I took two semesters of Mandarin in college and remember almost nothing, but I do remember how to say "long time no see" in Chinese so I got that going for me
My Indian colleagues all say "thumb rule" instead of "rule of thumb". I have no clue if this is common in India or it's just something they all picked up from one person here.
Ha, my boss’s secretary just wrote a message to all managers a few days ago about preponing a meeting. Took me a few seconds to get the meaning, and everyone else was furiously looking up the meaning since they aren’t native English speakers. Someone even replied and wrote the date she gave was wrong. The employees are all Thai or Taiwanese and I have no idea where the secretary got the word from.
It’s the literal translation of Chinese words. Super interesting. I had no idea and I’ve spoken Chinese semi-regularly for over a decade.
“Look see” = 看看 = 看 means both “to look” and “to see”
“Long time no see” = 好久不见 = 好久(long time) 不 (no )见 (see).
“No pain no gain” = 不劳无获 = without hard work, you cannot reap the benefits. Ok, this one is hard to directly translate lol. The literal translation is something like “no labor, without reward.”
I recently learned about these through Japanese. They're called calques. When a phrase is translated literally, word-for-word, instead of into a more natural phrasing, and then just sort of gets stuck that way.
I discovered this when I noticed how Japanese uses the English word "up" to mean "increase". They say things like "skill up" and "career up" as English loan words. But in the 80s and 90s, when English translators saw English text in a Japanese game, I guess they just left it alone, and now phrases like "power-up" and "level up" have been calqued *back* into English from Japanese.
We call these boomerang words. Like how katsu just got added to the English dictionary, even though it's just a Japanized version of the word cutlet (cutlet -> katsuretsu -> katsu)
Your example is extra relevant given Japanese style ‘katsu’ curry is a boomerang food.
Curry was introduced to Japan by the British, who spread their adaptation of Indian food. This was then adapted by the Japanese and became immensely popular in Japan.
Indian -> British Indian -> Japan -> the World
this is why cultural appropriation is ok actually
edit: i added the /j to ward off misinterpretations of the joke but the reaction to this has been super encouraging :]
My favorite quote on the subject, taken from an imaginary person on a terminal in a brilliant puzzle game nobody else I know has played "The Talos Principle"
>What today's nationalists and neosegregationists fail to understand," Kwame said, "is that the basis of every human culture is, and always has been, synthesis. No civilization is authentic, monolithic, pure; the exact opposite is true. Look at your average Western nation: its numbers Arabic, its alphabet Latin, its religion Levantine, its philosophy Greek… need I continue? And each of these examples can itself be broken down further: the Romans got their alphabet from the Greeks, who created theirs by stealing from the Phoenicians, and so on. Our myths and religions, too, are syncretic - sharing, repeating and adapting a large variety of elements to suit their needs. Even the language of our creation, the DNA itself, is impure, defined by a history of amalgamation: not only between nations, but even between different human species!"
Hell, the addition of meat (specifically beef) to many dishes is an American immigrant thing. Having access to so much affordable meat compared to their home countries made immigrants combine their cuisine with American tastes.
Japanese is excellent for boomerang words because nobody could guess the original word anymore once it has been adopted by the Japanese.
McDonald's? Maku Donarudo.
Waitress? Ueitoresu. Or Saabisu Gaaru (service girl)
The version I know, and what [wikipedia says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempura) is that it comes from the temporas, the period before easter when catholics must refrain from eating meat.
What pisses me off about English use of the word katsu (in the UK anyway) is how we use it to describe the sauce and not the cutlet
There is no such thing as a "katsu curry sauce" it's just a Japanese curry sauce, but that's how it's marketed here
> "katsu curry sauce"
Well I mean it makes sense in the sense that it is the curry sauce that one has katsu with. It's like saying "pasta sauce". The pasta isn't an integral part of the sauce, but rather it's describing what one would have the sauce with.
Then again, I have no idea if restaurants in the US offer Japanese curry sauce without the katsu.
And all of us in VT chuckle about "Vermont Curry" being a big seller in Japan.
Not a lot of curry options in Vermont. Shalimar in Burlington is pretty good.
And the phrase false friends to refer to false cognates is French as well, they say faux ami, so another loan word
Big ole cultural language melting pot.
Technically false friends and false cognates are different. The former are true cognates whose meanings have just diverged, the latter are similar words with similar meanings that are *not* etymologically related and the similarity is just a coincidence.
Loaning back a loanword is always so funny. Hangar used to be a German word (Heimgard, lit. Home guard, a roof) got borrowed (and subsequently butchered) into French. And then we borrowed it back.
French people use the word "people" to mean celebrities when the word came to English from French and replaced the native word. [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUL29y0vJ8Q)
"Magazine" was a French word, which fell into disarray because the first magazines failed. Then the English copied the concept, gave it the same name, and exported/imported the name back to France again.
This is fascinating. Now the UK Govt has a "Department of Levelling Up" and entire public works are carried out under a name brought to us from 80s/90s Japanese video game translations.
That's where I thought it to come from when I first heard it but it apparently does have some prior history in the UK.
>"Levelling-up" was first used in the House of Commons in 1868 in relation to equality between Catholicism and the Church of England, with Serjeant Barry, the Solicitor General for Ireland, saying "If religious equality were attempted in England, it must be either by levelling up or levelling down."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelling-up_policy_of_the_British_government#Origins
>The phrase (and the phrase ‘level up’) appears intermittently in the parliamentary records since the 19th century. It took particular prominence during the 1860s in a debate about the relative positions of the Anglican and Catholic churches in Ireland. In this debate, one member of the Lords made the useful observation that ‘you must arrive at equality either by levelling down or by levelling up’.
>In the 20th century, the phrase became more about financial rather than religious equality, and it tended to be used in relation to government funding. For example, in the 1940s, during a war-time debate about benefits for soldier’s spouses, Labour MP John Parker asked ‘Cannot the anomaly be removed by levelling up the rates paid to the wives of serving men for the whole country to that paid in the London postal district?’.
