When an April Sunday morning condenses in humidity that makes the manhole covers perspire, and the overcast sky smothers Beijing’s cacophony of car horns and screeching brakes, the apartment courtyard can take on an ethereal quality, floating in the eye of the storm awaiting the release of morning classes and the beginning of lunchtime traffic. The faraway sounds are rendered more distant, magnifying the isolation of the knife sharpener’s song as he plies his trade:
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(要?)磨刀的嘞
(yào?) módāode lei
(want) knife sharpening戗刀磨剪咯
qiāng dāo mó jiǎn lo
Sharpen knives and scissors(想?)磨刀的嘞
(xiǎng?) mó dāo de lei
(want) knife sharpening戗(?)刀磨剪嘞
qiāng (xiao?) dāo mó jiǎn lei
[Agreed: the recording makes it sound like there's a train going by next door (there wasn't) and there's a car horn that just won't quit. What can you do? It's Beijing. Honestly it seemed rather peaceful at the time.]
This post was just intended as a moment in sound. But the editor’s always asking: so what’s he saying? And that was the subject of some debate around the studios. The beat reporter was supposed to just ask the man, of course, but he got away on his electric trike before they could be properly introduced.
The BJS studio’s head reference librarian claims that the phrase he’s using is qiāng cài dāo (抢菜刀 = sharpen knives). Trouble is, none of the instances, except maybe the second, sound much like qiāng and certainly not like qiāng cài. The last one is a pretty clear “xiao”. The ABC dictionary gives xiāodāo as an alternative pronunciation for xuēdāo (both 削刀 = sharpener). That sounds promising, on the one hand, but on the other a google search for 抢菜刀 (qiāng cài dāo) found a video of a man sharpening knives and singing largely the same song, a video that I am mysteriously unable to find again and link to here.
Maybe we should just let him sing his song.
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Comments 9
What purpose does 嘞 have here? This character is not in the mdbg dictionary, and nciku says “equivalent to 了” – is it just a different pronunciation of 了?
Posted 20 Apr 2009 at 7:58 am ¶Gerard: good question, I was kinda wondering the same thing and decided I’d opened enough worm cans for an evening.
It all started with Mrs. BJS saying that the knife sharpener was saying “módāode lei”. And what is “lei” doing, I ask.
“Oh, it doesn’t mean much, it’s just a way of saying the same thing.”
So I went to the ABC dictionary for more help. It reckons the particle “lei” indicates “calling attention to a situation.” That actually fits pretty well.
Maybe “lei” is what he’s saying at the end of every line, but I heard the second phrase as “lo”, so I kept it there. The ABC says “lo” is “indicating obviousness.” Hmm, not a clear fit. The very last lei/lo really does sound like a cross between the two, but I left it as the former cuz that was the native speaker intuition about what he was “really” saying.
Posted 20 Apr 2009 at 8:21 am ¶I’m pretty sure I’ve been chastised here (or somewhere) before for saying this, but in my mind “lei” is just an alternate pronunciation for 了. I also think of “bei” as an alternate pronunciation of 吧, and “nei” and “zhei” as the same for 那 and 这, respectively. Over-simplistic? Missing out on a lot of special hanzi characters? I plead guilty as charged. But it helps me sleep at night, and with all this racket, I place a pretty high premium on that.
Posted 21 Apr 2009 at 1:04 pm ¶磨剪子嘞
戗菜刀
That’s what this recording inspired my wife to sing. That’s what she heard growing up in her village in Beijing’s Yanqing County. I’m not sure how much this helps, considering 延庆话 is quite distinct from 北京话 and historically Yanqing has been associated more with the neighbouring region of northwest Hebei than Beijing, but for what it’s worth…
Posted 21 Apr 2009 at 8:54 pm ¶Albert, I know you’re just playing for sympathy from a guy who would look for ANY excuse not to learn another character. It almost works, but I’m afraid I (still) have to disagree that bei and ba have the same meaning. (I’m less confident on lei/le.)
For the record, here’s the post where we originally clashed, like intellectual titans, over bei/ba. At that time, hsknotes seconded my opinion that it’s not the same, but neither of us really cited empirical evidence.
Risking another translation kerfuffle, let’s look at the one other instance I can find on BJS of a “bei” in the wild, from this post:
This was actually a guest post from Sima. I have to say that in this case, just looking at the words also makes me think that ba could be substituted for bei with no side effects. However, if you go back and actually listen to the woman’s tone when she said it, it sounds to me qualitatively different from how you’d be able to say it with a mere ba. The way she says “bei” sounds to me to indicate something like “fine can we move on?”
Maybe that’s reading too much into it. Maybe we can get Sima’s input since he was the one doing the recording. At the very least we should be able to get more data. You’ve got me inspired to do a new post if I can find the right bei/ba recording.
———–
Chriswaugh — that sounds pretty close to what Mrs.BJS was relying on when trying to parse what the fellow was saying. It also looks like it’s almost verbatim from the video I mentioned that I found but annoyingly can’t find again. Kind of cool: it’s like the national (or at least regional) standard song for knife sharpeners! You may not really be able to understand the words, but you know from the song what service is being offered.
Posted 22 Apr 2009 at 8:52 am ¶Looks like I have little choice but to agree with syz – this is becoming a bad habit. I hope you’ll forgive me Albert.
