On the rhythms and tones of a foul and trendy pun — yes, another dead horse post
Warning: Despite the innocent voices of some of the main actors, Beijing Sounds was never intended as a family blog. Even fluffy animals won’t soften this hard fact, so read on at your own peril and heed the check-with-your-doctor warnings if you have a known allergy to coarse language.
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As usual with current events, BJS comes a day (month? year?) late to the grass mud horse cacophony. ChinaSMACK has been translating it for ages. The New York Times introduced it to the Bobo world a few days ago with an overhyped political twist. Joel Martinsen at Danwei then explicated NYT’s euphemisms by telling curious readers [pinyin added] that…
grass mud horse ( cǎo ní mǎ) sounds similar to “mother fucker” ( cào nǐ mā), a fairly common curse
Language Log and Imagethief have weighed in as well.
But Beijing Sounds has been clamoring to know: how well, really, does “grass mud horse” morph into “mother fucker”?
First, the translation
Is it “mother fucker” or “fuck your mother”? The BJS position is that Joel Martinsen’s selection of “mother fucker” makes the better translation. The grammatically inclined will beg to differ, since the grammar of the phrase is literally “fuck your mother.” But like mother fucker in English, cào nǐ mā is a set phrase in Mandarin, well known (as Imagethief notes) to any Zhonglish speaker who has occupied the back seat of a Beijing cab and heard it applied liberally as a form of address to pedestrians, bicyclists, dump trucks and road construction sites. As a set phrase, cào nǐ mā seems less likely to evoke the sort of foul literal image that “fuck your mother” does. It is much more like “mother fucker” — just a general expression of offense or annoyance.
This is just one man’s intuition and opinion, of course. There’s a seething can of worms about “how foul language works” that would be fun to poke a finger into once the BJS studio researchers are coaxed back after the present strike. In the meantime, borrowing from Christopher Hom’s synopsis in a paper (h/t Language Log) about racial slurs, this blog’s position will be that the pragmatic strategy serves us better in this case than the semantic — as he summarizes it:
According to the semantic strategy, their derogatory content is fundamentally part of their literal meaning, and thus gets expressed in every context of utterance. This strategy honors the intuition that epithets literally say bad things, regardless of how they are used. According to the pragmatic strategy, their derogatory content is fundamentally part of how they are used, and results from features of the individual contexts surrounding their utterance. This strategy honors the intuition that epithets can be used for a variety of purposes, and that this complexity surrounding epithets precludes a univocal, context-independent explanation for how they work.
Phonetics: tones vs. stress
Writing it out, you might think the greatest difficulty with morphing cǎo ní mǎ into cào nǐ mā is the tones. And no doubt they’re quite different. But the Beijing Sounds team of crack analysts is going to argue that in fact it’s stress that (at least for Zhonglish speakers) makes the two easy to tell apart, especially for Mandarin beginners who are struggling to differentiate the tones. Why stress? Because in northern Mandarin*
A syllable is either stressed, in which case it has a tone, or unstressed and in the neutral tone
[Chao p.147**]
And following roughly the same pattern you’d find in English, where pronouns are unstressed, the nǐ (你 = “you”) is unstressed in cào nǐ mā. Therefore you’re likely to hear WAY more of the NI in cǎo ní mǎ (grass mud horse) than in cào nǐ mā (fuck your mother). Try it out for yourself, with a special thanks to my friend in Shanghai who didn’t hesitate to pull out the recorder to utter a few mother fuckers (NB: PLEASE don’t play this without headphones in your place of work – you never know who’s going to overhear):
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Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
So which is the profanity? You don’t even need to Praat that puppy: NI hardly hits the radar in (2). But let’s do Praat for the tones anyway, just to see what we get:
1. Grass mud horse
2. Fuck your mother
They graph nicely and, sure enough: no resemblance.
A few notes:
- In both graphs I’ve highlighted the NI in Praat. It makes a pretty cool visual, something you could print on a T-shirt and give to your favorite Mandarin nerd for St. Patrick’s day, maybe. Looking at the top of each chart within the pink, in the first case you can see how the ní has plenty of volume but in the second case how nǐ is hardly audible.
- The blue line showing pitch makes practically a perfect tone model in the first recording. Note the half third tone in the “cǎo ní” 3-2 sandhi.