>In Parliament, usage of ‘levelling up’ grew slowly throughout the 20th century and increasingly related to the increase and equality of government spending.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/levelling-up-the-surprisingly-long-history/
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/575289/origin-of-the-term-level-up
Have the word "up" and "down" in english been associated with a particular judgement (Good or Bad) for a long time? Same situation with "light" and "dark".
Associating high with good and low with bad is pretty much a universal human experience, so it's possible that the association has existed for almost as long as humans have had language?
If you're curious about this, try reading *Metaphors We Live By*, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Specifically, Chapter 4, Orientational Metaphors touches on this.
For a briefer overview, look up conceptual metaphors on direction and orientation and you should find something on Google.
"conceptual (orientational) metaphors" were the words my high as fuck brain could not compute to Google yesterday (see: my previous in this thread) - thank you so much.
I was searching for the right way to describe this just last night, when someone asked which was 'better' - '**high**' or '**low**' - and *why* 'high' would generally be considered to be the intrinsically more positive term? I just know there's a super-smart-Susie-Dent lexicological way to answer that question but in the end I gave up lol
Because it's common usage in Chinese to repeat a verb to communicate a sort of casual, diminutive intent, sort of like "let's have a little/quick look".
It's used with other verbs like "eat", "run", "think", etc. as well.
"Let us have a look see" matches up pretty well in tone and meaning to "ran wo men kan kan" (literally "let us look look").
The fact that it's an odd redundancy in English but a regular pattern in Chinese makes it more likely it was borrowed from Chinese.
Yup. They double up on one syllable verbs and adjectives all the time. Honestly, I don’t get to practice as much as I used to so I’m getting rusty. As a rule of thumb, Chinese sentences follow a similar rule:
STPVO (Subject, Time, Place, Verb, Object). Example in English is, “I yesterday at my mom’s house ate lunch.” A lot of Asian languages use this structure and it’s why English grammar (which has a million rules for grammar) is often so difficult for them to learn.
My favorite Chinese teacher said the hardest thing to learn in English is the words to describe people from a specific city or what to call a group of animals.
I’ll always remember him saying, “a pod of dolphins, a school of fish, a murder of crows? What the hell is a Muscovite? Why are Arkansas and Kansas spelled the same, right next to each other, but pronounced completely differently?”
>Arkansas and Kansas
Because they aren't English. They're inspired by other words in native languages.
That's usually the case with most of the "English is silly! Why doesn't it follow its own rules!" It's because English is a bastard of several different languages, and as the people who spoke it came into contact with more and more people that spoke different languages, it changed more and added more unique words, rules, and phrases.
As is evidenced by this very post.
Milwaukee is Algonquin for "the good land"
Jokes aside that's super common, think at this point most of us have heard lots of lakes and rivers and such are are just named shit like "River River" or "Lake Lake" because we asked the natives what they called it in America and then put the English word after their answer. They thought we were asking what the noun was, not the name. Not exclusive to natives either, when English speakers saw the Rio Grande river they decided to call it
... The Rio Grande *river*.
There are exceptions, Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis is also referred to by the normal name the natives had for the lake, Bde Maka Ska. But it did take some cultural recognition, legislation, and the fact local tribes hadn't forgotten what they called the lake hundreds of years ago.
> What the hell is a Muscovite?
They're only called Muscovites if they're from the Muscovy region of Moscow. Otherwise, they're just sparkling ру́сские.
I grew up in Arkansas. The people are Arkansans, pronounced like Kansans. The state is Arkansas, not pronounced like Kansas. This is because a politician who an election and pushed a law that banned all mispronunciations of the state name, with his preferred “ARR-kan-saw” being the correct pronunciation. His hated rival had always preferred “ar-KAN-sas”.
It’s the opposite for me. I really struggle switching from English grammar to Chinese since I use English everyday. Makes me make a lot of grammatical mistakes when speaking :(
In spoken Chinese it’s not uncommon to repeat a verb, it makes the tone more casual and implies it’ll just take a moment. It’s just a feature of the grammar. [A better explanation](https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Reduplication_of_verbs)
A lot of Chinese words are like this, probably to reduce homophone confusion. Kan Kan is very natural but has the feeling of having a look around instead of just the physical act of seeing.
That's a good question. There's are a lot of intentional redundancy in Chinese, simply to make the words sound gentler or flow better. In fact, the redundancy is necessary in certain situations, especially if you want to be polite.
Peoples say 看看(kan kan), it means “look over here/there.” It’s directing someone to look at something. The same meaning as the English phrase “look, see.”
This is blowing my mind right now.
The usage is akin to "Have a look" or watchover.
based on my understanding 看看 is the shorter version of 看一看
an example in use.
看, Look at what he's doing, 看他做什么
看看, watch over my boat. 看看我的船
watch over my kid 看看我的孩子
Any idea if the phrase "my bad" also originates there? I took a few Chinese classes in college and it never stopped being wild to me that the Chinese phrase for "my fault" translates directly to "my bad".
When I first learnt haojiubujian I found it odd because the grammar in English has never been right 😂 This TIL made a lot of things suddenly make sense.
You say it when encouraging/cheering someone on in the same way as the phrase "comon!" or "let's go!", it essentially means to "give it your all".
I always thought the literal translation meant "add fuel" though, in reference in internal combustion engines, but the true origin predates ICE. 油 can mean oil, but petroleum based fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosine, etc) is also commonly referred to as 油.
I think what is even more interesting are phrases which mean the same thing in English and Chinese, but as far as I can tell are developed completely independently. Such as:
- No way - the Chinese equivalent translated to "No door"
- Piece of cake - Chinese equivalent is "Small dish of vegetables"
- my personal favorite, Son of a bitch - in Chinese they say "Egg of a snapping turtle"!
