This is a continuation of Part 1 and Part 2. My favorite part of the song which also contains some useful vocabulary for those 3am calls to your ex to tell them how heartless they are and everything you’ve done for them. I’ve posted different versions of the song in each post, so here’s the 北七樂團’s version, although there’s another song at the end:
I’ve reposted the lyrics as they appear at KTV below as a reminder:
Continue reading
A錢 e chîⁿ (click syllable to hear) means to steal or misappropriate money, but there has been debate online about what the “A,” pronounced “e” (click to hear) actually stands for, with some people attributing it to an abbreviation of an English word and others assuming that it represents a Chinese character. After looking online I found around three theories in total.
1. The first I found pretty unconvincing, essentially that this is an abbreviation of the English word “abuse”. Why this word would come to Taiwan when it isn’t really used in this context in English is anyone’s guess, maybe “appropriate” would be more convincing. I don’t think that verbs like this would be adapted from English however, not to mention that “A” means “adult” or “porn-related” in Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan.
2. The second two examples posited two separate characters as the Taiwanese for “A.” One was a random poster on Forumosa in English, who said:
It is a false adaption from Taiwanese. “A錢” should be “挈錢”(qie4 qian2).
The Taiwanese for 挈 (to lift/ to raise) is kho̍eh though, so it doesn’t really fit.
The second was on the comments section of a messaging board for UCPenn which stated it was 掖:
From what I have found, A錢 originally comes from 掖錢 (pronounced as yē qián in Mandarin), 掖 means “to hide under armpits and take away.”
But 掖 is pronounced iā (click to hear) in Taiwanese, so this doesn’t seem to fit either.
3. The third and most convincing argument is from the Taiwan Language Blog which posits 挨 or the now defunct 
– both of which can mean “to meet with” or “to push,” to pull” or “to grind.” The blog states that the use of the term in the sense of misappropriation and specifically in the verb-object phrase A錢 began to appear in newspapers at around the end of 1999. The blog owner suggests that in this context means to pull, and by extension to shift about or to take a bit from this to make up for that, which can by turn be extended to misappropriation of money:
“e（挨）”有“拉”的意義（如前述的挨弦仔，e-hien´-na`，拉胡琴），e-lai´-sak-k‘iʟ 也就有拉過來推過去的意思，也就是“挪東補西”，把那邊的錢挪過來補這邊的坑洞的意思了。
All in all I have the most faith in the third solution. If anyone else has a clearer idea let me know in the comments section. Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
There was a big celebration going on in in Wanhua (萬華) on Saturday, with people from the local temples dressed up as gods (some of which were eating bento boxes and others sneaking a quick pee in alleys, but well-behaved all in all). As I was cycling home, I saw this Budaixi truck, playing to no one, so I stopped to have a lookey-loo and as no experience is complete without being filtered through the ‘me-machine’ (a description of smartphones in Joshua Ferris’ new book To Rise Again at a Decent Hour – a promising book that didn’t really seem to come to a satisfactory end), I filmed a bit of it. This kind of thing offers a great opportunity to study a bit of Taiwanese, although I’m not sure how useful the vocab is. Below the video is a transcript courtesy of a Pingtung friend, the “x”s mark the bits that even he couldn’t understand. Anyone with a better ear for Taiwanese welcome to comment below to fill in the gaps:
[wpvideo K0iPJVb8]
XXX的信使，到現在一點消息都沒有，我的女兒XXX，女兒不見只好對付(fight)大宋(Song Dynasty 960-1279)官兵，來去(出發)啊~~~ (015~025音樂)
Vocabulary:
使差 or 使俠? (This one isn’t clear but the meaning is 信使 or messenger) it sounds like sú kiap or gia̍p, but can’t be sure. Any help in the comments below would be appreciated. Continue reading
One of the more amusing literal translations from Taiwanese is the phrase for crying – lâu-ba̍k-sái, which literally means “flow eye shit.” It’s only really amusing as a foreign language speaker though, as for Taiwanese it’s obviously normal.
