There are alot of words in Chinese that come from English, but this week I discovered three that really surprised me. They are: romance (langman), humor (youmo), and logic (luoji). Logic perhaps makes sense: this is a concept totally invented by Western philosophy, and the Chinese have there own way of saying that something is logical/reasonable/makes sense. Humor I also understand; having a "sense of humor" isn't a valuable personality characteristic here as it is in the West, and once again, there are other ways of saying that a person has an enjoyable/amusing personality. Romance I don't get though--doesn't every society have romance? Isn't that sort of one of the fundamental aspects of humanity?
The word Bingo (Bin-ge) also comes from English, in case you were wondering. As this is not a unifying theme from human history, I guess I can understand why they don't have a word for it.
2 comments:
hmm, actually i thought some more about it, and "romance" could suan as an entirely western concept, at least at the time when it was probably introduced into the chinese vocab. if you think about the new culture movement in the late 19th-early 20th c., one of the *key* western ideals intellectuals and kaifang-ed women wanted to embrace was this idea of love and marrying for love rather than being sold into an arranged marriage. i remember thinking when i learned this how qiguai it was for people to be considering marrying for love to be such an important social reform, but that was cuz i live in a time and place where that's generally taken for granted and trillions of dollars are spent in various industries to promote this silly little idea...romance, pshaw~~~
Maybe so but marrying for love is also a relatively new concept in the West too; the "love marriage" really only became popularized 200 years or so ago. But i guess we had the concept of romance a long time before that, even though it really wasnt related to marriage.
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