chinese tuesdays

Cancer is no joke, but don't tell that to my friend Bai Heng. We were walking together on Friday night when he dropped a bombshell on me.

"Actually, my friend just found out he has cancer."

"OK, wow. How old is he?"

"He's thirty. It's 睾丸癌症." (gāowánáizhèng – testicular cancer)

"Damn, that's terrible!" I said.

"It's not so bad." A smile crept across his lips. "They had to remove one testicle. But hey, he's still got one left."

I nodded and Bai Heng paused for comedic effect.

"Now we all just call him 剩蛋老人." (shèngdànlǎorén – literally, "leftover ball old man", and an exact homophone for Santa Claus, 圣诞老人)

I've always been a fan of palindromes, but never expected to run into translations of Napolean's supposed quote "Able was I ere I saw Elba" as palindromes in Chinese.

The above note, written by a friend, gives two palindromic translations: 若非孤岛孤非若 (ruòfēigūdǎogūfēiruò), which translates word-for-word as "were it not for isolated island, lonely would not be"; and 落败孤岛孤败落 (luòbàigūdǎogūbàiluò), literally "leaving behind isolated island, loneliness declines".

Via Reddit, here's a collection of Pleco snapshots, "Funny/interesting entries from my dictionary app". It's a reminder of the versatility of characters, where one pictograph can have many, seemingly opposing, meanings – such as 哇 (wā), which most will know as the sound a baby makes, but also can mean both surprised delight, and vomming.

A friend pointed out this little mind f*ck coincidence to me the other day:

In English, the word "swallow", as in the bird, is the same as "swallow" as in the act of getting something down your gullet.

In Chinese, it's the same. Swallow, the bird, is yàn (燕). Swallow, the act, is yàn (咽). Exactly the same pronunciation.

Of course, with the limited number of phonemes in Chinese this isn't a wildly improbably coincidence. And another more common word for swallowing in Chinese is 吞 (tūn), with the two combined in 吞咽 (tūnyàn). But still.