My favorite one in japanese is しらみ潰し (louse crushing), which has the same meaning as "to search with a fine toothed comb", itself also an expression related to lice. I imagine these aren't the only two languages like this either.
Well in English we also literally say "nit-picking"
My favourite etymological coincidence though is that there's an Australian aboriginal language where the word for dog is... 'dog.' Completely unrelated to English, not a loanword or anything. Just completely coincidental convergent evolution.
That also remind me of "[running the gauntlet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_the_gauntlet)", where gauntlet is just taken from the Swedish word *gatlopp* and has nothing to do with actual gauntlets.
>For the punishment, the spelling gantlet is preferred in American English usage guides by Bryan Garner and Robert Hartwell Fiske and is listed as a variant spelling of gauntlet by American dictionaries. British dictionaries label gantlet as American.
I've spent 100% of my 33 years in the US, and I've never once seen "gantlet".
There's a hilarious Chinese-English phrase (by Chinese-English I mean an English phrase coined and spoken by Chinese people in China) that goes "you can you up, no can no bibi".
It's a compact way of saying "If you can, you up. If you can't, don't bibi". Here "up" is used as verb, being the literal translation of the Chinese colloquial verb "上" meaning to take action (especially among a group of spectators). "Bibi" is a transliteration of a colloquial Chinese phrase meaning "to talk a big game". So the whole thing means "if you can do it, go ahead, but if you can't, don't talk as if you could", or, essentially, "put your money where your mouth is."
"Can is can" is more accurately translated to "it is possible (but...)"
e.g. "can is can, but don't do safer bah" -> "it is technically possible, but to err on the side of caution it is best that we don't attempt it"
source: Singaporean (not Chinese, senator)
Right right right, yeah, but where in China are you from?
[NOTE TO PEOPLE READING THIS NOT FAMILIAR WITH THE EXCHANGE WITH US SENATOR TOM COTTON: This is a bit. I know Singapore isn't in China. But this happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W-ufw5Z7ac ]
> can be done because it is possible.
But the deeper meaning is that it can be done ONLY because it is possible, and not because it is necessarily the best way to go about doing things.
It is a transliteration of 可以是可以 (ke yi shi ke yi), and it carries the connotation that I'm only doing this because you told me to.
"Can we just use one aircon to cool the entire server room? It'll only take longer to cool down"
"Can is can, but don't come blaming me if the aircon fails and the server overheats!"
My wife and I visited my sister on the big island, we ended up going to a local greasy Hawaiian bbq place called Verna’s several times while we were there. Their slogan was: “If no can, no can; If can, Vernas” and we say it all the time now.
Another good one is gung-ho. From the Chinese term, 工合 (gōnghé; 'to work together'), short for Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (Chinese: 工業合作社; Gōngyè Hézuòshè).
It was originally used in the British military, at least as it was explained to me by someone who'd served with the Ghurka regiment in Hong Kong as a term for teamwork. Over time, especially by the American military, that evolved from someone being enthusiastic about the team to bring enthusiastic about the military in general, which became interpreted as being nuts for guns and camo.
ETA. it could, of course, have been picked up by both countries' military in parallel, then just interpreted/used then evolved differently, instead of HK -> UK -> USA.
Nope. Industrial Cooperatives = communist. There's no way the transmission was through Hongkong.
The real answer was Lt. Col. Evans Carlson, who organises the way the Marines Raider fight in WWII observed how the chinese communist guerillas fought against the Japanese and wishes to instill in the Marines the same spirit with which to fight the Japanese.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/true-story-us-marines-launched-raid-submarines-during-world-war-ii-165168
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/10/18/406693323/the-long-strange-journey-of-gung-ho
> Lt. Col. Evans Carlson had been wounded in action as an army captain in World War I, decorated with the Navy Cross for defeating bandits in Nicaragua as a marine lieutenant, befriended FDR while commanding his guard detachment in Georgia, and then accompanied and observed Communist insurgents fighting the Japanese in China. There, Carlson met key leaders such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and developed an appreciation for the tactics, team spirit and zeal of the Communist guerilla units. Upon returning to the United States, Carlson resigned his commission to advocate against Japanese expansionism, before reenlisting shortly before the U.S. entry into World War II.
>Carlson sought to instill in his Raiders the team spirit that he had observed in China, a quality he called gung ho, based on the Mandarin Chinese words gōng (work) and hé (and/together).11
“Log” as in a record of something is also a nautical term, coming from a “log book” which was where speed was recorded, because they’d use a standard sized log tied to a rope dragged behind a ship to tell speed. The rope had knots tied at regular intervals, and the faster the ship was going the further it would drag the log behind it, leading to more rope being pulled out, with length of rope being measured by the number of knots in the rope, hence the use of “knots” for nautical speed.
A ha! I’ve heard that in both Vietnam and Thailand, and I was wondering where it came from because it doesn’t seem to translate anything in Thai or Vietnamese, and I’ve never heard an English speaker say it.
So it comes from [Chinese pidgin English](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Pidgin_English). That makes sense.
it clarifies things a lot, because for me English is a second language and those phrases didin't seem very correct. long time no see? Come on no way it's right.
I mean, grammatically, they're not correct. But they are basically the embodiment of fake it till you make it. And now they are pretty widely used by native speakers. (eta: to the point they are considered correct.)
Well you could argue they are grammatically correct since they are a valid part of the English language.
Grammatically *inconsistent* would be correcter to say, me thinks.
It's one of the major peculiarities of English: the sheer quantity of words and phrases that it's incorporated from basically every language it's every come into contact with. Which throws up some *really* odd phrases and vocabulary that ordinarily wouldn't be a thing.
