As you are probably aware, the lunar year has recently turned, and much of Asia has celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Ox. Ox, or cow, is 牛 in Chinese, pronounced “nyo”. Remember this. It will be important later.
The change of year provides a circuitous opportunity to introduce to this blog one of the (many) challenges presented by the Chinese language: the high density of homophones. Of course, homophones are hardly unknown in English (new and knew, air and heir, through and threw, and so on) but Chinese has a lot more of them.
A Chinese character usually represents a one-syllable word (e.g. 牛, nyo, cow, as we saw above).* From the various consonants and vowel sounds of the Chinese language, something in the region of 400 unique one-syllable sounds can be created (ignoring the effect of tones, of which more some other time). I’ve no idea how many unique English one-syllable words there are, but dawdling to the metro after a rather large brunch (i.e. not in the sharpest of mental states) I could think of 80 or so one-syllable words just beginning with b.
Chinese does also contain many polysyllabic words formed by combining two or more characters. For example, 牛油, phonetically nyo yo, is butter, literally “cow oil”, and 牛油果, nyo yo gwor, is avocado, literally “butter fruit”. Even considering this, though, it is not hard to see that with only 400 single-syllable sounds available, there are going to be quite a lot of homophones.
For the student of Chinese, this can obviously be confusing. Just this morning B read me the following: wo zai ye bu hui likai ni, which I made sense of as 我在也不会离开你 and took to mean “I cannot leave you”. In fact, the second character was not 在 (zai, indicating an action currently in progress) but 再 (zai, again), meaning that the translation was actually “I will never leave you again”. B would like it emphasised here that she was reading me, for interest, a snippet of graffiti viewed via Chinese social media.
This sort of confusion is not insurmountable. Just as in English the context tells us which of a pair of homophones the speaker must mean – no-one sits around stumped wondering about the actions of the “air to the throne” – so too in Chinese. If my Chinese were better, I would have realised that my original interpretation of the sentence above wasn’t really grammatical.
Anyway, the prevalence of homophones means that Chinese lends itself to puns, and this leads us back to the Year of the Ox and the character 牛. English being the international language of commerce and academia, English language education is a big thing in China, so there’s no shortage of people with good English, and even more who can read a fair bit even if they can’t say much. This creates the opportunity for interlanguage puns, such as this one, which I’ve spotted all over Shenzhen of late: Happy 牛 Year!
*B, who has been doing a lot of academic reading lately, points out that a character is usually a lexical unit rather than a word.