Ignorance is Bliss

When I was in Shanghai six years ago, my coworkers and I came up with a running gag, saying that all the Chinese who worked for us were calling us “ignorant barbarians” behind our backs.  It then evolved into us using the term to refer to each other.  Instead of “Wassup, nigga!” we had “Wassup Ignorant Barbarian.” Then, since we were duty bound to take this as far as we could, we asked one of the girls in the office to translate it for us.  I don’t remember exactly what the translation was but it was something like Oo-Jeh-Dah Ye-mai-yan.  The end result was we would scream it at people, drunk off our asses, out the taxi window at four in the morning.  Imagine a taxi with three drunken lao wei, screaming “ignorant barbarian” out the window. 

At any rate, I was in Chinese class earlier tonight when the word wú zhī de came up.  Wú zhī means ignorant, and de is a particle which comes at the end of words to indicate ownership or possession of something.  In Chinese zh is pronounced like a letter j with a “juh” sound.  So the Pinyin for wú zhī de literally means “not know,” and sounds almost identical to the the Oo-Jeh-Dah of my Shanghai days.  (This should not be confused with wǒ zhī dao, which means “I know.")

Not so much luck with the second word.  The direct translation of “Barbarian” into Chinese is mán, phonetically spelled “mahn” and spoken in an upward tone.  This is followed by zi, a short flat word which indicates that the word is to be used as a noun.  We got it halfway right the first time, anyway.

I also found out another fascinating little tidbit.  The Chinese word for “electricity” or “electric” is diàn.  The next word, nǎo, is one you should all become familiar with after reading this post.  Go ahead and click the link, I’ll wait.

Okay, you’re back.  You now know that nǎo means “brain.” The word that goes in front of it, diàn, means electric.  Thus the word diàn nǎo means “electric brain.” Now, what product do you think is named an electric brain?  That’s right, a computer.  But the weird thing is that when the Chinese hear diàn nǎo they don’t think “electric brain” they think “computer.” Here’s a couple of other examples.

diàn tī, meaning “elevator.” Literal translation is “electric ladder.” You can also refer to an escalator as diàn tī because tī also means “steps”
diàn huà, meaning “telephone.” Literal translation is “electric speech.”