Category: Word of the Day

WOTD: 戕害

So, I was waiting for a coffee and killing time on WeChat and saw a Xinhua news article pinned to the top of my feed. It was a white paper issued by the State Council’s New Office regarding the “struggle to combat terrorism and remove extremism in Xinjiang while preserving human rights.” It would almost both worth taking it line by line because these things can be quite fun to read. About four lines in, I come across a character I swear I’ve never seen before: 戕 (qiang1 “kill”) in the construction 戕害 (qiang1hai4, “injure or harm”).

The depths of literary Chinese are unfathomable, but 戕 just looks like an ancient relic. It’s definitely low frequency (expect it to occur 1.12 times per million characters), but is included in the general purpose character list (of 7,000). 戕 has a straightforward radical structure with 戈 (ge1, “halberd” or some sort of ancient weapon) on the right and 爿 on the right as the phonetic signifier. It’s easy to miss 爿 as a functional radical because it was simplified to 丬 in the most common characters, such as 状 (zhuang4)、妆 (zhuang1)、and 将 (jiang1).

Anyways, the full sentence is:

恐怖势力通过暴力、破坏、恐吓等手段，肆意践踏人权、戕害无辜生命、危害公共安全、制造社会恐慌，严重威胁世界和平与安宁。

恐怖 (kong3bu4) = terror[ist]
势力 (shi4li) = force
通过 (tong1guo4) = by means of
暴力 (bao4li4) = violence
破坏 (po4hui4) = destroy; damage
恐吓 (kong3he4) = threaten
等 (deng3) = etc.
手段 (shou3duan4) = means; method
肆意 (si4yi4) = wantonly; recklessly
践踏 (jian4ta4) = tread on; trample
人权 (ren2quan2) = human rights
戕害 (qiang1hai4) = harm
无辜 (wu2gu1) = not guilty
生命 (sheng1ming4) = life
危害 (wei1hai4) = harm
公共安全 (gong1gong4 an1quan2) = public order
制造 (zhi4zao4) = make; manufacture
社会 (she4hui4) = society
恐慌 (kong3huang1) = panic
严重 (yan4zhong4) = serious; critical
威胁 (wei1xie2) = threaten
世界 (shi4jie4) = world
和平 (he2ping2) = peace
与 (yu3) = and
安宁 (an1ning2) = peace

In other words, “Terrorist forces use violence, destruction, and intimidation, among other means, to wantonly trample human rights, harm innocent lives, disrupt public order, and create panic in society. This seriously threatens world peace and tranquility.”

It’s both impressive that not a single word is repeated through the sentence and that verbal jujitsu is deployed to argue that the terrorists are the real abusers of human rights

WOTD: 수육 (Suyuk)

Choose your own adventure dining

One of the unfortunate things about Korean food once you get over the first flush of how delicious everything is is that you notice that meal after meal is visually similar. It makes it very hard to be aggressively sharing through social media (as if the little dopamine bursts of a half dozen likes directly stimulated the taste buds). Meal after meal, or at least the meals I’ve been going for, are composed of a cauldron of soup, a metal bowl of rice, and a handful of kimchi/banchan. Beyond that, its not hard to notice how meat is pretty much always served with a basket of lettuce leaves and a few chili peppers. No one will ever convince that Korean food is unhealthy because each bite of meat is taken with a mouthful of lettuce. You certain get your fill of salad.

수육 (suyuk, 水肉，”boiled pork”) is eaten with the lettuce wraps much like your array of barbecued meats, but the key difference is that it is boiled rather than barbecued. As should be clear from the parenthetical above, suyuk is based on the hanja literally representing “water meat,” though there is no close equivalent in Chinese cuisine. If I wasn’t dining alone and ordered a medium or large portion of suyuk, the restaurant would have brought it out in a chafing dish and the broth to heat it up at the table.

Suyuk appears to usually be served in restaurants that also offer an array of 국밥 (gukbap, “soup rice”). As pictured above, this set meal came with a bowl of pork soup to which I added a small portion of noodles and the bowl of rice. There were three dishes of seasonings (salty, spicy, and fishy) and the bowl of chives to doctor up the soup to one’s taste.

