“I have recently given myself to the study of Chinese language and I can promise you that it’s something quite different from either Greek or German. In speaking it, there is so much ambiguity that there are many words that can signify more than a thousand things, and at many times the only difference between one word and another is the way you pitch them high or low in four different tones. Thus when [the Chinese] are speaking to each other they write out the words they wish to say so that they can be sure to understand—for all the written letters are different from each other,” Matteo Ricci, sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary to China, from “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci” (1983), written by Jonathan D. Spence While browsing in my Chinese dictionary (in the index in the back which very nicely sorts all of the characters to their phonetic qualities), I noticed that some sounds have many different characters, while other sound and tone possibilities have very few or none. “Ji,” which is not an uncommon sound, has 41 different characters sorted under its first tone. For its second tone, there are 31 more distinct characters. The third tone has 10 more, and the fourth tone has another 32. (For those wondering, I could immediately recognize and identity only four of these characters, one of which was "chicken," another "remember.") At least four of these characters, I myself could identity as homographs, characters that are written the same but have different meanings with different sounds.
In short, a lot of Chinese sounds the same. A important part in learning the language is finding what ways there are to help navigate this homogeneous landscape of sound (especially if you believe yourself to be “tone deaf"). I would say, however, that the vast majority of this ambiguity of meaning is cleared up through context and conventions of use. Often characters combine into two word compounds that provide enough distinction that they can stand on their own. Though the second tone is easily confused by most beginners with the third tone when spoken alone, a combination of a second tone with a forth, is really quite different in sound to a third tone with a forth.
Thus using Chinese orally constructs a different reality that goes some length to tame the insanity suggested in the back of my Chinese dictionary. It should be noted, however, that if one does jumble these tones, these two word compounds can quite betray you. For instance, a “stuffy nose” can turn into a “sporting competition” and the statement, “I’ve caught a cold” can easily be heard as “I screw cats!”
I started this essay believing I was going to write about puns in the Chinese language (something that sounds completely ridiculous in this diluted and in-a-sense punned-to-death language). But in fact, it is the variety of puns I have seen here that have led me to write this paper. And therein is the catch—“seen.” There are plenty of puns that are only of use visually.
One often sees (as in the picture below) characters of this kind, meaning either “spring” or “luck” in diamonds of red paper decorating doors. Perhaps there is an inherent integrity in the structure of Chinese words, for I don’t remember it being long (certainly before I knew what the words even meant) that I could see these words were upside down. ‘ When I finally got around to asking someone about it, they said that the word that meant “upside down” was identical in sound to the word meaning “arrive” or “come,” thus making in one brave, visual cue the meaning “luck comes” or “spring comes.”
Similarly proving a visual bias, but slightly stranger, is a pun that is found on nearly every menu I have ever seen in Taiwan, usually the first item listed, a set of three words that mean, “rice with meat brewed in soy sauce.” There’s a word for meat and a word for rice—neither is the problem. It’s the word that represents the “brewed in soy sauce” part. The real character for this word is a slightly funny looking thing. To the side is a water symbol, and then the rest of the character looks like a box with an “X” inside, interspersed with some dots, and on the top is a sideways “T.” This part of the character can be a word on its own (also pronounced exactly the same), yet which means “alkaline oil” or “a halogen.” And yet, this is the character I never see on the menu. Instead, the character on the menu is a very simple and poetic looking thing (pronounced, again, the same), but it is composed with the “fish” character on the top half and the “sun” character on the bottom half. This character also means something else entirely: “dull” or “rash.” Yet everyone knows exactly what they’re ordering when they see it—it’s rice topped with some meat that has been brewed in soy sauce. Here—I said it was strange—the pun has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the substitute word. As far as I can make out, it simply looks better, as if one day we decided that “eggsighting” was more pleasing than “exciting.”
There are many more—the time Fiona asked a manager what “G 肉” was—apparently something
meat. The “G” stood for chicken, pronounced “ji,” although this appeared to be nothing more than a whim, and it occurred only one time on a menu that listed “chicken” faithfully two other times. Then there are the playful puns people like to make out of numbers. By saying “9-8,” for example, (pronounced jiou3 ba1), one knows it to mean “let’s go!” (pronounced zou3 ba1, differing phonetically but not by tone). “5-6” (wu3 liu4) means “bored” (wu2 liao2), and so on. “4” is a suspect number for it sounds like “death” only differing in tone. Yet because of this, some buildings go right from the 3rd to the 5th floor. When one time my change rang up as 444.00, Fiona, beside me, cringed. Yet later that day, when her balance coincidentally came to “666.00” she said, “this one is lucky!”
In short, language is never dead—even in a promisingly dead sounding one like “Chinese characters.” Yet we forget the origins of Chinese—no, all—language, merely a pun on nature, a perilous operation of transposing form or meaning into sound. Finally, when “researching” this essay (and that means punching in “pun” to wickipedia) I found the interesting observation that China’s space exploration project is represented, and here I quote directly, by “a stylized 月 (Chinese character for ‘moon’), but is also a pair of human feet, surrounded by a crescent moon, symbolizing ‘walking on the moon.’"