- What’s beautiful about the very heavy third tone mǎ in the first graph is that you can actually see how the voicing disappears at the bottom of the tone. The blue pitch line vanishes and the dark black formants are nowhere to be found. In Praat you can listen to just this part and it sounds like a breath — no voicing at all.
Like most puns, this one relies on the imagination to make the connection, at least in everyday speech. BUT don’t forget the great Mandarin secret: the key to instant Zhonglish improvement is the same key that opens up the box to the cao ni ma pun for everyone in the world who might have missed it without explanation.
Grass Mud Horses in Song
Yes, it escaped none of the Youku and Tudou types that once the words were put to music, which obliterates the tones and evens out the stress, there would be no overlooking the cao ni ma connection. Enjoy a youtube clip for the bigger kiddies and another one for the little tikes. Here’s a sample from the latter if you’re too lazy to click:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
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*I recall someone mentioning that some forms of Mandarin have much less of the neutral tone and much less in the way of unstressed syllables, but I can’t find the reference and I know so little I can’t even figure out where to start.
**Chao Yuen Ren (赵元任 Zhào Yuánrèn）in his A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. See all posts with Chao here.
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Comments 9
I’m surprised Joel (Martinsen) translated 操你妈 as “motherfucker” because one can often hear a variant (or maybe a more original version): 我操你妈, which makes it undoubtedly a predicate. I think a more viable translation if you are just going the way of usage analogues would be “fuck you”.
操 is an alternate way to write 肏, which is much more visually descriptive (enter + meat). I believe that 操 became popular because of cell phones having a limited character set, but I don’t have anything (aside from the fact that my cell phone, and most others until recently lacked that character) to support that.
Posted 15 Mar 2009 at 11:49 am ¶I started to write, according to my understanding, “操” is a euphemism for “肏”, analogous to saying “shoot” instead of “shit”, but then realized “euphemism” implies sound — so my question to you, BJS, is, what’s the right word to use to mean “looks better in writing”?
“Euphemism”, when applied to English, doesn’t differentiate written or spoken words, but in this case “操” – “肏” is exclusively a written phenomenon, so maybe a different word would be better.
Of course, I suppose you could claim this is outside your purview, since your blog is, after all, Beijing *Sounds*.
I have another question, which has come up a few times when I’ve tried to describe the “grass-mud horse” phenomenon to my American friends. I know Chinese people are more sensitive to tones than we are, so I thought that often, when two words differ only by tones, though they sound similar to us, they sound completely different to Chinese people. I’ve even experienced a few times, when in China, that I’d laugh at such an association, and then ask my friend, “isn’t that funny?”, but he/she would look at me blankly — the association had never occurred to him/her. Sorry I can’t think of any examples off the top of my head, but I know this happened more than once. So my question is — do these really sound similar *to Chinese people*?
Posted 16 Mar 2009 at 1:20 am ¶I second Randy on both points. One, 我操你妈 is a common companion to the vanilla 操你妈.
Two, I think ‘fuck you’ is a decent translation for 操你妈, but what exactly is wrong with ‘fuck your mother?” This seems to fit in fine with the string of english curse words: ‘(go) fuck yourself’, ‘(go) fuck your mother’, ‘go fuck your sister’, etc, etc.
Yes, ‘motherfucker’ is a set phrase in english, but it is a noun, 操你妈， may be a set phrase, but certainly doesn’t feel like a noun. I really don’t see why or how it can be stretched to a different word class when the other options are so acceptable. In actual translation I can’t imagine ‘motherfucker’ ever being the best choice.
From the two posts I’ve just looked at there seems to be a genuine misunderstanding of western versus eastern culture, in particular english slang, (not a surprise).
http://www.coocaa.com/RsMag/Show.aspx?RsId=8861&ebubrwd=10257
http://dzh.mop.com/mainFrame.jsp?url=http://dzh.mop.com/topic/readSub_9249691_0_0.html
The crucial mistake I see in one of these posts is the belief that the phrase ‘fuck your mother’ doesn’t exist. I think it does, or at least in the minor variant (go fuck your mother). My take on this is that ‘motherfucker’ essentially carries little or no meaning related to one’s mother. It is an expression showing immense hatred/disrepect, and nothing more (in this case). （go) fuck your mother, similarly carries no special meaning related to one’s mother. Their difference lies in nothing but word class, one a noun/exhortation, the other a command/phrasal exhortation.
