A Final Word on "Pickup Truck" in Mandarin, Plus More Transliteration Mysteries

In an earlier post, “More on those darn pickup trucks,” I stated that Mandarin has no word for “pickup truck”. I further wrote that the absence of this word is no doubt related to scarcity of such vehicles on the Middle Kingdom’s roads and highways.

I'd still stand by the second claim. You don't see very many pickup trucks here in China. In particular, there are hardly of them in the big cities. Again, practically all of China's city-dwellers live in apartments and hence have no need for such a vehicle to do things like hauling out trash from the yard. And in the countryside, an American style pickup would be prohibitively expensive for most farmers, who typically make just a 1,000 or so RMB per month (that's about $200 at the current exchange rate). These folks are lucky to have a tractor big enough to pull a cart with all their produce into the nearest town or city.

I now vaguely remember seeing some pickup truck like vehicles during my first year in China. I then lived in a relatively small city, 新郑市 (flat tone “xin” and falling tone “zheng” and “shi”), located in rural Henan Province. However, these vehicles were not only smaller than American-style pickup trucks, but many also had just three wheels—one in the front and two in the back.

Of course most of the farmers drove their tractors into the city or, in other cases, used three-wheeled bicycle carts and horse and mule-drawn wagons to get their fruit and vegetables into town.

Indeed, a fellow teacher that year hitched a ride, or perhaps better put, passed out, in one of those tractor drawn carts after drinking large quantities of that disgusting Chinese liquor, 白酒. The first character is a rising tone “bai” and means “white,” while the second character is a falling and rising tone “jiu” and means liquor. The stuff is typically distilled from corn or wheat is 50 proof. I'll have more to say about it in another post.

Getting back to pickup trucks, my first supposition about there being no word for this vehicle in the Chinese language is wrong. One of my excellent former Erwai students, 侯坤 (falling tone “hou” and flat tone “kun”), has informed that yes, Mandarin does have a word for pickup truck. It's 皮卡, or a rising tone “pi” and a falling and rising tone “ka.”

The first character is pronounced like “pee”, while the second character is pronounced like “k-ah.” The character 皮 means “leather,” so the Mandarin word for leather belt, for example, is 皮带 (the second character is a falling tone “dai,” which is pronounced as “die”). 卡 is the first character in basic Chinese word for truck, or 卡车—the second character, a flat tone “che”, refers to any kind of moving land vehicle.

So, in other words, literally translated, 皮卡 means “leather truck.” Of course, this character combination wasn't chosen because these trucks are made out of leather. The pairing is chosen because it sounds like the “pickup” part of “pickup truck.” As I noted in an earlier post, since Mandarin writing is based on characters, it's not easy for the language to absorb words from foreign tongues. The only way to do this is to find some character combination that sounds like the way the word is spoken in its native language (or, in many cases, given its status as the world's language, English).

Thus whenever one runs across a really nonsensical character combination, chances are the combination is some foreign word. This pairing of Mandarin characters to sound like foreign words is called “transliteration.” The problem is that in many transliteration cases, it's not immediately obvious what's being transliterated.

The Chinese word for pickup truck is a case in point. Once you know what the characters mean, you'll probably say, “Yeah, that kind of sounds like pickup truck.” However, it's certainly not immediately obvious. Fortunately, one has a clue here, namely the 卡 character, to tell you that we're talking about some kind of truck.

But no such clue exists in the transliteration for “jeep”, or 吉普. The first character is a rising tone “ji,” while the second character is a falling and rising tone “pu.” The first character is pronounced like the “gee” in “gee whiz,” while the second character is said like the “pooh” in “Winnie the Pooh.”

“吉” is a Chinese family name and is also an archaic term for “lucky,” while 谱 means “common” or “universal.” Thus the meaning of these characters gives no clue about the transliteration’s meaning. And the pronunciation of these characters doesn't help much either, as the word jeep is missing the “pooh” vowel sound.

There are certainly some transliterations that sound exactly like the foreign word equivalents. For example, the Chinese word for the African country Sudan is 苏丹 (flat tone “su” and falling tone “dan”). The first character appears in the name of the famous city in Jiangsu Province, Suzhou, while the second character is one of the Chinese words for red (and is a popular girl's name). And the Middle Eastern country, Yemen, is 也门. The first character, a falling and rising tone “ye”, is pronounced like “yeah”, while the second character, a rising tone “men,” is pronounced like “mun.” Together they mean, “also gate.”

In other cases, the transliteration of foreign country names is not an exact match, but pretty close to it. Malaysia is a case in point. It’s 马来西亚. “马” is a rising and falling tone “ma” and is pronounced like “ma” in “mama”, “来” is a rising tone “lai” and is pronounced like “lie,” “西” is a flat tone “xi” and is pronounced like “she”, and “亚” is a falling tone “ya” and is pronounced like “yah.” Together literally they mean “horse come west Asia;” however, any reasonably intelligent person would be able to guess it means Malaysia.

Other transliterations of foreign country names are not so obvious. For example, one could probably, albeit with some difficulty, guess that 法国 (falling and rising tone “fa” and rising tone “guo”) is France. This is because the second character means “country” and the first character, which is pronounced like “fah,” kind of sounds like France. This character means “rule”, so France in Chinese literally means “rule nation.”

That's an odd name for a country that from the late 18th through the mid-19th century experienced three revolutions and whose people even today still protest at the drop of a hat. It would be better to give this name to Germany, but that country is 德国—the first character, a rising tone, “de”, is pronounced like “duh.” It means “virtue,” and kind of sounds like the “Deutsch” part of “Deutschland,” which is the German name for Germany. So according to the Mandarin naming scheme, the French follow rules, while the Germans are virtuous. Go figure!

While one might be able to figure out that 法国 means France, I suspect that nobody could guess about the meaning of 西班牙. “班” is flat “ban” is a pronounced like “b-ah-n,” while 牙is a rising tone “ya” and is pronounced like “y-ah.” 班 is one of the characters in the character combination for “go to work,” 上班, while 呀 is the Chinese word for teeth. The pronunciation bears only a passing resemblance to the way Spain is said in English and has an even more tenuous relationship to its Spanish name, “Espana.”

The same could be said for the Chinese name for Indonesia, which is “印尼”—a falling tone “yi” and a rising tone “ni”. This is clearly a transliteration from the English name of the country, as the first character is pronounced like the “E” in “E.R.” and second is pronounced like “knee.” I suspect this has nothing in common with the way Indonesia is said in Bahasa, the country's official language (I did a quick web search on this matter, but couldn't find get that information).

Finally, to end this discussion, there is one transliteration of a country name that is not as literal it could be. I'm talking about the Chinese name for America’s northern neighbor, Canada. It's 加拿大 in Mandarin. The characters are a flat one “jia,” meaning “add to/addition,” a rising tone “na”, meaning “take/hold, and a falling “da”, meaning “big” (in terms of size, not quantity). While this kind of sounds like “Canada”—gee-ah n-ah d-ah—the character trio, 看那大, sounds almost exactly the way “Canada” is said by English speakers. As noted above the last character is a falling tone “da”; the first one is a falling tone “kan” and the second is a rising tone “na”.

When learning a foreign language, one necessarily engages in word sleuthing. Good and really serious students will try to learn words from their context, rather than looking them up in a dictionary and trying to memorize them.

This is especially true with Mandarin. And this is really the case when it comes to learning the language's characters. This discussion has tried to show that one can turn this task into a fun and interesting activity. And since Mandarin is such a bloody difficult language to master for non-native speakers, you might as well try to have some fun while learning it!