The whole set was listed as a 수백한상 (su baek han sang), which I think literally means “water, white/hundred, one, table” or rendered more naturally a table of suyuk set meal. baek (백) is an interesting word which either means white or hundred via the Chinese loan words 白 (bai2) or 百 (bai3) respectively. Baek appears in baekban which refers to a set meal consisting mostly of banchan side dishes (notice how ban shows up in both words). The dictionary says baekban is 白饭 (bai2fan4, “white rice”) in the Chinese hanja, which strikes me as less poetic than an etymology suggesting a hundred dishes.

WOTD: 아르바이트

In a span of two days, I came across “아르바이트” from two different sources, and it is far too interesting a word to pass up. At first glance, it is obviously a loan word because it is too long and there are a bunch ㅡ’s in it.

Loan words in Korean adopt a number of very predictable patterns to approximate non-native sounds. [1] There are straight substitutions for consonants that don’t exist in Korean. For example, ㅍ (p) substitutes for “f” or ㅈ (j) substitutes for a “z” sound. [2] Vowels are combined to create new diphthongs. The long i sound (as in “eye”) is created through the addition of 아 ( “a” as in father) and 이 (“i”, but sounds like “ee”) — 아이 (“ai”) –, while 에 (“e” as in bed) and 이 (“i”) combine to make 에이 (“ei”, but pronounced like “ay” in day). [3] consonant clusters have the neutral “eu” sound as place holders. For example, 스트레스 is technically “seu-teu-re-seu”, but if you ignore all the eu’s, you get “stres,” i.e. stress.

So, when I come across “아르바이트”, I sound it out to see if I could identify the English: a-reu-bai-teu –> arbait… Arbeit! WTF is a German word doing in Korean? I thought it was a fluke until I saw it twice.

So, “arbeit” in Korean appears to refer to part-time work or a manual labor type wage-based job. I have some serious questions about how this entered the language. The general (native) way to say work is 일하다 (il -hada). This is a verb-object combination, where hada means “to do” and takes il as the object. What does il mean? The dictionary lists three distinct words: work, day, one. For “day” and “one,” il is the Korean pronunciation of two Chinese characters: 日 (ri4, “day”) and 一 (yi1, “one”). Maybe 일 is a native Korean word meaning work, but I like the supposition of it being related to day such that the etymology of work in Korean would be “what you do all day.”

WOTD: Quality

God, that’s depressing

Living in China definitely warps ones internal calibers of what qualifies as quality (both in terms of product or service quality and envornmental conditions), though living on the periphery of China can be just as bad with the common fallacy of “China is polluted, here is not China; therefore, here is not polluted.”

I live and die by my apps which report the air quality index (AQI)–空气质量指数 (kong1qi4 zhi4liang4 zhi3shu4). The word is a fairly direct translation, with 空气 meaning air, 质量 meaning quality, and 指数 meaning index. “指数” is an easy word to remember because its individual characters mean “point [as in, to point with your finger] + number,” but my focus today is on quality.

“质量” can be broken down into 质 (zhi4), meaning the nature or character of something, and 量 (liang4), referring to the quantity or amount. Though 质量 is the highest frequency word containing 质, the characters base meaning is probably best exemplified by 素质 (su4zhi4) or 性质 (xing4zhi4), both of which mean quality in a more abstract sense, and are worthy of full discussions in their own rights.

The “opposite” of 质量, i.e. quantity as opposed to quality, is 数量 (shu4liang4, literally “number amount”). However, if we are speaking about research, e.g. qualitative and quantitative, the respective terms in Chinese are 定量 (ding4liang4) and 定性 (ding4xing4), where 量 and 性 are serving as shorthand for “number” and “nature” with 定 functioning as “to determine.”

Another interesting aspect of 质 and 质量 is the physics-specific meanings. 质 can mean “matter” or “substance,” though that is more clear when paired with 物 in 物质 (wu4zhi4, “matter; substance”), and 质 is the building block of all matter as a proton (质子，zhi4zi3 [Note: the zi3 is not a neutral tone]). In physics, 质量 means mass, which makes it much easier to distinguish between mass and weight (重量, “zhong4liang4,” literally “weight amount”) because mass is intrinsic to the substance while weight depends on gravitation.

WOTD：Ramen

That’s not Korean

Much like the commonalities of dumplings across east Asia, ramen presents an interesting case for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Let’s begin with the word and then talk about the actual food item. As pictured above on the lantern, “ramen” is written with the Japanese kitakana script, which suggests–despite its entry into English from the Japanese–that it is in itself a loan word. The beauty of blogging is that I can posit wild speculations without actually doing any research to verify this.

