Sometimes when you dig too deep in your memory some good stuff comes out of it 😛
No, actually that happens fairly often.
It’s just that some scars have never healed, and probably will never heal.
But obviously there’s also shittons of normal and good stuff to be found there.
This post will be about a little peculiarity in Chinese of which I’m actually not entirely sure if it has been pointed out at all. It might also be specific to Taiwan; I’m just not sure. However, it exists, so let’s take a little look at the phenomenon.
I received this email:
思麒你好：
最近天氣不穩定，早晚溫差大，易讓人身心不適，也有可能會感冒，這是最近滿多人出現的狀況，若覺得不舒服，就讓自己多休息一下，但狀況較好一些時，或許可以趁有太陽時出來走走、買餐點，曬曬太陽也會好一些喔
Well it’s obvious that the person in question knows that I’m not feeling that great. However we’re gonna talk today about the first part of the sentence, the part about the weather.
I overthought it a bit, and it reminded me of what I think was the first time I received a text-message (we’re speaking me being around 24-25 or so) stating something along the lines of:
思麒，天氣要變冷了，你多穿一件衣服，多保重。
I mean I can’t literally remember it, but something along these lines. To give some unimportant and anonymized background stuff: The message was from a girl I used to see for a little while, a long time ago. She had lived a troubled life, something I was kinda trying to fix myself so to say. Broken family, addiction problems and whatnot. Real life, but the hard version of it so to say.
It’s especially hard in Taiwan, and more so as a woman, for reasons, you know. Anyway, my heart was maybe a tad too big at the time, so yeah we did kind of fall in love for a little while.
But actually this message, if I remember correctly, came a bit later. And I was a bit puzzled cuz yeah, what’s written there is just that ‘the weather is getting colder, wear some more clothes and take care of yourself’.
I asked my big all knowing 學姐 (her Chinese was and is 10 times better than mine, but just like me she isn’t Chinese) what she thought of it. And she said something along the lines of, ‘well, that’s just kinda cute no?’
And I replied ‘Yeah, I guess’, but still did find it a little bit weird.
Now a few years later I was taking ‘teaching Chinese as a 2nd language’ courses, and to cut things short: This is called 問候語, which just kinda translates to the title of this post. In Chinese it’s very different, a local Taiwanese one is 吃包了沒（呀）(have you eaten yet), or a more general one is 你去哪 or 回來了 (‘Where are you going to’, or ‘you’ve returned’, to which you don’t actually answer, but just say ‘嗯‘ (en) or ‘是’ (a copula (as in the English ‘to be’) that also can be used to confirm a statement).
You essentially just say ‘Hi/Hello’ and ‘Hi/Hello’ back, but using completely different words from the ones being used in the Germanic and Roman languages.
During the teaching Chinese as a 2nd language courses they go over all kinds of 語：成語，俗語，俚語，慣用語，and what not. So I realized yesterday that this is a very particular case of 問候語, it almost exclusively exists in online text messages, at least as far as I know, and I’ve never heard any lecturer or seen any book pointing out its existence.
If no one ever did, here you got a little present. Someone can write an official linguistics paper on the phenomenon and get a few bucks and some credits I guess. For me it’s too late already.
But for a stupid little blog story it does the trick 🙂
And also for staying puzzled, cuz that’s what defines me I guess.