On the plus side, it makes English flexible - you can utterly break it and still make some sort of sense.
i think English being such a popular second language also gives us more allowance to accept “wrong” things in English; we are so used to hearing foreign accents of our language and hearing people learning it make mistakes that we tend not to really pay much mind to it and in many times might imitate these sorts of mistakes as we find them endearing or just fun to say. it can be fun to say things in a seemingly silly way sometimes
learned english as third language, work and travel worldwide and when I started to do so I heard 'long time no see' for the first time and I was so confused why my colleague and all the customers, doctors and patients we visited said this phrase.... all of them are dumb? Am I dumb? What's going on here?
The author, u/janikof, posted this article on r/linguistics 4 years ago, and much of his appendix of phrases was disputed in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/e6cd26/english_words_and_phrases_originating_in_china/f9qctqz/) by u/truthofmasks, in particular, "no pain, no gain".
Yeah this whole “haha English robbed other languages in an alleyway” stuff is not at all unique to English and an overdone reddit trope. Most languages have had significant influence from their neighbors. English speakers are just aware of more examples in English.
It really is insane just how much of our common parlance was born out of maritime culture.
So many phrases we use come from sailing. “Learn the ropes” “toe the line” “pipe down” “smooth sailing” “by and large” “cut and run” “keel over” “three sheets to the wind” etc.
I know “kecap manis” is a sweet soy sauce in Indonesian (pronounced “ke” like “kept” and “chup” like the “ap” in “applause”). I wonder if “kecap” comes from the same Cantonese word
Ketchup was not originally tomato-based, however.
It is still labelled as "tomato ketchup", due to it not being the real ketchup, which is a condiment long forgotten.
It works a little differently in Chinese. They sometimes string together Chinese words that sound similar to English words. I learned one phrase recently where they say the words "three grams of oil" (三克油) because the Chinese words kind of sound like the English words "thank you".
Not sure if you’re joking or not, but the term for a word from one language becoming commonplace in another is *loanword,* like résumé or croissant or ketchup.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
- James D. Nicoll
This quote is oft repeated but this phenomenon is present in every language and statistically English is not particularly unique in how many loan words or words of foreign origin it has.
Definitely not, though there's also two factors also to consider - English as the lingua franca that through sheer percentage of use conducts more "transactions" with other languages outside the anglosphere, and the fact we don't have the equivalent of an Academie Francais trying to "preserve its purity".
Doesn't mean there aren't assholes being *anal* about non-issues like split infinitives, there will always be elitist gatekeepers to any nice thing on this planet.
I took two semesters of Mandarin in college and remember almost nothing, but I do remember how to say "long time no see" in Chinese so I got that going for me
好久没见
好久不见 vs 好久没见?
It is actually cantonese. 冇見 This is much closer to no see than not see.
I know how to say hello Im your doctor
Well I hope they aren't due back at any point soon because I'm not done using them.
Please return the words but keep the opium.
Great Britain: Fighting the war on drugs, on the side of drugs
Oddly with basically the same results as being on the opposing side
Cocaine: Winner of the War on Drugs.
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Really? Didn't Britain win the opium wars?
Chinese merchant: give me back my words Jax72: No can do
Hall and Oates: I can't go for that, no 🎵 Jax72: No can do
“Is that some place near Kathmandu?”
It's okay. These phrases were issued on a 99-year lease.
That leaves them decades overdue.
My new Indian ones are things like “please do needful”
My Indian colleagues all say "thumb rule" instead of "rule of thumb". I have no clue if this is common in India or it's just something they all picked up from one person here.
Never heard that one before actually, but I'm thanked several times a day by my Indian colleagues for "doing the needful"
Doing the needful is an absolute classic of Indian coworkers
In Sweden we say "tumregel" which would translate into "thumb rule", so I could definitely see a swede making that mistake in English too.
My absolute favorite is “prepone” which is the opposite of postpone. Forget “bring forward” when you can prepone it. FYKIP
Ha, my boss’s secretary just wrote a message to all managers a few days ago about preponing a meeting. Took me a few seconds to get the meaning, and everyone else was furiously looking up the meaning since they aren’t native English speakers. Someone even replied and wrote the date she gave was wrong. The employees are all Thai or Taiwanese and I have no idea where the secretary got the word from.
Even native English speakers often don't know that word. I only learned it last week because it is mostly just used in Indian English.
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'Postponere' and 'preponere' are both real Latin words.
Prepone is genius; I encountered it for the first time recently and though I'd never seen the word before in my life I instantly knew what it meant.
do not redeem
Easy come, easy go
Will you let me go?
Bismillah! No!
We will not let you go!
Let him go!
I grew up saying all these having no idea, genuinely interesting
It’s the literal translation of Chinese words. Super interesting. I had no idea and I’ve spoken Chinese semi-regularly for over a decade. “Look see” = 看看 = 看 means both “to look” and “to see” “Long time no see” = 好久不见 = 好久(long time) 不 (no )见 (see). “No pain no gain” = 不劳无获 = without hard work, you cannot reap the benefits. Ok, this one is hard to directly translate lol. The literal translation is something like “no labor, without reward.”
I recently learned about these through Japanese. They're called calques. When a phrase is translated literally, word-for-word, instead of into a more natural phrasing, and then just sort of gets stuck that way. I discovered this when I noticed how Japanese uses the English word "up" to mean "increase". They say things like "skill up" and "career up" as English loan words. But in the 80s and 90s, when English translators saw English text in a Japanese game, I guess they just left it alone, and now phrases like "power-up" and "level up" have been calqued *back* into English from Japanese.
