Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #8: Espresso Machines
May 18th, 2009 | View Comments
I am exhausted. Thus, this week’s “essential” “travel” phrase is:
“All you need is an espresso maker.”
只需要一台濃縮咖啡機就夠了.
Zhi3 xu1 yao4 yi4 tai2 nong2 suo1 ka1 fei1 ji1 jiu4 gou4 le5.
エスプレッソマシーンが必要ですね。
Esupuresso mashīn ga hitsuyō desu ne.
Last week we talked about the Japanese propensity to borrow words from other languages. Well, here it is again! I don’t need to tell you what an エスプレッソマシーン (esupurasso mashīn) is, do I? The rest of the sentence is also straightforward, at least for Japanese grammar: が = object marker, 必要 = “necessary”, です = “is”, ね = emphasis marker. As in last week’s sentence, the “you” part is implied.
This week we also have a borrowed word in the Chinese: 咖啡 (ka1 fei1), or coffee. But before I can explain where these characters come from, I need to back up and explain a bit about the structure of Chinese characters.
Many Chinese characters break down into two parts: a radical,which hints at the meaning of the character (and is also used to sort words into dictionary order), and the…other part (forgot the technical term if there is one, sorry)…which hints at the pronunciation. Take, for example, the character for “mother”:
ma1
The left side of the character is 女 (which you first saw here), which means “female” or “woman”. The right side of the character is 馬, which is pronounced ma3.
If you have some spoken proficiency in Chinese but are just learning to read (like little kids or, uh…me), learning the radicals can help you make educated guesses at unknown characters.
Now back to coffee.
As far as I can tell, both of these characters were specifically invented to Chinese-ize the word coffee (though not necessarily from English). Note that both characters have 口for a radical on the left. 口 means “mouth” and is a common radical for food- and drink-related characters.
The right sides of the characters are 加 (jia1) and 非 (fei1), respectively, and are common characters that more or less give us the pronunciation ka1 fei1.
As far as I know, 啡 has no usage other than being part of the compound for “coffee”; it doesn’t even get a standalone entry in my dictionary.
咖 does get a standalone entry, but it has no definition. The only things that appear in the entry are the compound 咖啡 and a note that the character is also pronounced ga1. I flip to the ga1 entry and once again, no definition, just the compound 咖喱 (ga1 li2) which both means and sounds suspiciously like “curry”.
Whew! To summarize, the Japanese borrow words from other languages by approximating the pronunciation using their katakana alphabet. The Chinese approximate the pronunciation with existing characters, which they then mash with an appropriate radical for the meaning.
Sometimes. You’ll see a different way of borrowing below.
We’ve taken an extended detour into the etymology of 咖啡, but that’s just regular ol’ coffee. We’re talking espresso! To get espresso from 咖啡 you add 濃縮 (nong2 suo1) in front of it. 濃縮 means “concentrated” (literally, “concentrated and shrunken”—Chinese do love redundancies).
Sometimes you’ll see 意大利濃縮咖啡 on a menu, specifying Italian espresso. And for the record, 意大利 (yi4 da4 li4) means and sounds like “Italy”, but the characters separately mean “meaning”, “big”, and “sharp”, respectively. In this case, there’s no radical to alert us that this is the name of a country—they just mash common characters together to approximate the pronunciation. Learn your compounds, kids! Because sometimes reading one character at a time gets you gibberish. Which makes Dan Brown an idiot.
There’s actually one more thing about this particular Chinese sentence to tickle the brains of language nerds, but I’ll save it for another time. To wrap up:
只 = “only”, 需要 = “need”, 一台 = “one”, 濃縮咖啡 = “espresso”, 機 = machine, 就夠了 = “is enough”.
Yvonne posted this on May 18th, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #8: Espresso Machines"
American-born Taiwanese girl who married a Japanese guy. And who forgot about six years' of Spanish grammar and most of the vocab.
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I’ve recently gotten halfway back into Japanese – I’m not studying it actively yet, but probably will in the undistant future. Anyway, this episode of Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook made me nostalgic about Chinese and Japanese
I liked the etymological explanation!
Kevin