SheldonJul 12, 2023

I finally watched Everything Everywhere All at Once and there was one scene at the beginning that perfectly captures a snippet of life in a Chinese-American immigrant household.

It's the pronoun scene. The main character keeps referring to her daughter's girlfriend as "he" and gets visibly frustrated when the daughter corrects her that Becky is a "she."

First, the bilingual dialogue is spot on! It happens so fast that it's hard to keep up with the subtitles, but if you understand Mandarin, you probably laughed at the exchange.

You might notice that Chinese immigrants are terrible at #pronouns. This is because in spoken Chinese, there is only one generic pronoun, "ta" which translates to "that person"

Any child of Chinese immigrants knows the embarrassment of correcting their parents in front of their friends when they keep calling male friends she and female ones he. It only recently occurred to me why this is.

I love this scene for bringing this to the fore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr4kJuZGQPI

Everything Everywhere All At Once, pronoun scene

YouTube
Show threadSheldonJul 12, 2023

Now, there is a twist to this pronoun story and it's more fun if you experience it for yourself.

Go to Google Translate and type in "him" in an English to Simplified Chinese translation and press the audio button to hear the word spoken.

https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=zh-CN&text=him%0A&op=translate

Now change it to "she".

Keep going, change it to "it".

Whaaaat?

So there actually are gendered pronouns in Chinese. They're written differently, but are pronounced exactly the same! Is that wild or what?

No wonder why native Chinese speakers get completely flummoxed by pronouns. Look at where they're coming from.

That Abbott and Costello "Who's on First" skit ain't got nothin on Chinese speakers and their struggles just trying to refer to the person next to them.

Do you mean him? Ta!
Or her? Ta!
It? Ta!

This quirk may apply to other East Asian languages too, but I can only speak Mandarin (and not very well).

#pronouns #funny

Show threadDavidJul 12, 2023
@sysop408 Wikipedia claims originally in Chinese there was no distinction between the male/female singular pronoun. But this distinction was created during the process of Westernization.
Show thread步丈九州不想六月四日在广场上面对坦克           Jul 12, 2023
@david1 @sysop408 Yes, it's true, and there were two ways of creating a she in Chinese, 她(ta) and 伊(yi). Finally the former survived through history, may be because we Chinese are poor dealing with these things, the former didn't force people change orally.
Show threadSheldonJul 12, 2023

@buzhangjiuzhou @david1

Thanks! I did not even know about 伊(yi) nor have I even heard anyone in my family say that before, but I'm primarily an English speaker so people try to keep their vocabulary simple when talking to me in Chinese.

Show thread步丈九州不想六月四日在广场上面对坦克           

@sysop408 @david1 伊yi is only used by people several decades ago(1910-1950), e.g. 鲁迅LuXun used it many times in his article.

By the way, 伊yi is used in dialect of south China before, but I don't know is it with gender information, may be, or not, as I am from the north part of China lol,

Jul 12, 2023 at 6:17amWeb