The English makes it look simple enough. “If I was” (”if I were” if you’re old-fashioned) clearly indicates that she was not a radish seller. In fact Beijing Sounds has her resume on file (as well as the results of the independent investigator — one can never be too careful about these things) showing that YU was a doctor her whole career — no radish peeling stints at all.

But how, asked Albert in the comments, would the translator have known to translate the IF had they not known already that she was not a radish seller?! After all, what the first phrase says is, “wǒ shì mài luóbo de” which by itself could be understood perfectly clearly to mean “I am/was a radish seller.” So couldn’t it just as well have been: “When I was a radish seller…”?

Counterfactual Conundrums

The trap set by YU was to make me think the answer to his question was clear-cut and closed-ended. To quote my own followup comment:

you point out something I was puzzled by too: there’s no “if”. Nothing at all, so far as I can figure out. Yet it is indeed an imaginary situation. I think YR Chao had something to say about this construction. I’ll try to look it up … tomorrow

[more than two weeks ago, but who's keeping track?]

YR Chao did indeed have something to say about this construction. As usual, he stated clearly and simply [p.116 of A Grammar of Spoken Chinese -- for you Gwoyeu Romatzyh fans, note that you can see that romanization in action by clicking on the link]:

A conditional clause can occur without an ‘if’-word by merely having the adverb jiù/就’then’ in the consequent clause or by having negatives in one or both clauses, depending on the sense, as: 你打电话给他，我就不用写信了 [Nǐ dǎdiànhuà gěi tā, wǒ jiù bùyòng xiě xìn le].

Quite analogous. If you take YU’s phrase, clean up the disfluencies and hesitations, and adjust for tense since she clearly indicated talking about the past, you get:

wǒ shì mài luóbo de, wǒ jiù zài nèr xiāo
word-for-word: I was radish seller, I jiù ["then" in YR Chao's terms] would peel right there
translated: If I was a radish seller I would do the peeling right there

Everything is fine if you stop right there. But what if you decide you want an extra source or a different angle. You go online and start searching and submit you come across this:

Chinese, unlike English, does not have any means for expressing counterfactual implicational statements such as “If John were to go to the library, he would see Mary” or “If John had gone to the library, he would have seen Mary” as distinct from the descriptive and straightforward implication alternatives. Chinese, in other words, has no way to express distinctly that mood which in English and other Indo-European languages invites the reader or listener to shunt aside reality considerations and consider a state of affairs known to be false for the purpose of drawing implications as to what might be or might have been if that state of affairs were true.

The paper is by Alfred H. Bloom and since the Beijing Sounds accounting department refused to approve $14 in JSTOR fees, you only get this quote from the first page, which they do provide, grudgingly (as in — the page comes as a picture, not text, so you have to retype even to get your fair use out of it).

Having just provided an example of a Mandarin phrase that clearly shunts aside reality, the editorial team might be excused for immediately throwing this paper onto the pile labeled Horseshit. Yet, yet — since the Beijing Sounds editorial policy is, after all, to presume innocence, to presume that people aren’t just, to use the vernacular, making shit up– maybe we should give it a second chance. If anyone can offer some guidance as to why Bloom’s assertions might be correct or at least interesting, the Beijing Sounds studios promise to complete a full and timely (as in: it will take a lot of time) investigation. Just as nice would be if you know more references to where this has been argued, pro/con.

[UPDATE: Since I now have the entire article and have discovered that the aforementioned $14 would have bought me only a couple additional paragraphs, I've taken the liberty of pasting the final paragraphs of the very short article below. Again, you can see the first page on the link above, and the rest of the article below. Sorry JSTOR and Bloom for depriving you of rightfully earned revenues. Please contact Beijing Sounds in-house counsel for discussion of revenue-sharing opportunities.

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.

—–

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 (草泥马 cǎo ní mǎ) sounds similar to “mother fucker” (操你妈 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):

1. [Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]
2. [Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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:

[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]

——————-

*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.