So, Korean uses a similar word as fitted to its phonetic system: 라면 (ra myeon). We should remember from the post on zhajiang mian that “myeon” is a functional morpheme in Korean for noodles and related to the Chinese character 面.

In China, ramen is rendered 拉面 (la1mian4), but this word is better translated as hand-pulled noodles and is most associated with the northwestern (read: Muslim) parts of China. Most notably, 拉面 pretty much also refers to freshly made noodles, while the instant packs are called either 方便面 (fang1bian4 mian4, “convenient noodles”) or 泡面 (pao4 mian4, “soaked noodles”).

So this is the key difference. We tend to associate “ramen noodles” as cheap stuff college students live on, while there is really a major difference between that kind of ramen (inspired by pulled noodles) and the real pulled noodles. To the best of my knowledge, in Japan ramen refers exclusively to fresh noodles (though the real star is the soup stock with every region of Japan claiming to make the best kind), while China uses different words, and in Korea, ramyeon either refers to the instant noodles or the kind served at a Japanese restaurant.

WOTD: 痞霸

When I was walking around Weihai last month, I was stopped in my tracks by the sign (pictured above) because I had never encountered the last word before：痞霸 (“pi3 ba4”). It isn’t listed as a word in Pleco, but it roughly means “hooligan tyrant” or possibly gangster. 痞霸 is the name of a criminal offense on the law books in China, where the key attribute is that there is a degree of collusion or organization to the criminal activity.

痞 has medical roots (which one can infer from the illness radical), referring to a lump in the abdomen or constipation, though it’s extended meaning encompasses ruffian, behaving like a hooligan, and rascally. It’s a low frequency character (#4093), but part of the list of general purpose characters. The phonetic radical, 否, is a bit misleading since 否 is more common as “fou” (negation) than “pi3” (wicked).

霸 (“ba3”, tyrant or hegemon) is a much more common character (#1838) and included in the HSK and common character lists. 霸 most frequently occurs in the words 霸权主义 (“ba4quan2 zhu3yi4”, hegemonism), 称霸 (“cheng1ba4”, dominate), and 霸王 (“ba4wang2”, despot).

The whole sign– 高举法治利剑，铲除黑恶痞霸–is quite interesting, meaning “Raise high the sharp sword of rule by law, eradicate underworld gangsters.” 黑恶 (“hei1 e4”, black+evil=criminal) is pretty common on police propaganda as is 铲除 (“chan3 chu2”, shovel+remove=eradicate), though the phrasing is usually shortened to 扫黑 (“sao3 hei1”, sweep+black=crack down on crimes) or 除恶 (“chu2 e4”, remove evil), which can be seen in the name of the sponsoring office.


WOTD: Dumplings

Whether called jiaozi, baozi, wontons, mandu, or gyoza, dumplings are delicious

Of course they are stuffed with kimchi

Dumplings are universal. To the best of my knowledge, every culture has some food item which consists of a starchy outside stuffed with filling. If we adopt a broad enough definition, everything from samosas and empanadas to ravioli and pierogi are types of dumplings. Needless to say, China has a ton of menu items that defy translation more specific than “dumpling.”

饺子 (jiao3zi) and 包子 (bao1zi) make up the core concept, though I consider jiaozi to closer to the Platonic ideal of a dumpling. 包, as we covered before, is a general term referring to the wrapping, while 饺 is a specific character for the food item. Jiaozi tend to be sorted by their method of cooking and filling (a.k.a 馅儿, “xian4r” covered here). Boiled (水饺 shui3jiao3, literally “water dumpling”), pan-fried (煎饺 jian1jiao3), or steamed (蒸饺 zheng1jiao3). Pork is the most common stuffing, especially paired with a single vegetable, though one can also get pure beef or lamb stuffed dumplings.

Jiaozi have thin skins while baozi are bread-y, but that distinction gets confused by regional specialties like 小笼包 (xiao3 long2 bao1 “small basket dumpling) from the lower reaches of the Yangtze (Nanjing through Shanghai) and 薄皮包子 (bao2pi2 bao1zi “thin skin dumpling”) from Xinjiang. Of course, we cannot forget wontons (rendered 馄饨 hun2tun), which are always served in soup and have extra skin hanging off them.

