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

[mistress-elaine.livejournal.com]

I suppose so. :-)