For me, 呗 (bei) changes things from 吧 (ba) quite a bit and syz’s “fine can we move on?” gets pretty close to what it’s about. I understand 呗 as ’stating the obvious’ or ‘grudgingly accepting’. In the case of the “nà jiù shùlín bei” example, I’d suggest this is very much the former. Of course, ’stating the obvious’ might well be accompanied with a certain amount of irritation, but it doesn’t have to be. In the recording, I was showing pictures to the subject in order to elicit certain words. This all becomes a little bit like a childish quiz, with the respondent thinking, ‘Is it really this simple, or is there a catch?’ Perhaps ‘nà jiù shùlín bei’, could be translated as ‘Well, that’s just a wood, isn’t it?’
呗 only really came onto my radar about three years ago and, after a few aborted attempts to crowbar it into my speech, it seems to be beginning to bed down – I catch myself using it from time to time. Of course, it still sometimes slips out at the wrong moment.
The hardest thing about this is that it inevitably accompanies certain kinds of intonation (at the phrase or sentence level) and if I’m actually thinking about which particle to use, there’s not a cat in hell’s chance of getting it all right.
As for 嘞 (lei), I’m struggling a little – the ABC suggests that it has the connotation of ‘calling attention to the situation’, which seems quite fitting here. The 现代汉语规范词典 (Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian), courtesy of Plecodict, says that it’s used in the same way as 了 (le) but “带有肯定的语气“ (dàiyǒu kěndìngde yǔqì), giving the example “好嘞，就这么办吧!” (hǎolei, jiù zhème bàn ba!).
I think 咯 (lo), like 呗, suggests ’stating the obvious’, so maybe it could be thought of as 了+呗. I’ve always thought of 啦 (la) as 了＋啊, i.e. a slightly enthusiastic version of 了.
My impression is that there may be considerable variation between regions and individual speakers. I have one friend down south who types 咯 frequently in our online chats. Somehow it seems to fit with her general demeanour.
Incidentally, if pinyininfo is lurking, perhaps we could have an adjudication on when or whether these particles are to be attached the preceding word. I’d have thought it’s debatable whether many people bother, either in pinyin or chinese characters, to write anything other than 了 and 吧 most of the time. Likewise with other ‘minor’ variations like 哇 (wa), as in ‘好哇!’, 呀 (ya) ,as in ‘谁呀?’
Posted 22 Apr 2009 at 11:45 am ¶Like we’ve thrashed out before, at least in North China, bei and ba are different.
As for lei, in Beijing, and other places, you do get it as a replacement for le, such as in the case of hao lei! I always thought of this as a either an southern influence or a quirk of the sound system in where ‘-ei’ can be used sometimes, but I don’t have a good theory about it. My impression is that it is not standard, and I have been been chastised for using it playfully. For me, the problem is dealing with the most common appearance of lei
好嘞
in contrast with
好了
好啦
好啊
好的
好吧.
Judging from the dearth of (-ei) ending characters in Modern standard mandarin, (nei 那, is really na. 谁 is really shui.) I’d guess some of this with lei is north china fangyan interference coming up against standard mandarin. 呗 may have the same origin, coming off a bastardization of 吧, but at this point it is clearly distinguishable in sound, intention, and character.
Now, 了, does have a common alternate reading of liao, in songs for example.
As for the combos, you may find many chinese people who would not be able to place 啦 as a combo of 了 and 啊, (if that’s even true), let alone more obscure hypothetical origins like 喽 （for some reason you guys write 咯, which I’ve seen, but carries a few standard pronunciations, none of which is lou. commonly it is ‘lo’ which would rhyme with wo (我） and is something I’ve never heard, and I assume the 咯 is just being stretched to read lou. )
Posted 22 Apr 2009 at 11:54 pm ¶@hsknotes: Not sure how I overlooked 喽, but I would think of it as different from 咯, probably without good reason. Agreed on the pronunciation, but you see them as otherwise interchangeable?
Not sure the dearth of (-ei) endings; (-ei) can follow all of the plosives, plus ‘n,l,m,h,z’ (I accept ‘zh,sh’ are special cases). Add to these ‘w’ and all the (-ui) syllables and there ought to be a pile of ‘em.
Something that does happen here in the Northeast quite a lot is that 好的 sometimes becomes ‘haodi’. Obviously, ‘di’ is an alternate pronunciation for 的 anyway, so there probably wouldn’t be cause to write it any differently, but ‘haodi’ also seems to convey a slightly more affirmative air than simply ‘haode’. Of course, this might just be me reading more into it than there is. Does anyone else hear this where they are?
Posted 23 Apr 2009 at 12:36 pm ¶@Sima: I don’t know of any reason to attach those. Having them separate makes it clearer what they are (esp. if left toneless). Of course, though, tense-related particles are a different matter.
Posted 23 Apr 2009 at 3:27 pm ¶As for writing “hǎo de” or “hǎo di”, I suppose that depends on whether you’re trying to get the sound/flavor of the speech or are mainly concerned with writing in standard forms, as one in English might sometimes choose “gonna” instead of “going to.” (I should admit, though, that I’m a nèige, shéi kinda guy, not a nàge, shuí one.)