My Two Cents

Originally wrote this as a comment on Joyceyland's "Chinglish grammar and Hong Kong slang" entry. But it's not often that I feel so motivated to write something this lengthy for someone else's blog, so I finally decided I should also post it here.

There is a Chinese character for "doot", but it'd be considered a Hong Kong word. There's also "ding" (to microwave).

I think the verb-"one"-verb construction in Chinese is used to indicate the brevity of an action (kan-yi-kan to take a quick look, deng-yi-deng to wait a moment, shi-yi-shi to give something a try). Like in the Oreo commercial shown in Hong Kong, the narrator says "ling-yut-ling", "lam-yut-lam", "jum-yut-jum" as the three ballerinas twist, lick, and dunk the cookies. Each action is meant to be swift. In colloquial Cantonese, the "one" is often dropped (tai-tai to look, dung-dung to wait, si-si to try). My guess is that Hong Kongers are just in too much of a hurry. For actions that are meant to take longer than a moment, the repeated verb is replaced by "down" (kan-yi-xia in Mandarin and tai-ha in Cantonese).

English-Chinese code switching has become very common in Hong Kong, even among the non-English-speaking population. Words like "book", "check", "double book", "double check", "call", "send" have come to sound more natural than their bulky Chinese equivalents. However, it seems to be—and should be, with good reason—limited to words that sound close enough to Cantonese pronunciations. So nobody really says "try-yut-try", because the tongue rolling makes it more difficult to say than its Chinese equivalent. In any case, I really think code switching should be limited to verbs and nouns. It bugs me most to hear "for" in the middle of a Chinese sentence.

English verbs always remain in the present simple tense in code switching; the actual tense is indicated by a Cantonese particle (send-joh for sent, send-gun for sending). But I'd argue that just like -ed and -ing, -joh and -gun are bound morphemes. And incidentally, the opposite is not unheard of. I have heard people say things like “I deng-ed a table.” Whether or not that’s pushing it is another question. Similarly, English nouns should remain in the singular form no matter how many you’re talking about. Other than number-counter combinations, plurality can also be indicated by a preceding D for some or ho-doh for many. As in “Send-joh ho-doh message ah!"

I'm either the King of Chinglish or just really geeky.