You live in a house, but you stay in a hotel. The Chinese only have the one common word for all forms of 'residing', so they are incapable of differentiating between long-term and short-term accommodation arrangements. This can occasionally be - discombobulatingly - charming. I have been greeted by Chinese hotel receptionists with the warm wish: "I hope you live a long time." In fact, it was their own commercial advantage rather than my longevity that they had in mind. This is an error - using 'live' instead of 'stay' when talking about holiday accommodation -that comes up all the time in the recording scripts I work with. And my partners and I painstakingly amend the faulty scripts, pointing out that they should say 'stay' in instances like this; although we have little expectation that anyone at the publishing houses will ever pay any attention. And when they do pay attention, as often as not it just backfires on us. Today we had a whole clutch of uses of 'stay' where people were almost certainly talking about their home addresses. Further little footnote here - when we're talking about our present arrangements for temporary accommodation, we usually use the Present Continuous Tense: I'm staying at the Hilton until Friday. This really shouldn't be very difficult, but.... |
Friday, September 11, 2009
War on Chinglish (10)
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4 comments:
hey, F-man, listen, how about the British guys learning Chinese, oh, Jesus, I used to meet a guy from Bristol who had been learning Chinese when I was in London, and when he tried to talk to me in Mandarin, I have to really control myself not to burst into laughs when i heard his awful pronunciation and totally wrong usage of grammar. He cannot differentiate the 4 tones in the Chinese. The 4 tones are really easy, but....
It's uncommonly restrained of you not to laugh at foreigners speaking Chinese - whether well or badly. It is the standard reaction here, and one of the things that most discourages anyone from attempt to use the language.
People from Bristol talk funny. The accent is regarded as risible - and barely comprehensible - in most of the rest of Britain.
Now, Froog, I hate to burst your bubble but actually what these Chinese people are doing is using common Scots usage of the word "Stay". It is Very widely used as a synonym for "live". "Where do you stay?" "I stay in Leith". :)
Really? That's very interesting, Livy. I don't think I've ever noticed that quirk of Scottish English before.
Also, I find it rather unexpected, in that I tend to think of Scottish English as mostly rather more 'refined' than modern British English - with a rather more old-fashioned grammar, and a richer, more archaic vocabulary. It seems out of character to ignore or abandon a useful distinction in vocabulary that most of the rest of the English-speaking world has been using for - I would guess - quite a few hundred years at least.
Anyway, we are trying to promote a 'standard English' for speakers of other languages - increasingly it's a kind of 'international English' that owes more to the US than the UK; but it certainly owes nothing to Scottish English or any other regional variations.
It would be nice to think that Chinese English speakers had picked up this verbal tic from studying in Scotland (or having Scottish friends or teachers, or watching Trainspotting), but I fear this is not the case. It's just that they find this distinction very difficult to assimilate because it's completely absent in their own language. Also, they're probably not even taught it, because most home-produced textbooks here are so bad.
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