I suppose I could have complained that they were a little burned…

Dumplings in Korea and Japan are very similar to the prototypical 饺子, though Japan tends to fry their dumplings more often than China. Linguistically, Japan uses the kanji-equivalent of 饺子 (pronounced gyoza in Japanese). The relation is quite obvious. Korean, on the other hand, uses 만두 (mandu) as its general word for dumplings. This is also related to Chinese, except it derives from 馒头 (man2tou, a steamed bun). This is ironic because mantou are best described as baozi without any filling, which would exclude them from the dumpling family. Finally, I don’t know how widespread it is, but the fried dumplings I ordered (pictured above) had “야끼 교자” provided as explanatory text. Sounding that out, “Yakki Gyoja” sounds just like a transliteration from the Japanese (yaki being that super common element of Japanese grilling cuisine names: yakitori, teriyaki, teppanyaki, okonomiyaki, etc.).

WOTD: 自助餐

自助餐 (zi4zhu4can1), literally “self service meal,” is the Chinese word for buffet. Buffets in China are universally found in 5-star hotels and are similar to how we treat buffets in the US. Among the specialty restaurants that provide unlimited food, they adopt a number of limitations to make sure that they still turn a profit. For example, time limits are generally imposed (typically in the range of 90 to 120 minutes) and complex rule systems penalizing wasted food. The best items are nearly inaccessible behind a long queue where the food is either only served for brief intervals or limited to one portion per person.

Buffets in Taiwan, specifically the vegetarian buffets, are a different beast altogether. One fills up a plate as one wishes, but pays according to the total weight of the food. That also happens to be how 串串香 (chuan1chuan1xiang1, a type of Sichuan hotpot with skewers) is calculated, where it is easier to weigh the pile of skewers than count them.

While on the topic of unlimited food, free refills is 续杯 (xu4bei1, literally “supply more cup”), while if one is getting unlimited alcohol as part of a meal special or happy hour, the term is 畅饮 (chang4yin3, literally “free drinks” meaning “to drink one’s fill”).

Finally, the Korean for all-you-can-eat is 무한리필 (muhan ripil) which combines Chinese with English. Muhan based on 无限 (wu2xian2, “unlimited”), while ripil is a sound loan of “refill.”

WOTD: Gimbap

Korean sushi?

I don’t really have much to say about 김밥 (gimbap or kimbab), other than that it is probably one of the first words I learned in Korean and the cause of my initial awareness into the morphemes. 밥 (bap) is the word for cooked rice (as in bibimbap) and although 김 (gim) is the same sound as in kimchi, it actually means “laver” (the proper name for that seaweed wrapping). Also, gimbap is quite delicious.

Though it looks like a sushi roll, there is usually no fish and definitely no raw fish in there. The pictured rolls both contain scrambled egg, ham, pickled radish, some other veggies, and their respective titular ingredients: tomato and chili pepper. The chili pepper gimbap was way better than the tomato one, despite being the place’s signature item.

WOTD: 炸酱面

Would you like some noodles with your sauce?

炸酱面（zha2jiang4 mian4, “fried sauce noodles”), aka “noodles with fried bean sauce” is one of those dishes that I strongly associate with Beijing, though its origins lie in Shandong. Aficionados of Chinese cuisine would note that Beijing food (and all cooking in northeast China) is rooted in 鲁菜 (Lu3cai4 “Shandong cuisine”), one of the 8 great schools of Chinese cooking.

I’ve always loved proper 炸酱面 because the noodles are thick and chewy, and remind me of freshly made spätzle, while the freshly shredded cucumber and radish (or even more veggies if you get lucky) offset the rich and salty sauce.

Zhajiang mian is also a Korean dish (in a sense). Alternately called 자장면 짜장면 (jajangmyeon / jjajangmyeon), it is clear we are talking about the same dish linguistically. In culinary terms, Jajangmyeon is its own dish in Korea. The sweeter sauce is full of onions and seafood (instead of just salty beans and pork scraps).

As a certain podcast host would say, always read the plaque. Interestingly enough, Incheon claims Jajangmyeon as one of its specialties, though it gives credit to the influx of Chinese workers in 1884. Apparently, they would make the sauce in China and carry it across on merchant ships, serving it on freshly made noodles.