你們吃飯了嗎?

[muckefuck]

Chinese verbs are often compound. This is partly due to homophony, since a monosyllabic verb would often be ambiguous, and partly because such compounds allow the expression of distinctions that in other languages would be handled by derivation, temporal and aspectual suffixes, adverbial phrases, and the like.

A good example is the verb 吃 chi1 "eat". Add 完 wan2 "finish, complete" and you get a compound roughly equivalent to English "eat up". With 飽 bao3 "full", 吃 expresses the meaning of "eat until full". If you 吃飽 your meal, the implication is that, like Mr Creosote, you really couldn't eat another bite, whereas 吃完 simply means that you're finished eating (perhaps because you had the misfortune of sitting near Mr Creosote). If neither of these conditions necessarily applies and you have no other object handy, it's typical to use 吃飯 chi1fan4 (lit. "eat-rice") so that you aren't left with a bare verb.

This was a 吃飽 kind of weekend.

Saturday afternoon, it was birthday boy bunj's desire to check out tapas townhouse 1492 before the Caravaggio exhibit. While it hasn't dimmed my affection for Café Ibérico, it didn't disappoint. Well, maybe the tomato sauce was nothing special, but I was very pleased with the boquerones and I loved the lacy crisps that accompanied the solomillo and the rich mousse-based dessert I shared with febrile and lustronheloise.

I can honestly say, though, that it was all left in the dust by dinner that night: grilled lamb chops, champiñones al ajillo, a 1995 Muga, and a dulce de leche tres leches cake from Bombon that truly has to be eaten to be believed. monshu couldn't stop talking about any of it. I didn't hear him say a word about what he thought of the tapas, but at least four times between Saturday evening and Sunday evening, he praised some combination of (1) the evening as a whole; (2) the lamb; and (3) the cake (which he really, really wanted a second piece of but manfully restrained himself).

Sunday we had shopping to conduct in South Chinatown, so I called up Nuphy and made a dim-sum date out of it at Three Happiness. I hardly need to elabourate, do I? Perhaps the man exists who can go to dim sum and eat no more than he actually needs to keep his body functioning, but I certainly haven't met him.

No wonder dinner Sunday night ended up consisting of Triscuits, hummus, and swiss cheese nibbled in front of the tv.

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It helps to keep in mind that Chinese "adjectives" are really a subclass of verb. Mei3 can mean not only "be beautiful" but "become beautiful". Also, there are no comparative or superlative endings in Chinese either, so mei3 can also mean "more beautiful". The way you say that someone is more beautiful than someone else is literally "Bob, compared to Rob, is beautiful" (i.e. "Bob bi3 Rob mei3").

Thus, if you simply say, "Bob mei3," the listener is left wondering, Are you saying that Bob is more beautiful than someone else? More beautiful now than he was before? Getting better-looking each day? AFAICT, using hen3 has the function of forcing a positive, stative interpretation. "I'm just saying Bob is beautiful without reference to how he was before or how he compares to anyone else."

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Alas, my tutor was not a linguist, so I definitely missed out on a real understanding of the grammar! Since it seems that a lot of things don't translate directly to English grammar concepts, I suspect that many puzzling issues would have been resolved by observations like you have made here.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

China has no native grammatical tradition to speak of. (Both a blessing and a curse, I guess, considering the damage done by centuries of (mis)analysing English as an aberrant version of Latin.) From ancient times on, students were supposed to learn the rules by imitation of the classics, not direct analysis. The standards have changed--no one is expected to write like Confucius any more--but the methods don't seem to have. No wonder even many Chinese will tell you that Chinese "has no grammar".

Even linguists are still struggling with how best to analyse Chinese grammar. (Not surprising because, IMHO, they are still struggling with how best to analyse language in general.) My Chinese teacher still doesn't think she's seen a treatment that does the language justice. I need something for my analytic brain to seize hold of, however, so I rely on Li and Thompson's 1981 reference grammar.

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

This is a very linguistic interpretation of the whole thing -- perhaps a bit overly linguistic. My first conversation teacher (a native speaker from Hangzhou) used to say hen3 mei3 was better than mei3 because the Chinese simply don't like the sound of one-syllable adjectives. Mei3, being a one-syllable adjective, didn't sound pleasing to the ear, so they turned it into hen3 mei3, which as a de-facto two-syllable adjective sounded better to them. Authentic two-syllable adjectives such as, say, piaoliang (pretty) are fine on their own, although in practice, you'll frequently hear hen3 piao4liang, hao2 piao4liang, zhen1 piao4liang or man3 piao4liang.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Explanations like this only beg the question: Why don't monosyllabic adjectives "sound pleasing"? They sounded perfectly fine to the ancestors of today's Mandarin speakers and still sound fine to speakers of other descendents of Middle Chinese. All she's telling you is that utterances with hen3 are judged by native speakers as more well-formed than utterances without them--but you knew that already, didn't you?

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

I suppose so. :-)