Posts by Rosalyn S

Cantonese can be a creative tool for foul language and political insults. A few years ago, the phrase “Delay no more” started appearing on t-shirts and billboards for a popular clothing brand, hinting at the similar-sounding Cantonese diu lei lo mo, which means “f**k your old mother”. Soon after, grassroots organisations added the profanity to their own cause by printing their own t-shirts: “Universal Suffrage, Delay No More” and “Delay No More, Stop Reclamation of the Habour.”

Earlier this year, a stuffed wolf toy from IKEA called Lufsig also became a crude symbol of anti-government protest – the nickname of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive CY Leung by his critics is “the wolf”.

Cantonese has a few loanwords borrowed from English that have slipped into everyday usage. The best example is probably 的士 (dik si) for “taxi”, hence people saying 打的 (da di) for “hail a cab” as far north as Beijing. Chinglish is also pretty standard, especially among trendy teenagers and work colleagues, who might say “Send个email卑我啦” (send go email bei ngo laa) for “send me an email”.

But the biggest number of loanwords has to be for imported foods. The south of China is stereotyped for its fondness of eating everything from snake to civet cat, but we’ve embraced imported food too.

Ed: Our August season of Cantonese posts, from the lovely Rosalyn S, will be your open sesame to that mysterious and impregnable “other Chinese” (the “funnier sounding” one, according to Russell Peters). We begin with the tricky question of just how many tones it has anyway …

There’s a running joke among Cantonese speakers. If we can’t decide how many tones we use, what hope is there for outsiders?

There are six main tones, from high to low to those that wiggle in between.

Finding stillness in a restless capital – by R.S.

For three months during my first spring in Beijing, I couldn’t sleep longer than three hours a night.

It was mostly restlessness. Everything I was doing to relax was only heightening my senses, keeping me further and further from sleep. I tried a litany of rituals – meditation, breathing exercises, reading the dictionary, listening to crosstalk comic dialogues on the radio, soaking my hands in warm water. If by chance something finally allowed me to sleep, I would repeat it the next night. It never worked twice.

I guess you could call it insomnia, or what Murakami called “the same as what people refer to as insomnia.” But I never used the term; I just called it having trouble sleeping.