Who doesn’t love a good pun? Most people, it turns out.

The Chinese language, however, is structured to lend itself to a whole world of puns. Each syllable corresponds to a written character, and they are put together in different ways to make words.

For example, in English, we have a word for owl. It’s owl. It means owl. It’s a word on its own and doesn’t relate to anything else.

In Chinese, it’s 猫头鹰 (maotouying) or “cat-headed eagle.”  Which is kind of clever and also kind of confusing.

There are about 1,700 possible syllables in Mandarin compared with over 8,000 in English. This opens up many opportunities for hilarious confusion, clever use of homophones or good old puns. My friend Dan, who would historically make everyone groan with his silly jokes, was quite a hit in China, where puns and double entendres are a very popular and appreciated form of humor. They show a real mastery of language.

To give a newsworthy example, recently, a subversive Chinese artist posted internet videos for a song called 草泥马 (Grass-Mud Horse) which featured a happy alpaca galloping in a big field. The topic seemed totally benign and passed Chinese sensors. However, it became an overnight phenomenon as the Chinese and international media realized that the “grass-mud horse” was a disguised homophone for “(expletive) your mom.” The whole episode caused a great stir and brought attention to the Chinese censorship process, which is facing innumerable new hurdles with the internet age.

(Fun fact: That particular vulgar character is not included in many Chinese character input systems (like on cell phones) and is written literally with the character for entry below the character for flesh).

This story is just one of a million examples of why I find Chinese infinitely interesting. People often ask me how I’ve learned Chinese, which is popularly known as a difficult thing to do. I think it really borders on an almost obsessive desire to build words and extract basic meaning in new ways, figure out curious pieces of history and culture behind each character, and enjoy clever wordplay as you go.

I mean, popcorn is called 爆米花 (baomihua) which means “exploding corn flowers.” How awesome is that?

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 12:25 PM and is filed under Asia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.