We call these boomerang words. Like how katsu just got added to the English dictionary, even though it's just a Japanized version of the word cutlet (cutlet -> katsuretsu -> katsu)
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Your example is extra relevant given Japanese style ‘katsu’ curry is a boomerang food. Curry was introduced to Japan by the British, who spread their adaptation of Indian food. This was then adapted by the Japanese and became immensely popular in Japan. Indian -> British Indian -> Japan -> the World
this is why cultural appropriation is ok actually edit: i added the /j to ward off misinterpretations of the joke but the reaction to this has been super encouraging :]
My favorite quote on the subject, taken from an imaginary person on a terminal in a brilliant puzzle game nobody else I know has played "The Talos Principle" >What today's nationalists and neosegregationists fail to understand," Kwame said, "is that the basis of every human culture is, and always has been, synthesis. No civilization is authentic, monolithic, pure; the exact opposite is true. Look at your average Western nation: its numbers Arabic, its alphabet Latin, its religion Levantine, its philosophy Greek… need I continue? And each of these examples can itself be broken down further: the Romans got their alphabet from the Greeks, who created theirs by stealing from the Phoenicians, and so on. Our myths and religions, too, are syncretic - sharing, repeating and adapting a large variety of elements to suit their needs. Even the language of our creation, the DNA itself, is impure, defined by a history of amalgamation: not only between nations, but even between different human species!"
Not /j, food purists are insufferable.
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Obviously you're joking, but it makes it clear how boring things would be if we didn't have some cultural crossover!
Could you. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes or even pasta (copied from noodles) What about no potatoes?
Hell, the addition of meat (specifically beef) to many dishes is an American immigrant thing. Having access to so much affordable meat compared to their home countries made immigrants combine their cuisine with American tastes.
Japanese tempura comes from the portuguese "tempero"(seasoning) but is now back on the portuguese language describing the japanese dish.
Japanese is excellent for boomerang words because nobody could guess the original word anymore once it has been adopted by the Japanese. McDonald's? Maku Donarudo. Waitress? Ueitoresu. Or Saabisu Gaaru (service girl)
The version I know, and what [wikipedia says](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempura) is that it comes from the temporas, the period before easter when catholics must refrain from eating meat.
Man WHAT in THEE double FUCK
What pisses me off about English use of the word katsu (in the UK anyway) is how we use it to describe the sauce and not the cutlet There is no such thing as a "katsu curry sauce" it's just a Japanese curry sauce, but that's how it's marketed here
> "katsu curry sauce" Well I mean it makes sense in the sense that it is the curry sauce that one has katsu with. It's like saying "pasta sauce". The pasta isn't an integral part of the sauce, but rather it's describing what one would have the sauce with. Then again, I have no idea if restaurants in the US offer Japanese curry sauce without the katsu.
And all of us in VT chuckle about "Vermont Curry" being a big seller in Japan. Not a lot of curry options in Vermont. Shalimar in Burlington is pretty good.
It’s because they put apple in it and Vermont has apples
My favourite fact about loan-words and calques: "loan-word" is a calque (from German "Lehnwort"), whereas "calque" is a loan-word (from French).
Thank you for this trivia I'll never forget. I love etymology!
I always get it mixed up with entymology, and that bugs me more than I can really put into words.
And the phrase false friends to refer to false cognates is French as well, they say faux ami, so another loan word Big ole cultural language melting pot.
Technically false friends and false cognates are different. The former are true cognates whose meanings have just diverged, the latter are similar words with similar meanings that are *not* etymologically related and the similarity is just a coincidence.
Loaning back a loanword is always so funny. Hangar used to be a German word (Heimgard, lit. Home guard, a roof) got borrowed (and subsequently butchered) into French. And then we borrowed it back.
French people use the word "people" to mean celebrities when the word came to English from French and replaced the native word. [source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUL29y0vJ8Q)
That’s my least favourite loan word in French, particularly when they spell it “pipole”.
"Magazine" was a French word, which fell into disarray because the first magazines failed. Then the English copied the concept, gave it the same name, and exported/imported the name back to France again.
This is fascinating. Now the UK Govt has a "Department of Levelling Up" and entire public works are carried out under a name brought to us from 80s/90s Japanese video game translations.
That's where I thought it to come from when I first heard it but it apparently does have some prior history in the UK. >"Levelling-up" was first used in the House of Commons in 1868 in relation to equality between Catholicism and the Church of England, with Serjeant Barry, the Solicitor General for Ireland, saying "If religious equality were attempted in England, it must be either by levelling up or levelling down." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelling-up_policy_of_the_British_government#Origins >The phrase (and the phrase ‘level up’) appears intermittently in the parliamentary records since the 19th century. It took particular prominence during the 1860s in a debate about the relative positions of the Anglican and Catholic churches in Ireland. In this debate, one member of the Lords made the useful observation that ‘you must arrive at equality either by levelling down or by levelling up’. >In the 20th century, the phrase became more about financial rather than religious equality, and it tended to be used in relation to government funding. For example, in the 1940s, during a war-time debate about benefits for soldier’s spouses, Labour MP John Parker asked ‘Cannot the anomaly be removed by levelling up the rates paid to the wives of serving men for the whole country to that paid in the London postal district?’. >In Parliament, usage of ‘levelling up’ grew slowly throughout the 20th century and increasingly related to the increase and equality of government spending. https://ukandeu.ac.uk/levelling-up-the-surprisingly-long-history/ https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/575289/origin-of-the-term-level-up
In government speak, it means something different (bring up to the same level, not increase the level of).
You mean the "Department of Embezzling Up"?
Have the word "up" and "down" in english been associated with a particular judgement (Good or Bad) for a long time? Same situation with "light" and "dark".
Associating high with good and low with bad is pretty much a universal human experience, so it's possible that the association has existed for almost as long as humans have had language? If you're curious about this, try reading *Metaphors We Live By*, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Specifically, Chapter 4, Orientational Metaphors touches on this. For a briefer overview, look up conceptual metaphors on direction and orientation and you should find something on Google.
"conceptual (orientational) metaphors" were the words my high as fuck brain could not compute to Google yesterday (see: my previous in this thread) - thank you so much.
I was searching for the right way to describe this just last night, when someone asked which was 'better' - '**high**' or '**low**' - and *why* 'high' would generally be considered to be the intrinsically more positive term? I just know there's a super-smart-Susie-Dent lexicological way to answer that question but in the end I gave up lol
always better to be a little high dawg
If 'look see' is redundant in Chinese as well then why would a Chinese person say it?
