systems","tag-date-night"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3326"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7863,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3326\/revisions\/7863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}