Chinese Tuesdays: Swallow
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.
Can anyone think of other examples of Chinese homonyms that are matched by the same English homonyms?
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