Cirqadian rhythms.

Before I came to China, I would go for food (mostly pork) with my girly asian ex-managers (independently. In fact I’m not sure I’ve ever seen both Leon and Thorf in the same room together. Hmmmm….[0]).  And when I knew I was going to Macao, I would ask questions, like “So when a waiter brings my food, how do I say thank you?”. And they’d both look puzzled and say “I dunno. You don’t, really. You’re paying them, right?”. And so later I learned the word for thank you, and kinda started using it when a waiter brought me a dish, and then I pretty much stopped. Not because I’m paying them, but because the word for thank you in this case is just so overloaded in Cantonese (and this is one of the very few syntactic differences between Mandarin and Cantonese[1]) that using it just starts to sound silly. Today, I have used “ng-goi” for the following:

“Pardon me!”, to get past someone on the street.

“Excuse me!” to get the attention of a waiter.

“Thank you”, when that waiter brought me a drink.

“Please” when ordering take-away.

“Thank you” when that take-away arrived.

“Sorry” when I realised I’d have to pay with a large bill.

“Thank you” when I got the change.

And those are the ones I remember. It does mean that “ng goi” is the only word you *really* need in Cantonese. But it gets pretty ridiculous after a while. So I’m trying to limit myself to one use per person per day.  But it occurs to me that linguistically it makes a fair bit of sense. In English, “excuse me” can mean a couple of things, overlaps with “Pardon me”, which can also mean a couple of things, and overlaps with “Sorry”. “Please and “Thank you” are a little different, but they all fall into the same basic category of acknowledging another human being and your interaction with, or impact on them. Which is mostly interesting to me because shortly before I came I was reading a post in a friends blog about the use of “Please” and “Thank you”, and someone responded with the tired “They’re emotional blackmail! They’re weasel words, and I don’t use them because people are either doing something for their own benefit, or doing it under duress!” argument that I grew out of at about 12.

And this is an interesting case in point. The Chinese certainly say please and thank you less, especially in commercial situations, but they use it less precisely *because* it’s an acknowledgement of another human being. They use it when appropriate.

There is another word for “Thank you”, used even more sparingly – “Daw jie”. A couple of the boys in LX looked puzzled the other day, when we were discussing “ng goi”, and said that they’d used “ng goi”, and the person they were talking to had corrected them to “Daw jie”. That’s unlikely for a couple of reasons, so I asked for more details. “Oh, we said ‘ng goi’, and they smiled and said ‘daw jie’!”. Like the Chinese do when they’re correcting us”

“Ah. These were shopkeepers?”

“Yup!”

“And you’d just bought … something large and expensive?”

“Yeah, a lot of furniture.”

“Paid cash?”

“Of course.”

“Ok. They weren’t correcting you. They were saying ‘nono, thank *you* for giving us all this lovely cash!’ You say ‘ng goi’, they say ‘daw jie’”

That amused me, for some reason.

Anyway. Next week, we have a theatre, and this week we’re writing procedures for everything from subgrid access to lockout/tagout for specific machinery, so the topic of communication, and lack thereof, is greatly on my mind.

jai.

.

[0] Thorf and Leon will be amused to hear that the Assistant Head of Rigging to whom I report over here is called Roy, and is from Singapore, and totally understands being the one called over to stick his girly asian hands into places other riggers can’t reach.

[1] Syntactically, Mandarin and Cantonese are almost identical, which is either the cause or result of having the same written language. Actual vocab and pronunciation differs quite a lot, but there are only a handful of cases where you can’t just swap in a different pronunciation. Interestingly, though, that change in vocab means classical Chinese poetry is almost always red in Cantonese, because it was almost certainly composed for Cantonese pronunciation, even though the meaning in Mandarin will be effectively identical.

This entry was posted Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.