When Caught Early, Poor Syntax Can Be Cured!

I have been staring at this ad in the subway for weeks. All I want to say is that, if you write sentences like this, I can help you!

A Tonsure in Time?

In the Singapore Teochew of my mother's generation, one way (perhaps the way) to express the idea of "suddenly, without warning" is to say bho da bho dak (using the Peng'im method of transliteration explained at the Gaginang.org website).

The English–Teochew dictionary at the same site gives the phrases bho seu bho siang (roughly translated, without much ado?) and bho gao bho dai (without advice or advance warning?) as equivalents for suddenly.

There are, in fact, many Teochew phrases with this bho ... bho ... structure, meaning "without ... without ...". For example, one can say bho tao bho bue (without head or tail) for something that doesn't make much sense.

The only problem is that my searches of the dictionary have not yielded any results for bho da bho dak. (This does not necessarily mean much.) For da, there are the interesting phrases gang da, meaning "only, just" and gao da, "as of now", but, in each case, no character is given for da, suggesting that it may be a purely colloquial expression with no Mandarin cognate.

Which brings me to my grand theory. I would love to think that bho da bho dak is really Malay botak-botak, meaning "bald". Admittedly, the Malay terms for suddenly have nothing to do with hairlessness, but are instead tiba-tiba (incorporating the notion of landing or arrival) or sekonyong-konyong. But wouldn't it be great if I could prove that the Singapore Teochews had fallen into this way of expressing suddenness, encouraged by the similarity of the phrasal structure bho ... bho ... to botak, which is surely among the first Malay words that any Singaporean Chinese child learns?

The sense development would not be hard to explain. In English, bald has the figurative meaning "undisguised, evident". To make a bald statement is to say something that has an all-too-salient, in-your-face quality about it.

It is surely not a great stretch to imagine that the same qualities of rudeness or lack of subtlety could be applied to a temporal adverb—with the basic image being, perhaps, a tonsure in time?

Animals and Moving Things

I just finished reading Fuchsia Dunlop's memoir of eating her way through China, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. It's quite good. Dunlop is an honest, entertaining, funny writer, and one can't help but admire the courage and gusto with which she sets about learning to eat such delicacies as goose intestines and rabbit's head.

More than most English writers, she demonstrates a willingness to forget her own cultural identity and plunge into the one in which she finds herself—even when, as she discovers, this appetite for assimilation might land her in ethically compromising situations.

But there was one passage in Dunlop's book that made me rather unhappy.

It comes where she discusses the casual cruelty with which stallholders in Chinese markets kill the animals whose meat they are selling. What could possibly explain such indifference to suffering?

Dunlop writes:

In English, as in most European languages, the words for the living things we eat are mostly derived from the Latin anima, which means air, breath, life. 'Creature', from the Latin for 'created', seems to connect animals with us as human beings in some divinely fashioned universe. We too are creatures, animated. In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'. Is it cruel to hurt something that (unless you are a fervent Buddhist) you simply see as a 'moving thing', scarcely even alive?

By such simplistic reasoning, I guess, no Chinese person could have any sort of compassion for anything they designated by dong wu, while Europeans will always be mindful of their oneness with other sentient beings, by virtue of the etymology of the words they use for them.

I have come across other statements of this sort—a memorable one theorized that, because the Chinese language lacks conditional tenses, Chinese speakers are incapable of forming hypotheses. I wish I'd kept the reference for that article, but at the time I must have simply thrown it away (with great force).

As must be evident from other posts on this blog, I am quite interested in etymology. But I don't make the mistake of believing that people are straitjacketed into a particular world view by their language.

My own mother regularly confuses he and she when speaking in English, because in her native Teochew, no difference is made in the gender of the third person singular pronoun. However, it would be absurd to imagine that she can't thereby tell the difference between males and females, wouldn't it?

This sort of reasoning is essentializing. And it's deterministic. But in all too many circles, it passes for sophisticated, informed commentary. Of all the common misapprehensions about language, this is surely one of the most unhelpful.

Perhaps all my troubles would be solved if I could find a country to move to in which the native language lacked a term for educated imbecility.