“Hold the Zhōngshì Yīngyǔ”. Literally: Chinese-style English.  (an anonymous comment left yesterday)

Yikes!  Censorship already.  Sal on my case and now this!  OHMIGAWD!  I am going to sign up immediately for membership in the Canadian Civil Liberties Union. 

I definitely believe in freedom of MY speech (but I am not so sure about my anonymous commentators).  Like most governments-in-exile, I am a bit selective in giving out licenses for free speech (better make a note of this for the Little Green Book).  Some animals are just more equal than others.

Anyway, the mix of Chinese and English (Zhōngshì Yīngyǔ) is often called Chinglish.  Not surprisingly, the same kind of name has been applied to the mix of Spanish and English as Spanglish.   I will definitely ‘hold up’ on writing in that style but the comment raises a fascinating point about language and communication. 

But my point will be this: there is nothing wrong with Chinglish.  For those of you who do not know about Chinglish, I will share with you a bit of what I learned about it.  (My kids would shout ‘BORING!’ right about now). 

We are all familiar with the Chinese-English that sounds like short sentences using predominantly English nouns and verbs but lacking the ‘connector’ and descriptive words that we call conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, and the like.  I can do a passable imitation of Chinglish but it is considered politically incorrect.  It shouldn’t be.  It is very correct in so many other ways.  Kind of efficient in a harsh sounding way to unilinguisticaly pampered ears.

Here’s why: As you know, the Chinese language is written in what we call characters or ‘pictograms’.  The words are actually symbols that, when used individually or together, form the word currently being communicated. And it is the picture-words in groups that provide meaning through context – not by way ‘connector’ or descriptive words so much. 

So, their language is a lot of ‘loose’ words or pictures that make sense only when taken in the aggregate.  Context is everything. 

A small example of that is the ballpoint pen.  The Chinese had a pictogram for a pencil or something similar but the ballpoint pen was new and modern.  So they had to find another pictogram to ‘make’ the new word.  Oddly (for me, anyway) they had a pictogram for  ‘atomic’.  Don’t ask how that came to be.  Because the new, ballpoint pen came out not long after the new atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, the word for ballpoint pen was written as ‘atomic pencil’.  And that would make no sense unless it was used in the new modern context in which it was conceived. 

English doesn’t do that.  English, for the most part, is inclined to invent new words when something ‘new’ happens and so we now have all sorts of words that are new-but-accepted like say, doodle, microwave, movie, telephone, parachute and the like.  We have really new words that have made it into the dictionary quite recently such as ‘Google’ (used as a verb) and ‘text’ used as a verb.  Of course there are all sorts of weird words vying for acceptance all the time so the dictionary is constantly being updated.  And so is the language.

Theirs?  Not so much.  They just reconfigure the pictograms.     

It is a hard enough task as an new English learner to just get a grip on the nouns and the verbs.  But, if your mother-tongue was never big on anything other than nouns and verbs (as pictograms emphasize) and all descriptive and connective words are largely implied by context and association, it is a very difficult transition.  Instead of incorporating what would be seen as frivolous connector words it is quite reasonable to learn a new language by filtering out what is unnecessary in your own culture and sticking with the main words.  To hell with adverbs, adjectives and conjunctions!  Time is short! 

Now, I could be wrong.  It has been known to happen.  But I was told that this is the way Chinglish or Pidgin English has come to have a distinct character and delivery style.  So, Chinglish is much more than English-not-spoken-well.  It is English spoken as Chinese speak their own language. 

And, anyway, what could be more clear than: ‘No Tickee, no washee?’