XiaoHo was having a fever on and off last weekend, the doctor in the first clinic simply prescribed some anti-biotics. My mom insisted to get the second doctor's opinion. And they found out XiaoHo's ear was seriously infected. Another battle won.
____________________________________________
The standard Mandarin was consider the standard, official and civilised language in Modern China. However, many local dialets preserves the sounds and tones of the ancient Chinese. Take the Chinese poems for example, the choice of characters and arrange of tones are formatted so that they can be read out loud beautifully. But Mandarin pronounciation has blended the "Ze" tone into the 1, 2, 3 or 4 tone. The "Ze" tone is short and quick, as if you narrow the air passage and stop the sound-making in a haste.
Mandarin also rips off those creative and interesting phrases. For example, in some dialet, butterfly is called "拍翼", which means clapping wings. In Mandarin, butterfly is a none, means butterfly. Don't you think "clapping wings" almost has slapped the moving insect in the visual comprehension area of your brain?
Different regions develop their own way of describing things. The phrases might be different but they can still be understood by Chinese because we can connect the individual Chinese character's meaning together and reach the concludion. Take the disposable culinaries for example, in Taiwan, chopsticks, spoon or knife are prefixed by "wash-free". However, in China, the prefix is "use only one time"(一次性). But I am sure people from both sides of Taiwan Straight know what you are refering to either way.
However, in some cities of China, the English translation of disposible chopsticks is "one-time sex chopstick". The character, "性", could mean the nature of an item/thing/event or sex.
No comments:
Post a Comment