NaamKyun.com Discussion Forum

HI all,

i have a "language" question.
Because i´m do not living in my native country (which would be Hungary) but in Germany and i (try to) speak english, so i use 3 langueges, i do thinks about the differences / similiraities these langueges often. Sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is interessting, and i do think, you can learn the differencies in the attitude towards life in the different nations with it.

So the quesion.

"Why" does it "play the form" in english?
In german we say "Run the form" (Form laufen) or "do the form" (form machen).
How is it in Chinese (with word-to-word translation)?
How do you say it in other languages?

Chinese can be both "Play the form" and "Hit the fist"

In Norwegian/Swedish there are two ways of saying it:
"Øve/Öva formen" practice the form, as in repeating, practicing guitar, practice a dance routine, etc,)
"Trene/Träna Kung Fu" train Kung Fu, train soccer, more of an athletic slant on it.
"Øve Kung Gee Fook Fu Kuen, men trene Seipin Ma."

"Walk the form", would be better translated for Form Laufen I think...

But I agree, languages make a huge difference. Many serious Hung Kuen practitioners for that reason alone learn to speak/read Cantonese. Some day I might have the time to go that route too.

waan kyun or waan tou lou or da kyun

I find that extremely hard to believe, since "tao" is a completely different pronunciation from "dao", and would therefore be a completely different character. "Tao" in Wade-Giles is still pronounced "dao". To pronounce it "tao" (as in English), it would be spelled "t'ao". This is one reason why no one except the Taiwanese still use it (and even then, barely).

Chinese would never get confused over the difference between "tao" and "dao" since they are not represented by sounds, but by characters. I know in internet-language, Chinese like to play around with sounds like saying "ba ba liu" instead of "bai bai lo" (byebye!), but I cannot believe that anyone would actually get confused about the pronunciation of a character like that. I mean, sometimes one character has more than one pronunciation but not the Dao de Jing's "dao".

Well, if that is what the translator told you, then that's what s/he said. I can't believe that, though, and I've certainly never heard that.

Asmo: both Cantonese and Mandarin do not have a D sound. both in Yale (Cantonese romanisation) and Pinyin (Mandarin romanisation), written d is pronounced as "t", written t is pronounced as "th" (aspirated "t"). same goes for g, b etc. in Wade Giles it is written as t, t', k, k', p, p' etc.

Back in the 20's LATINHUA was the beginning of PINYIN and even some scholars including linguists wanted to get rid of chinese characters so common people (laobaixing) will be able to learn how to read and have fast access to education. The debate was to find a better way to represent chinese sounds in western characters, i.e. latin letters or cyrillic alphabet. In the meantime, Chinese linguists had created a system called BOPOMOFO which represents the opposition of several sounds used in phonetics and phonology/phonemics (sound pattern of a language) the sound [p] = B against [p'] = P and so on. Instead of having acronyms and using several systems it became an unified system called PINYIN which in essence is pretty accurate and easy to learn and memorize. So if you think DAO as d in Daniel then you are wrong. Just like in English the letter P has two variations P of Peter (explosive sound) and sPeak (the regular sound of P). As you may know in Chinese there are several languages, not dialects (another academic western version) and the unified version of putonghua was a tentative to have a standard language as in the past with GUAN HUA: mandarin language with different accents from region to region. Just a very short version of an extensive subject.

HTH

Mig