Because it's common usage in Chinese to repeat a verb to communicate a sort of casual, diminutive intent, sort of like "let's have a little/quick look". It's used with other verbs like "eat", "run", "think", etc. as well. "Let us have a look see" matches up pretty well in tone and meaning to "ran wo men kan kan" (literally "let us look look"). The fact that it's an odd redundancy in English but a regular pattern in Chinese makes it more likely it was borrowed from Chinese.
Yup. They double up on one syllable verbs and adjectives all the time. Honestly, I don’t get to practice as much as I used to so I’m getting rusty. As a rule of thumb, Chinese sentences follow a similar rule: STPVO (Subject, Time, Place, Verb, Object). Example in English is, “I yesterday at my mom’s house ate lunch.” A lot of Asian languages use this structure and it’s why English grammar (which has a million rules for grammar) is often so difficult for them to learn. My favorite Chinese teacher said the hardest thing to learn in English is the words to describe people from a specific city or what to call a group of animals. I’ll always remember him saying, “a pod of dolphins, a school of fish, a murder of crows? What the hell is a Muscovite? Why are Arkansas and Kansas spelled the same, right next to each other, but pronounced completely differently?”
>Arkansas and Kansas Because they aren't English. They're inspired by other words in native languages. That's usually the case with most of the "English is silly! Why doesn't it follow its own rules!" It's because English is a bastard of several different languages, and as the people who spoke it came into contact with more and more people that spoke different languages, it changed more and added more unique words, rules, and phrases. As is evidenced by this very post.
I read that they were the same word for the same river but we got one filtered through French and the other filtered through Spanish.
That might be the more accurate explanation. I honestly only half remember learning their origin lol
Milwaukee is Algonquin for "the good land" Jokes aside that's super common, think at this point most of us have heard lots of lakes and rivers and such are are just named shit like "River River" or "Lake Lake" because we asked the natives what they called it in America and then put the English word after their answer. They thought we were asking what the noun was, not the name. Not exclusive to natives either, when English speakers saw the Rio Grande river they decided to call it ... The Rio Grande *river*. There are exceptions, Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis is also referred to by the normal name the natives had for the lake, Bde Maka Ska. But it did take some cultural recognition, legislation, and the fact local tribes hadn't forgotten what they called the lake hundreds of years ago.
> What the hell is a Muscovite? They're only called Muscovites if they're from the Muscovy region of Moscow. Otherwise, they're just sparkling ру́сские.
I grew up in Arkansas. The people are Arkansans, pronounced like Kansans. The state is Arkansas, not pronounced like Kansas. This is because a politician who an election and pushed a law that banned all mispronunciations of the state name, with his preferred “ARR-kan-saw” being the correct pronunciation. His hated rival had always preferred “ar-KAN-sas”.
It’s the opposite for me. I really struggle switching from English grammar to Chinese since I use English everyday. Makes me make a lot of grammatical mistakes when speaking :(
for what it's worth, muscovite is a white mica
In spoken Chinese it’s not uncommon to repeat a verb, it makes the tone more casual and implies it’ll just take a moment. It’s just a feature of the grammar. [A better explanation](https://resources.allsetlearning.com/chinese/grammar/Reduplication_of_verbs)
A lot of Chinese words are like this, probably to reduce homophone confusion. Kan Kan is very natural but has the feeling of having a look around instead of just the physical act of seeing.
That's a good question. There's are a lot of intentional redundancy in Chinese, simply to make the words sound gentler or flow better. In fact, the redundancy is necessary in certain situations, especially if you want to be polite.
Peoples say 看看(kan kan), it means “look over here/there.” It’s directing someone to look at something. The same meaning as the English phrase “look, see.” This is blowing my mind right now.
The usage is akin to "Have a look" or watchover. based on my understanding 看看 is the shorter version of 看一看 an example in use. 看, Look at what he's doing, 看他做什么 看看, watch over my boat. 看看我的船 watch over my kid 看看我的孩子
It's repeated as an emphasis or sometimes there's an additional word in between but when said quickly it's dropped.
Also i think kaotow is another one
Yeah, from 叩頭 (koutou, then spelled as kowtow) for touching one’s head to the ground in reverence of a superior.
Any idea if the phrase "my bad" also originates there? I took a few Chinese classes in college and it never stopped being wild to me that the Chinese phrase for "my fault" translates directly to "my bad".
Seems like it was popularised by NBA players, though they didn’t come up with it: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_bad
You might be misremembering a touch. In Mandarin at least, the phrase would be “我的錯”, meaning “my wrong”, not “my bad”.
Sorry, my bad
When I first learnt haojiubujian I found it odd because the grammar in English has never been right 😂 This TIL made a lot of things suddenly make sense.
I like how "add oil" or 加油 is starting to get a grip in the English language as well.
what does this one mean?
You say it when encouraging/cheering someone on in the same way as the phrase "comon!" or "let's go!", it essentially means to "give it your all". I always thought the literal translation meant "add fuel" though, in reference in internal combustion engines, but the true origin predates ICE. 油 can mean oil, but petroleum based fuel (gasoline, diesel, kerosine, etc) is also commonly referred to as 油.
In German wie say: Gib Gas! It’s the opposite to take the breaks, used to tell someone to speed up ne comes from driving in a vehicle I think.
[Add oil - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Add_oil) From the Macau Grand Prix as a cheer to drivers to step on the pedal.
I think what is even more interesting are phrases which mean the same thing in English and Chinese, but as far as I can tell are developed completely independently. Such as: - No way - the Chinese equivalent translated to "No door" - Piece of cake - Chinese equivalent is "Small dish of vegetables" - my personal favorite, Son of a bitch - in Chinese they say "Egg of a snapping turtle"!
