For my senior seminar project in college, two of us Chinese majors worked on a project analyzing the Chinese used in chatrooms. Since it was right when Napoleon Dynamite had come out, the catchphrase for our project was, "Napoleon, don't be jealous because I've been chatting online with babes all day."
That has nothing to do with what follows, but I just thought it necessary to tell you.
So anyway, in English, when you type messages to people, you use stupid abbreviations like lol, brb, btw, omg, and my personal least-favorite, wtf. But in Chinese, it takes just as long to type one character as it does another character, so abbreviations don't really work like this.
But what really speeds things up (especially while texting) is using numbers instead of characters. So sometimes you use numbers to sound like phrases.
For example, 88 sounds like "ba ba," so people use 88 to sign off. Bye bye!
Another one I remember is that 520 sounds like "wu er ling," and with the tones and everything, it sounds remarkably like "wo ai ni," or I love you.
One time I sat on a train by an 8th grade Chinese kid, and he laughed pretty hard at his seat number, which was 478 "si qi ba." To him, it sounded like "si qu ba" or "Just go die."
Pretty cool, huh!
So I smiled and felt pretty smart when I saw that the delivery number for ordering McDonald's (the king of advertisement) ended in 517 517 "wu yao qi, wu yao qi." Sounds like "I want to eat, I want to eat."
Chinese 495 Senior Seminar finally paid off.
3 comments:
How interesting! I have a friend who says that texting in Korean is easier than in English since there are a limited number of sounds in the Korean vocab. Now I wonder if they use numbers too. I guess I will have to ask :)
Yes, that is very interesting. I'd never thought about that. And I love those moments when you get something that's not so obvious in another language.
Makayla (Da Gu Li) has this on her Skype profile. "143 ^.^ 4 ever!" Could it be a Chinese texting shortcut?
Post a Comment