Dipthong me high, dipthong me low

Originally posted Jan 13, 2006:

During the week, I usually eat outside. I mean, literally, outside. As I work at a university and have to share an over-crowded cafeteria with students and faculty alike, and being the IFSP that I am, I usually take my food outside to the picnic tables just adjacent to the building.

On one particularly fine day, I was sitting at a picnic table, sleepily digesting and soaking up the sunshine of the seventy degree January afternoon. Awash in my post-luncheon stupor, I had not noticed that I my jacket had slipped from the back of my chair to the ground. Fortunately, a civil-minded girl walked past and said “Three plates”. I turned in my chair and looked up to face her, thinking “Three plates?” Before another synapse would fire, I probably would have said “What the [insert colorful metaphor here] are you talking about?!” Luckily for the both of us, she pointed down at my now crumpled jacket splayed on the concrete.

Cantonese is a tonal dialect consisting of about six to seven tones. Actually, this is even under dispute, as many Hong Kong-ers have told me there are at least eight or nine tones in total. See, you know stuff gets confusing when native speakers of the local dialect don’t even know how many tones there are. Anyway, I digress…. Speaking the same words using varying tones will vary the meaning of the word. So, in my case, when spoken using different tones, the word for “three” means “clothing” and the word for “plate” sounds like “fall.”

Just to add to the mayhem, let me clarify something here. The word for “clothing” in Cantonese can mean sweater, jacket, t-shirt, button-down, polo, etc, etc. However, you cannot use it to indicate pants or shorts. No freakin’ way. Waist up only, pal. Crazy foreigner. So, taken in context, and with a little imagination thrown in, what I had heard was not “Three plates” but rather “You dropped your jacket.” Elementary, my dear Watson.

I’ve read countless books, magazine articles, expatriate discussion forums, etc, about foreigners voicing their frustration at the difficulty in learning to speak Cantonese. As an American-born Chinese who rarely spoke anything but English growing up, I can attest to this complaint, and seemingly, on a day-to-day basis. The fact that the common Cantonese or Hong Kong person you run across on the street is more likely to either ignore you or laugh at you than correct your pronunciation only exacerbates this linguistic gem of a problem. So, allow me to present just a smidgen of a sliver of a microscopic cross-section of a mere sampling of common tonal mishaps that occur when foreigners try to speak Cantonese.

You want to say “X”, but you actually say “Y”:

X= buy Y=sell (can be hell for stock brokers)

X=expensive Y= strange

X=small Y=wash

X=charity Y=You’re crazy!

X=dozen, open Y=hit (Let me expound on this one a bit… Imagine you are in cafe, and you motion to the waiter and say “cigarette lighter” but what you really said was “Hit the waiter.” Done with the right facial expression and enough times, this can provide hours of fun. That is, until you booted from the restaurant or assaulted.

X=new Y=first (not so bad, this one)

X=dog, nine Y=um… male sex organ (Okay, you know that I know that you know what I’m thinking so… let’s just get past that, shall we? I’d like, once again, to take some liberties with this. Imagine now you are standing at a street-side food vendor. You want a “hot dog” but what you really say is “hot male sex organ.” Depending on which way the, uh… meat handler… swings [no pun intended], you may or may not end up with a date for the evening.)

Mind you, this is only a sampling of what could happen.

At the risk of sending this blog straight to the gutter, I’d to point out another possible candidate for embarrassment by picking up where “Hit the waiter” left off. Ignoring for the moment my incorrect Romanization of the Chinese, “Hit the waiter” in Cantonese sounds like “Dah foa gay”. Literally, it means “Open fire machine.” (Personally, I think “fire machine” is a whole hell of a lot cooler than “cigarette lighter.”) If you were to happen to confuse the sounds, and instead were to say “Dah fay gay”, everlasting laughs would ensue. “Dah fay gay” in its literal translation, means “Hit the airplane.” Okay, not such an odd thing to say, linguistically speaking. But, what does it mean, you ask? Ay, there’s the rub. Oops. Again, no pun intended. Well, let’s just say that it’s synonymous to one of my perennial favorite sayings, especially at the dinner table, “Punch the clown.” Should I clarify by mentioning something about choking chickens, or need I say more?

God, you gotta love language. By the way, you dropped three plates.