Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #12: Swine Flu Quarantine Edition
June 22nd, 2009 | View Comments
I’m going to hope that you don’t find this to be a useful travel phrase. Because if you ever utter this sentence while visiting China, it probably means you’re chatting with these folks in Hotel Quarantine or will be shortly.
“I got the flu from my roommate.”
我被室友傳染了流行性感冒.
Wo3 bei4 shi4 you3 chuan2 ran3 liu2 xing2 xing4 gan3 mao4.
ルーマメートに流感をうつされました。
Rūmamēto ni ryūkan wo utsusaremashita.
The grammatical structure on the Chinese sentence is pretty weird for English speakers. This is the first time we’re seeing the marker 被 on Chipanglish. 被 indicates that the subject of the sentence, in this case 我, is on the receiving end of some action. 我 = I, 室友 = roommate (literally “room friend”), 傳染 = to infect, 了 = marker to indicate an action is completed, 流行性感冒 = the flu.
But what is really interesting about this sentence comes in this long phrase for “flu”: 流行性感冒. The first two characters form the compound 流行, which means “trendy” or “popular”. 性 is an adjective marker. The last two characters for the compound 感冒, which means “common cold” and literally translates to “feel steamy”. So flu is a trendy steamy feeling. Hah! I love how Chinese can be so evocative, sometimes bizarrely so.
The grammar is pretty standard Japanese, which means it seems contorted to an English speaker—implied subject, actor, object, and finally the verb. ルーマメート = roommate, に = by, 流感 = flu, を = object marker, うつされました = infected. Now, note that the Kanji for “flu”, 流感, are plucked from the Chinese compound. You see this in Japanese a lot, where rather than borrowing a whole phrase from another language, they’ll just borrow bits of that phrase and mash it together to form a shorter compound.
Yvonne posted this on June 22nd, 2009 @ 12:00pm in Chinese, Grandma's Crazy Phrasebook, Japanese | Permalink to "Grandma’s Crazy Phrasebook #12: Swine Flu Quarantine Edition"
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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Ah, the infamous bei-construction. Almost as headache inducing as the ba-construction for linguists. Perhaps I’ll do a post on the bei-construction later this week.
Even more fun if you point out that the other definition of 被 is “blanket”.