More on those darn pickup trucks

After finishing the earlier blog post about pickup trucks, it occurred to me to me that there might not be any word in the Chinese language for this vehicle. The word “truck” in Mandarin is 卡车 (falling and rising tone “ka” and flat tone “che”).

I then thought that the Chinese might call such vehicles a “小卡车”. The first character is a falling and rising “xiao” and means “small”. Mandarin is such a wonderfully logical language, so why not call these trucks “small trucks,” as that’s basically what they are!

However, when I emailed one of my former Erwai students, a very bright and clever young lady named 冯岑 (a rising tone “feng” and a rising tone “cen”) about this, she informed me that 小卡车 doesn’t really refer to a small truck, but a truck that is used to haul automobiles. Such vehicles, of course, would be a good bit larger than a standard sized American pickup truck.

There are only two other Mandarin words for truck. One is 房车—the first character is a rising tone “fang” and appears in the Chinese word for “home”, or 房子—which refers to a vehicle or mobile home one can live in. As was said a moment ago, Mandarin is very logical in the way it pairs different characters together. The other word is 大车, which literally means “big truck”. The first character in this couplet is a falling tone “da” and means big, in the sense of size, in Chinese.

The story illustrates how a language is rooted in its underlying social and physical environment. Since there aren’t any pickup trucks in China, Mandarin doesn’t have a special word for these types of vehicles. Conversely, the language spoken by Inuit Eskimos has 30 odd words for “snow.”

I studied German as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California and still speak and read it fairly well. I checked in my dictionary and, unlike Mandarin, the German language appears to have two separate words for “pickup truck.” When in Germany, you can call this vehicle either a “kleiner Lieferwagen” or “Kleintransporter.” I guess, in contrast to China, “Im Deutschland gibt es Lieferwagen” (there are trucks in Germany).