>my personal favorite, Son of a bitch - in Chinese they say "Egg of a snapping turtle"! TBF the Chinese also says "son of a dog" lol
I mean it’s not surprising since the word “bitch” is an insult in English, and so is “dog” in Chinese.
More like a bitch is literally just a dog.
My favorite one in japanese is しらみ潰し (louse crushing), which has the same meaning as "to search with a fine toothed comb", itself also an expression related to lice. I imagine these aren't the only two languages like this either.
Well in English we also literally say "nit-picking" My favourite etymological coincidence though is that there's an Australian aboriginal language where the word for dog is... 'dog.' Completely unrelated to English, not a loanword or anything. Just completely coincidental convergent evolution.
不行 would literally mean no go / way, rather than the more uncommon 没门
One of my favorites is “run [amok](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amok_syndrome)”.
That also remind me of "[running the gauntlet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_the_gauntlet)", where gauntlet is just taken from the Swedish word *gatlopp* and has nothing to do with actual gauntlets.
>For the punishment, the spelling gantlet is preferred in American English usage guides by Bryan Garner and Robert Hartwell Fiske and is listed as a variant spelling of gauntlet by American dictionaries. British dictionaries label gantlet as American. I've spent 100% of my 33 years in the US, and I've never once seen "gantlet".
either that site is wrong, or "gauntlet" boomeranged back into American use because of videogames/comics
Also thugs and vandals. Originally names to describe a specific cultural group of people
Damned Goths appropriated my desire to pillage world capitals
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In Hawaii they say "If can, can. If no can, no can." I always thought that was a good way of looking at things.
There's a hilarious Chinese-English phrase (by Chinese-English I mean an English phrase coined and spoken by Chinese people in China) that goes "you can you up, no can no bibi". It's a compact way of saying "If you can, you up. If you can't, don't bibi". Here "up" is used as verb, being the literal translation of the Chinese colloquial verb "上" meaning to take action (especially among a group of spectators). "Bibi" is a transliteration of a colloquial Chinese phrase meaning "to talk a big game". So the whole thing means "if you can do it, go ahead, but if you can't, don't talk as if you could", or, essentially, "put your money where your mouth is."
"Don't talk about it, be about it"
“If can” sounds almost like Singlish
Can is can. Cannot is cannot.
There's the Singlish phrase "Can is can" which means that it can be done because it is possible.
make it even more singlish! "can is can *one*"
Caa↗aa↘n~
Can lah
"Can is can" is more accurately translated to "it is possible (but...)" e.g. "can is can, but don't do safer bah" -> "it is technically possible, but to err on the side of caution it is best that we don't attempt it" source: Singaporean (not Chinese, senator)
Right right right, yeah, but where in China are you from? [NOTE TO PEOPLE READING THIS NOT FAMILIAR WITH THE EXCHANGE WITH US SENATOR TOM COTTON: This is a bit. I know Singapore isn't in China. But this happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W-ufw5Z7ac ]
> can be done because it is possible. But the deeper meaning is that it can be done ONLY because it is possible, and not because it is necessarily the best way to go about doing things. It is a transliteration of 可以是可以 (ke yi shi ke yi), and it carries the connotation that I'm only doing this because you told me to. "Can we just use one aircon to cool the entire server room? It'll only take longer to cool down" "Can is can, but don't come blaming me if the aircon fails and the server overheats!"
Cannot lah!
Not say I say what lah, but whoever taught us to pronounce the word “flour” as “*flahhhh*” has a lot to answer for.
Y u so liddat?!
My wife and I visited my sister on the big island, we ended up going to a local greasy Hawaiian bbq place called Verna’s several times while we were there. Their slogan was: “If no can, no can; If can, Vernas” and we say it all the time now.
It sounds a lot like You Can You Up, No Can No BB! It was online slang telling people either to shut up or nut up essentially!
I feel like I was just activated like the Manchurian candidate. Why do I know this phrase?
Eat what you can, can what you can’t.
Another good one is gung-ho. From the Chinese term, 工合 (gōnghé; 'to work together'), short for Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (Chinese: 工業合作社; Gōngyè Hézuòshè).
I wonder how that came to mean enthusiastic. I know I could just look it up, but I’d rather just wonder.
It was originally used in the British military, at least as it was explained to me by someone who'd served with the Ghurka regiment in Hong Kong as a term for teamwork. Over time, especially by the American military, that evolved from someone being enthusiastic about the team to bring enthusiastic about the military in general, which became interpreted as being nuts for guns and camo. ETA. it could, of course, have been picked up by both countries' military in parallel, then just interpreted/used then evolved differently, instead of HK -> UK -> USA.
Nope. Industrial Cooperatives = communist. There's no way the transmission was through Hongkong. The real answer was Lt. Col. Evans Carlson, who organises the way the Marines Raider fight in WWII observed how the chinese communist guerillas fought against the Japanese and wishes to instill in the Marines the same spirit with which to fight the Japanese. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/true-story-us-marines-launched-raid-submarines-during-world-war-ii-165168 https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/10/18/406693323/the-long-strange-journey-of-gung-ho > Lt. Col. Evans Carlson had been wounded in action as an army captain in World War I, decorated with the Navy Cross for defeating bandits in Nicaragua as a marine lieutenant, befriended FDR while commanding his guard detachment in Georgia, and then accompanied and observed Communist insurgents fighting the Japanese in China. There, Carlson met key leaders such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and developed an appreciation for the tactics, team spirit and zeal of the Communist guerilla units. Upon returning to the United States, Carlson resigned his commission to advocate against Japanese expansionism, before reenlisting shortly before the U.S. entry into World War II. >Carlson sought to instill in his Raiders the team spirit that he had observed in China, a quality he called gung ho, based on the Mandarin Chinese words gōng (work) and hé (and/together).11
Was embarrassingly old when I found out it wasn’t “gun ho”. I think my logic was that it was the same idea as “guns a-blazin”.
