Because it is a monosyllabic language, there is considerable flexibility in phonetically translating an Indo-Euoprean term into Chinese. Whereas the turkish term " قهوة " is translated as "coffee" in English with limited ways of varying possible spellings thereof, there are multiple Chinese characters corresponding to phonics "co" and "ffee", respectively.
What that means is that when Chinese translators translate a term, they typically try to use Chinese characters that says something about the term they are translating. In some way, this process is a balance between transliteration- mapping meaning from one language to another and transcription- mapping sound from one language to another.
For example, the 3 syllable word "Fannie Mae" in Chinese is "房利美" or "FONG-LI-MEI",
The meaning for each character:
房 (FONG) -house, or abode
利 (LI) -profit
美 (MEI) -beautiful (or America).
Note that the Chinese term does not faithfully reproduce the original sound, because the translator made a conscious effort to impart information about the term within the term itself.
Also note that the reason why 美 (MEI) also means "America" because the same characters is used to translate the term A-MER-ica, with the term "美" representing the phonic "MER".
Incidentally, Because Japanese language also uses Chinese characters as one of its two writing systems, their kanji term for America is "米国", or "Rice Nation".
Incidentally, Because Japanese language also uses Chinese characters as one of its two writing systems, their kanji term for America is "米国", or "Rice Nation".
Finally, the Chinese characters for Freddie Mac is "房地美" (FONG-DEE-MEI), or "house-land-America".
4 comments:
duh yang. The chinese just wanted "pineapple girl"
:)
I took a little Japanese in college. I always found the Chinese characters fascinating, especially how they are derived from simpler characters or pictograms and their meanings.
From what I understand, Semitic scripts, which ultimately gave rise to Greek and Latin script, has a pictographic origin as well- that the symbol for aleph was an abstraction of a bull's head.
And that's where the east and west diverged. Whereas pictograms became phonics that are "pun'd" to form new words in the west, in China, the pictograms retained more literal meanings.
Another interesting development ,from what I gathered, was the old Egyptian hierglyphs which were both used as literal icons and as phonetic alphabets.
Yup. See http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/3_home.html for a nice exposition of the origins and meanings of each Hebrew letter.
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