In Changing China, Being 'Suicided' or 'Harmonized'

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124913011

by hakan • 16 years ago

40 15 16 years ago

sriram_sun• 16 years ago

How about being "Baptized into Totalitarianism?"

forinti• 16 years ago

It's hard to be original in a planet with 6 billion people; this is done quite often in Brazilian Portuguese. Since when, I know not.

mustpax• 16 years ago

Catch 22's protagonist, Yossarian exclaims incredulously at one point:

It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean to disappear somebody?

PhilChristensen• 16 years ago

I had a hard time understanding this article, but it was really due to translation issues, and my own lack of understanding about grammar.

I had to read up on the English concept of active- versus passive-voice. For example:

  The cat ate the mouse.

is active, because the cat is the subject of the sentence, and is doing the eating.

  The mouse was eaten by the cat

is passive, because the mouse is the subject, but is "having something done to it", i.e., passive.

So in the case of "He was disappeared", the point is that you are implying that he did not make himself disappear, but that it was done to them.

However, in Chinese, the language is so flexible that there are many far more common ways to express the same concept. So when someone specifically uses the passive voice in this way, while it is grammatically correct (or at least, is a grammatical invention that follows existing rules), it is obvious to other Chinese-speakers that it's an unusual way to say something.

The examples given start making more sense when you forget about the fact that "suicided" isn't a real word. It's not supposed to be a real word, instead it is meany to be a translation into English that preserves the 'strangeness' of the phrase.

In the case of the Chinese, use of the passive voice in this way is kind of like a shibboleth in that someone who agrees with your politics will know what you really mean, but you still have plausible deniability for those that don't.

scott_s• 16 years ago

Are you not a native English speaker? I'm a native English speaker, and the meaning of everything was immediately obvious to me. In fact, I've heard similar constructs used in English before.

tokenadult• 16 years ago

I see the comments in this thread (several of them) are going off on the issue of the author's description of the 被 construction as "passive voice." It really isn't. The author was writing for an English-speaking audience and tried to make an analogy to something familiar to English speakers. But the Chinese language actually doesn't have the category of voice in its verbal system at all, and the 被 construction is better described as an "adversative" construction. I learned this from the authoritative Chinese grammar textbook by the late Chinese linguist Y. R. Chao while an undergraduate student of Chinese.

In Chinese in the most recent century, mistranslation of Western writings with passive voice constructions by the 被 construction (whether or not the Western passive constructions have an adversative meaning) tempts a lot of casual observers to suppose that today's Chinese uses 被 simply as a marker of passive voice. But I have many times tried out, as part of personal linguistic fieldwork, newly composed sentences that use 被 as a straight-up translation of normally grammatical sentences in English, and the Chinese sentences are regarded as ungrammatical unless the 被 construction can plausibly be construed as adversative.

(I just Googled for a good Web reference about this, but didn't find one quite to my satisfaction.)

nandemo• 16 years ago

Couldn't you say it's adversative passive? What about this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice#Adversative_passi...

(it happens to inaccurate in respect to Japanese, since the mentioned indirect passive is not always adversative)

xiaoma• 16 years ago

Yeah, it's pretty messy. 被 is usually but not always adverse. And while 被 is the most common, there are at least half a dozen possible passive markers such as 讓,弄,給,叫,據說, etc... The topic comment construction of Chinese further complicates things, since it's very common for passive constructions to lack any passive marker at all.

For example:

The article has been finished. 文章寫好了.

The meeting has been postponed until Monday. 會議延到星期一舉行.

kentosi• 16 years ago

If you're having trouble understanding passive voice, then think of it this way:

The passive voice means that you don't actually have to put in the person/thing doing the action, and the sentence will be gramatically correct and complete.

See these examples:

Active: The burgler robbed the bank. Passive: The bank was robbed by the burgler. Passive - doing person: The bank was robbed. Note: You can't do this with the active voice, unless you say "someone robbed the bank".

Active: I ate the cake. Passive: The cake was eaten by me. Passive - doing person: The cake was eaten.

I hope this makes sense?

ulo• 16 years ago

The use of the passive voice in this respect is not unique to China. For example, "dehoused" was a WWII Allied term to describe Germans whose homes were destroyed by Allied bombs.

gojomo• 16 years ago

Conspicuous passivization: even better than a SarcMark, with no licensing fees required!

anabis• 16 years ago

or 'River Crabbed'

http://meiguozi.blogspot.com/2009/03/harmonious-crab.html

papersmith• 16 years ago

My favorite Chinese word of the day. :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZRYd78vMT0

patio11• 16 years ago

My favorite line in the history of totalitarian repression was from one of the Eastern European states. I can't remember the specifics, but it goes something like this: $DISSIDENT committed suicide by shooting himself in the back of the head eight times, pausing to reload, and then finishing the job.

kls• 16 years ago

--"is constantly coining and importing new terms to describe new ideas and things"

This point is almost missed, Latin and latter English are the previous languages where this happened. Most of the time other languages adopted and sometime slightly localized the Latin or English word or expression. Being the language that ideas are expressed in is a powerful statement in the ownership of thought. With China's ascension, I am sure that new technology conceive of in China will bare their trademark on thought.

In Changing China, Being 'Suicided' or 'Harmonized'

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