Bilingual workplaces are confusing. I spend a lot of my time shortening my sentences and trying to remove unnecessary words so that non-English speakers can understand me as best as possible. This results in sentences like "You want go check-in guests? I phone duty." Sentences often get shortened to remove the question portion, as it is unnecessary in English. Your tone of voice can say it all. Things like "The food was good?" are actually logical.
However, as most people know, Chinese words have specific intonation attached to them. Saying the same word 2 different ways can completly change its meaning from say bread to ice -- not quite the same thing. One of the accents (the one that looks like an accent aigue) means that your tone of voice should go up...just like a question. However, it does not mean that what you are saying is a question.
As you can probably guess, this leads to confusion and a lot of "was that a question or a statement?" in a bilingual environment. "Alice, there is a car?" "Why, what, no. I never said there was a car" or "You print the page" "yes, a while ago" "I know, that's why I said it."
I suppose the lack of verb tenses in Chinese doesn't help either...
Anyways, that's just today's tidbit. Enjoy!
Ino understand how to write Chinese stuff and it is driving my spellchecker crazy
ReplyDeletegranpa
And I thought French-English translation could be difficult!
ReplyDeleteHi Liz:
ReplyDeleteGreat note. Short sentences are good. Saves time too.
Cheers
Ron
I can't say I totally could follow what you were saying (say, maybe you have been there too long) although I think it is more likely that I have a very bad background in grammar.
ReplyDeleteNever-the-less, I found your description of the origins of pigeon English to be fascinating. Thanks
About Pigeon English
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Chinese pigeons speak pigeon Chinese..I have found that pigeons in Canada only speak Pigeon English although one pigeon gave me a coo-coo with an uptick on the second coo so maybe he flew in from China