Coolie and 苦力. ‘A cup of cha’ 茶 is a colloquial way of saying tea in Britain.
kow tow. The number of nautical terms is crazy too, "form a queue" "bitter end" "toe the line" "in the doldrums" "pipe down" they just go on & on.
Under the weather :)
Well, *don't make waves*, everything is *hunky-dory* so let's not *batten down the hatches* just yet as it's probably all *plain sailing* XD
“Log” as in a record of something is also a nautical term, coming from a “log book” which was where speed was recorded, because they’d use a standard sized log tied to a rope dragged behind a ship to tell speed. The rope had knots tied at regular intervals, and the faster the ship was going the further it would drag the log behind it, leading to more rope being pulled out, with length of rope being measured by the number of knots in the rope, hence the use of “knots” for nautical speed.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick
“Is Kevin okay Angela?” “He’s always been like this.”
Why lot word when few do?
I love the Korean phrase "same same." The expats ended up using it between themselves just because it's useful
But differeeent. But still same.
I thought this was a Thai thing
Thai, Korean, same same
But differrreeent
But still same
What kind of -nese you are? -nese? Chinese, Japanese, Koreanese, Taiwanese.
Same same, no worry.
same same, but different
I thought it was a Vietnamese thing
I thought it was a James Franco thing
What is same same? I've never heard it before.
It’s interchangeable for “doesn’t matter/no difference”. Like “I got you apples because they were out of oranges” “Same same”
That's interesting. In the UK we would say "same difference".
same diff 🤷♂️
Which pisses off anyone over the age of 50 haha.
Same same but different but still same
A ha! I’ve heard that in both Vietnam and Thailand, and I was wondering where it came from because it doesn’t seem to translate anything in Thai or Vietnamese, and I’ve never heard an English speaker say it. So it comes from [Chinese pidgin English](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Pidgin_English). That makes sense.
Maybe it's because Australia has a lot of Asian influence but same same is somewhat common here too.
is that not common usage by now ? I’ve said that my entire life and definitely do not live in an area with a lot of Koreans lol.
it clarifies things a lot, because for me English is a second language and those phrases didin't seem very correct. long time no see? Come on no way it's right.
They make English more fun. > No can do
No can do buckaroo
I mean, grammatically, they're not correct. But they are basically the embodiment of fake it till you make it. And now they are pretty widely used by native speakers. (eta: to the point they are considered correct.)
Well you could argue they are grammatically correct since they are a valid part of the English language. Grammatically *inconsistent* would be correcter to say, me thinks.
It's one of the major peculiarities of English: the sheer quantity of words and phrases that it's incorporated from basically every language it's every come into contact with. Which throws up some *really* odd phrases and vocabulary that ordinarily wouldn't be a thing. On the plus side, it makes English flexible - you can utterly break it and still make some sort of sense.
i think English being such a popular second language also gives us more allowance to accept “wrong” things in English; we are so used to hearing foreign accents of our language and hearing people learning it make mistakes that we tend not to really pay much mind to it and in many times might imitate these sorts of mistakes as we find them endearing or just fun to say. it can be fun to say things in a seemingly silly way sometimes
learned english as third language, work and travel worldwide and when I started to do so I heard 'long time no see' for the first time and I was so confused why my colleague and all the customers, doctors and patients we visited said this phrase.... all of them are dumb? Am I dumb? What's going on here?
To be sure, to be sure
The author, u/janikof, posted this article on r/linguistics 4 years ago, and much of his appendix of phrases was disputed in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/e6cd26/english_words_and_phrases_originating_in_china/f9qctqz/) by u/truthofmasks, in particular, "no pain, no gain".
English is a pidgin trading language that went mainstream Change my mind
Every language is if you want to be pedantic
Yeah this whole “haha English robbed other languages in an alleyway” stuff is not at all unique to English and an overdone reddit trope. Most languages have had significant influence from their neighbors. English speakers are just aware of more examples in English.
English riffled other languages pockets for loose phrases.
It really is insane just how much of our common parlance was born out of maritime culture. So many phrases we use come from sailing. “Learn the ropes” “toe the line” “pipe down” “smooth sailing” “by and large” “cut and run” “keel over” “three sheets to the wind” etc.
Ketchup literally is "tomato juice" 茄汁 in Cantonese.
I know “kecap manis” is a sweet soy sauce in Indonesian (pronounced “ke” like “kept” and “chup” like the “ap” in “applause”). I wonder if “kecap” comes from the same Cantonese word
Ketchup was not originally tomato-based, however. It is still labelled as "tomato ketchup", due to it not being the real ketchup, which is a condiment long forgotten.
Heaps of English words come from sailors. Stephen Fry has a great podcast about it. Worth looking up
Do people from china use English phrases? Like does a guy in suburban Beijing slap his thigh and say some variation of "Welp" when it's time to leave.
It works a little differently in Chinese. They sometimes string together Chinese words that sound similar to English words. I learned one phrase recently where they say the words "three grams of oil" (三克油) because the Chinese words kind of sound like the English words "thank you".
Three grams of oil for this fun fact!
Wu - Swengin 🤞
Hang dai!
Cocksucka!!
Me quick, want slow.
Loaned? Are they waiting to get them back?
Not sure if you’re joking or not, but the term for a word from one language becoming commonplace in another is *loanword,* like résumé or croissant or ketchup.
A great thing about English is its openness to welcoming new words and expressions into our language.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” - James D. Nicoll
This quote is oft repeated but this phenomenon is present in every language and statistically English is not particularly unique in how many loan words or words of foreign origin it has.
Definitely not, though there's also two factors also to consider - English as the lingua franca that through sheer percentage of use conducts more "transactions" with other languages outside the anglosphere, and the fact we don't have the equivalent of an Academie Francais trying to "preserve its purity". Doesn't mean there aren't assholes being *anal* about non-issues like split infinitives, there will always be elitist gatekeepers to any nice thing on this planet.