Envy

[flemmings]

Hope this twitter thread will export. It's about Chinese usage of poetic references and/or mmh 'four character phrases' that draw on a common cultural background to convey much in little. The effect of "boom, here have lots and lots of associations over all the times you've seen this cascade into your head".

Shakespeare and the King James bible might have worked similarly for, err well, people a hundred years ago, but I get the feeling the effect for the Chinese goes deeper than any 'screw your courage to the sticking place' or widow's mite does for us. If only because 21st century Chinese clearly still say 梨花带雨 and no one mentions widows' mites, or would be understood if they did. No, we are not talking about tiny relatives of the tick.

H/t to incandescens for leading me here.

Finished?
Tell My Horse

Reading?
Finn Family Moomintroll
-- because I never have

Rainy Willow 16
-- slowly, to make it last

Next up?
Jane Haddam, Festival of Deaths
-- retired FBI agent solves mysteries. This is the Hanukkah one, supposedly containing many cultural shout outs that I doubt this cradle Catholic will get.

Comments

[conuly]

Shakespeare and the King James bible might have worked similarly for, err well, people a hundred years ago, but I get the feeling the effect for the Chinese goes deeper than any 'screw your courage to the sticking place' or widow's mite does for us. If only because 21st century Chinese clearly still say 梨花带雨 and no one mentions widows' mites, or would be understood if they did. No, we are not talking about tiny relatives of the tick.

Excepting very religious people, you're right, we don't talk about the widow's mite that much, but we do talk about prodigal (sons). Not many people have cause to say "Screw your courage to the sticking place" in casual speech, but you'd be surprised how many ways people find to cram "beast with two backs" into conversations. (That's what she said, anyway.)

And we have other references, perhaps more modern ones, that resonate with most people - if you turned to me in a boring presentation and said "Beam me up, Scotty" I'd have a full set of images to go along with those four words. (Or perhaps "This looks like a job for $NAME!" or "And knowing is half the battle" or any of other pop cultural touchstones. All culture was pop culture at some point.)

[flemmings]

True about the modern cultural references, but those are more ephemeral than the Chinese sayings and not as universal as Shakespeare and the Bible used to be in the English-speaking world. I wonder if Millennials do talk about prodigal sons anymore? Judging by the twenty-somes I deal with at work, four hundred years of literary allusion has gone out the window, to be replaced by TV shows. And even those... 'Beam me up, Scotty' is still around because of the franchise, but how many people know 'Heeere's Johnny!'

The same generation gap seems not to exist with the chinese sayings, just because they've passed into standard vernacular, whereas ours seem more age-specific and hence short-lived.

[conuly]

English has "kennings" as well, don't get me wrong, like referring to blood as "battle-sweat", but it's not as commonly used, not passed down as much, and often authors will come up with kennings that are region/religion/myth specific.

This, I'm convinced, is flat out wrong. Our modern kennings aren't the poetic ones used by the Vikings, but they do exist. We talk about "rug rats" and "couch potatoes" and "skyscrapers" and "baby bumps" and and and omg so many ethnic/racial/religious slurs also are actually of that form and I refuse to name them.

We don't call these things kennings, but that doesn't mean they aren't.

[flemmings]

Agreed. You don't have to go back to AngloSaxon to get kennings.

[incandescens]

I wondered if you'd see that one: it reminded me of some things you'd said before.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Based mostly on things Mimi has said to me, probably.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

You can get dictionaries of idioms, they are a ton of fun to read. It doesn't really replace the literary knowledge, but it helps. It's why I don't really want to read translations, it doesn't give me all the idioms I really need to know. And idioms were an old way of teaching reading, an entire reading primer built of idioms. I do think a lot of this is going to start to fade away in the modern world, though.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I can see, if these idioms are so commonly used, that they'd be useless in translation. You'd get the sense but not the wrappings. I have a couple of books of idioms related to various categories- flowers, nature, animals- and yeah, looks like it's an idiolect on its own.

[mvrdrk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and the flip side is read it to learn the idioms, which translations also don't help with. My favorite are the history/culture ones like 'Meng's mom cut threads'.