不甘/毋甘 (m-kam) is the phrase for 捨不得 in Taiwanese. So the phrase in the Taiwanese song above (愛人的目屎 by 黃克林) means “I can’t bear to see you cry”
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Was flicking through some notes yesterday and found this handy pitch guide for the different tones in Taiwanese – handy in the sense that it may be of use to some people other than pitch deaf me. The first line is the character; the second line is the romanization; the third line is the linguistic description of the kind of tone it is in Chinese along with the number commonly attributed to the tone in superscript (note that fourth tone changes when it ends in a glottal stop or with p t or k); the fifth line represents how the tone changes when used before the final character in a clause. Continue reading
This is a continuation of this post on a popular Taiwanese language song called ‘The hustle bustle is all a dream’. This time I’m going to look at Verse 2 of the song featured below – this is the version by Jiang Hui (江蕙) – a favourite of middle-aged Taiwanese women, and it’s a good one to whip out at KTV:
LKK/老扣扣/洛可可/老硞硞 láu kho̍k-kho̍k (audio available here) Out of touch/ fuddy duddy
This is an adjectival phrase that most commonly appears using the roman letters LKK . It means old and out of touch and has the sense of being behind the times or of an older order. Surprisingly the roman letters often appear in news articles and novels as opposed to the Chinese characters. This took me by surprise as I thought that using roman letters was usually something quite informal – like the 火星文 that features widely on BBS.
When I asked my coworkers for examples, one of them cited Andy Lau’s attempts at street dancing as LKK.
I also found the following examples on the internet:
為了不讓自己顯得ＬＫＫ，我決定在生活中多學習新世代用語 (I have decided to learn phrases used by the younger generation, so as not to not appear so out of touch)
from the Liberty Times in which it is used as an adjective.
這屆海峽兩岸圖書交易會將邀請知名作詞人方文山、製作人王偉忠等人出席相關活動，吸引年輕人參加，讓圖交會不再「LKK」。 (Renowned lyricist Vincent Fang and TV producer Wang Wei-Chung, among others, will attend this year’s Cross-strait Book Fair, in order to get young people to attend and to prevent the book fair from being out of touch with the younger generation.)
from CNA, in which it’s used as an adjective.
And this rather more current example from ET Today:
網評／得網路者得天下 屁孩成就國民黨LKK的慘敗 (Social media: Whoever rules the internet, rules the world; the brat generation succeed in defeating the out of touch KMT)
In this last example I had to rearrange the words in the translation, but essentially LKK is an adjective here too, describing it as an “out of touch crushing defeat”.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Photo credit: Politics & 2P
The phrase “melter” in Belfast slang refers to someone who prattles on endlessly without seemingly ever saying anything that means anything, hence the phrase, “I’m going to go over there now, you’re melting my head!” Taiwanese has a similar sentiment manifested in the phrase “有的沒的”, meaning “Something and nothing/nonsense/trivialities” which can be used in both Mandarin (you3de5mei2de5) and Taiwanese (ū ê bô ê – audio available here).
The handy thing about this phrase is that you can use the Taiwanese in Mandarin and in Taiwanese, or you can just use the Mandarin if you can’t recall the Taiwanese.
It can be used as a noun or an adjective and I’ve included an example below:
你不要在那邊講那些[有的沒的/ū ê bô ê], 無聊死了！
I wish you’d stop going on about all this crap, it’s so dull!
The ū ê bô ê in question can either be something trivial, or in some contexts gossip, but expresses the speaker’s opinion that they are above gossip.
These are various examples I’ve found on the internet:
看看一堆有的沒的是非問題
有的沒的聊了幾句便睡 *Note – in this phrase 有的沒的 is used as an adverb with the 地 omitted.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
Feel like your friend’s being a pretentious ass and want to take him down a peg or two? This is the phrase for you!
Ké-gâu 假
– translated into 自作聰明 or “trying to be clever, thinking you’re clever” (when you’re not).
Lí mài teh ké-gâu! 你 mài teh 假gâu!
It can be adapted into Mandarin too, so you can say:
你不要在那邊ké-gâu! Stop trying to be clever!
One example would be a recent ad I heard on the radio the other day, which used a quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, specifically about the Übermensch to advertise apartments in Hongshulin.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.
I was discussing Taiwanese expressions that are quite hard to translate today with my coworkers over lunch, and one word they mentioned really stayed with me because it evokes a very comic picture in your mind. The phrase is 「犁田」lê-chhân and is often rendered phonetically into Mandarin as 「雷殘」. It’s original meaning is to plough fields, but it has been extended to mean when people fall off the back of their motorbikes but keep holding on to the handles so that they get dragged behind, like a man driving a plough, although it can be applied to falling off your bike or motorbike in general. It is a jokey term, so only really appropriate for minor scrapes. It is another of these Taiwanese terms that you can use in Mandarin, the equivalent (but without the comic image) is 「摔車」. Drive safe people!
The Ministry of Education’s Taiwanese dictionary provides this example:
伊昨暗車騎無好勢，都犁田矣。I cha-àm chhia khiâ bô hó-sè, tō lê-chhân—ah. (他昨晚車子沒騎好，就摔車了) Last night he wasn’t driving carefully, and fell off his bike.
Feel free to contact me with any cool Taiwanese words or phrases you hear and want featured on the blog.