Gong Fu Xiong Mao
I went to see Kung Fu Panda last night. Great stuff, go see it if you haven’t already.
One bit of useless trivia: the Kung Fu master, played by Dustin Hoffman, is named “Shi Fu.” This, in Chinese, means skilled worker, and is a respectful way to refer to taxi drivers, tradesmen, and other working-class types. Of course, in Chinese the word “shi” is pronounced like a cross between “shuh” and “shurr,” whereas in the movie they pronounced it “shee.”
If they wanted to be technical, they would have named him “Lao Shi.” This is the word for “teacher.” The word lao means old, wise, or experienced. Shi means teacher or master. So “Lao Shi” would be a wise master.
Oh, and the title to this post is how you say “Kung Fu Panda” in Chinese. Gong Fu is self explanatory, and xiong mao means “bear cat.”
Update: Just received this in the comments.
I looked up shifu on zhongwen.com and one definition was “teacher, master” so I think it can be used in that sense as well.
Interested, I did a little more digging into this. It seems that while Shi Fu was coloquially used during communist days to denote the “skilled worker” to whom an unskilled worker would be apprenticed, the actual, literal meaning is quite different.
师傅, or shī fu, is the “skilled worker” I have been referring to. However, when you look at the individual characters shī means “teacher, master, or specialist,” and fu means “tutor, teacher; assist.” Chinese words are, as I have shown, comprised of characters which mean other things. Thus if the impression you were trying to give was that the skilled worker two whom a young person would be apprenticed was someone to be learned from it makes sense that shī fu would he the colloquialism of choice by the communists—a specialist who will teach you something. While those to characters together mean “skilled worker”—师傅 is a word—the characters themselves imply an image in your mind, that this man is a master at his craft who can teach you many things.
Interestingly, there is a Taiwanese variant on this. 父师, or shī fù (note the difference in tones—“fu” is spoken in a neurtral tone in mainland Mandarin but in a downward tone in Taiwanese Mandarin—means “master, qualified worker.) More or less the same as it does here. The shī character means the same thing, “master or specialist,” whereas the fù means “father.” So while they ostensibly mean the same thing, the characters are different—the first means “skilled teacher” and the other means “skilled father,” the idea being that your father, being older and wiser than you, could teach you something. (Plus, referring to someone as “father” or “elder sister” or something of that nature is very a vary common way of showing respect in Chinese.) It was only in the days of communism, however, that the combination of these two characters came to mean the word “skilled worker.”
To show how easy it is to say things incorrectly in China consider this sentence: 弑父, pronounced shì fù. Note the chance in tone on the word shì. In the previous examples it was a high, flat tone whereas here it’s said in a sharp, downward tone. This means, literally, “kill your father.” The first shì means “to kill one’s superior” and the second, fù, means “father.” Thus with a slight mispronunciation “skilled worker” can mean “kill my father.”
This also explains why the number four is unlucky. “Four” in Chinese is 四, pronounced sì. Now consider the word for “death,” 死, pronounced sǐ. The first is said in a sharp downward tone, the second in a curved down-then-up tone. They sound remarkably similar. This is why fours are unlucky in China, because the word for four sounds almost identical for the word for death.
My guess is that the kung fu teacher referred to in the comments to this post was closer to the original meaning of shī fu, a skilled master. The communists essentially ordered by diktat that this would be the phrase of respect for the skilled worker to whom you were apprenticed, to learn your skill on the factory floor or the machine lathe or whatever the hell communists managed to do under Marxism. Thus, in communist China, shī fu became “skilled worker.” In other parts of the country, Taiwan for instance, there was no communism, thus the term for “teacher” wasn’t co-opted in the manner it was in the PRC.
At the height of the PRC people reffered to each other as comrade, tóng zhì, which literally translated means “similar purpose” or “similar goals.” In other words, two people working towards the same goal of the glory of the communist state. After Mao’s death and Deng Xaoping’s new policy of reform this title fell out of favor, and the word shī fu was used in it’s place. We use it in much the same way that we would say, “Excuse me, sir?” It’s a generic form of respect to be used towards any blue collar skilled worker.
See how confusing Chinese is?
