Interesting Times

18

In Interesting Times, much is made of similar sounding words having totally different meanings. Languages such as Chinese and Japanese pay great attention to the pitch and intonation of words, and the same word with a different intonation can indeed have radically different meanings. (Of course not all different meanings are due to intonation — there are other possibilities, such as vowel lengths, and some words just naturally have many different meanings).

Just in case you think Terry is overstating things for comic effect, there is an anecdote told by linguist David Moser, who was learning Chinese, and was practising with some Chinese friends. He was tired, and said “I want to go to sleep now”, but got the intonation wrong, and what he actually said was “I stand by where the elephant urinates”.

Similarly, I am told that the Chinese glyph ‘sento’ can alternatively mean ‘public bath’, ‘residence of a retired emperor’, ‘first scaling the wall of a besieged castle’, ‘fighting together’ or ‘scissors’, while the Japanese ‘kansen’ can mean any of ‘main-line’, ‘warship’, ‘sweat-gland’, ‘infection’, ‘government’, ‘appointed’ and ‘witnessing a battle’.