Something like 笨蛋 could easily be translated into cunt, dick, motherfucker, asshole, depending on tone and the degree to which you can accept certain words. 操你妈 seems restricted to times where one is really saying something like ‘fuck you’ or ‘go fuck yourself’ or ‘go fuck your mother.’
傻逼 seems to be more suitable to becoming cunt, dick, asshole, motherfucker, than 操你妈.
Things like 你是什么东西？ 你是人吗？ Seem to be the most flexible of the bunch:
What the fuck is the matter with you?
Are you fucking kidding me?
You motherfucker!
What kind of fucking person does this/that?
Ok. I’m done.
Posted 16 Mar 2009 at 1:42 am ¶Klortho,
John as Sinosplice I believe said his Chinese wife didn’t ‘get’ the 草泥马 joke at first.
And I don’t think it’s about tones, its about ’sound’, the overall ’soundshape’ of a word. You would think that three or four character phrases that only differ in tones would be something chinese people would get instantly but I’ve never found that to be the case. On the other hand, things that don’t sound remotely alike, but by ‘tradition’ are supposed to sound similar or something, they all know. The same thing happens with english, but it is late and I can’ think of any examples. But the things we associate and think of sounding ‘alike’, are not necessarily the things everyone thinks sound alike, or will think about sounding alike in english.
Posted 16 Mar 2009 at 1:49 am ¶Neutral Tone notes. Teaching material from Taiwan usually states that neutral tone usage is much more rare in Taiwanese Mandarin. If you are looking for a source, you can check out the textbook Taiwan Today, it might have some sources.
Posted 16 Mar 2009 at 1:55 am ¶My Chinese students come up with stuff like that in English, putting together little jokes with sound-alikes that don’t immediately strike me. Because, like HSK先生 said, there’s no traditional association there or whatever. And my joke that hinges on 放盐 sounding like 方言 doesn’t kill, for the same reason.
Not really relevant but… reading it 草泥马 gives it a sound almost like a northern Jiangsu dialect pronunciation of 肏你妈, almost exactly (the only difference is that the fourth tone of the 肏 should still sound like a fourth tone [almost].)
Posted 16 Mar 2009 at 10:50 am ¶Looking back through all the posts I’ve written for Danwei about obscenities, I’ve rarely translated them the same way twice. In the first Grass Mud Horse post, I put “fuck your mother” in the mouse-over text; this time I used “motherfucker.” Jeremy even asked me why I did so. I’m not really sure. For a lot of these words and phrases, I don’t think there’s a strict one-to-one correspondence, so in isolation, you’re left with a choice of (a) translating literally, which (at least to my mind), tends to make them sound stronger than they are in actual usage*, or (b) choosing some analogue that roughly agrees in tone, if not in lexical class.
I think I went with “motherfucker” this time because it’s got maternal fornication in the form of a common obscenity of roughly the same strength. “Fuck your mother” is not something I’m familiar with in English.
There’s quite a bit more leeway when translating these inside a larger context. I can see translating an emphatic “我操!” as “Motherfucker!” for example.
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Posted 16 Mar 2009 at 11:09 am ¶* Granted, my sense of strong language may not be in line with what everyone else thinks; I feel that hknotes’ English renderings in [3] are far stronger than the Chinese originals.
This is how it happens in China, things are told indirectly, but they are told anyway. This is good to see that in China too, people are able to stand up for their rights.
Posted 17 Mar 2009 at 5:34 pm ¶So translation-wise, if we go with “fuck you” we’re missing the “mother” part, which seems problematic to me. I also agree with Randy & hsknotes, that forcing the change from predicate to noun is kind of dicey. BUT I still don’t think “fuck your mother” works in a lot of cases because it’s just too harsh. Of course that’s my intuition, but we can get a bit of factual support by looking at google hits:
motherfucker 4250k
fuck your mother 139k
The latter, being WAY less common, would tend to have more force as a curse (I think there’s academic work that backs this up but can’t think of where I read it).
In the end I’m inclined to vote with Joel again, this time with his argument that, fundamentally, it depends on the situation.
Klortho: Good point about the “visual euphemism”. It’s clearly needed. Just take a look again at google hits for the “real” vs euphemized versions of shǎbī and then càonǐmā. With 肏 vs. 操 you could almost argue that 肏 may disappear entirely since the numbers are so low.
傻屄 33k (real)
傻比 243k
傻逼 841k
肏你妈 11k (real)
Posted 19 Mar 2009 at 9:28 am ¶操你妈 408k
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