Friday, February 18, 2011

Pauvre lapin!

As if the 'Rabbit' were not already the most unimpressive of the roster of zodiac animals in the traditional Chinese calendar... I have recently learned that the Chinese character for rabbit,   - tu, is an exact homophone (yep, fourth tone and all) for , which means 'vomit'.  Oh dear.

I see someone's already cashing in on this unfortunate coincidence....





Although it turns out - oh, the irony - that in fact rabbits can't vomit.



2 comments:

Froog said...

The Weeble points out that 兔 is usually used in combination with 子 (zi) when denoting the type of animal.

But that sounds uncomfortably similar to the word for diarrhoea...

Poor rabbit!

Murr Brewster said...

I have never seen bunny barf before, but up until now I thought I was just being unobservant.