So I was reading this article: Modern marriage and mortgages enter Chinese lexicon and helped me remember a discussion I had with my dad awhile back. I had asked him, if there’s been any new Chinese character for the past few hundred years, or has it always been the 5000 or some that has been standardized in one of the earlier dynasties. This is referring to Traditional Chinese, as I believe Simplified Chinese has drop that amount to about 2000 characters, which is still quite a handful for anyone wanting to learn.
My dad doesn’t think that any new characters have been added to the Chinese dictionary. This however differs from phrases. Any new concept or idea, people use existing Chinese characters to form up a new phrases to represent the new concept or idea. For example, computer is 電腦 (dian4 nao3) which literally means electric brain. The monitor is called 螢光幕 (ying2 guang1 mu4) which translates to fluorescent screen.
I always like to see how Chinese evolves with new sayings and understanding how they come about is always fun.
The new phrases mentioned in this article are:
- Economic reforms and soaring rates of home ownership have coined a new moniker for the tribe of youth struggling to pay off home loans in traditionally debt-wary China: “fang nu,” or “house slaves”. 房奴 (fang2 nu2) which as they stated correctly does translate to house slave.
- And young, married professionals who live in separate homes to keep the romance alive and maintain their own space have been branded “Semi-honey couples” (“ban tang fu qi”), the official Xinhua news agency said, citing education officials. 半糖夫妻 (ban4 tang2 fu1 qi1) which translates to half sweet couples.
- “Young Chinese moving in fashionable circles often drop phrases like ‘duan bei’, with a literal meaning of ‘brokeback’,” to euphemistically refer to male homosexuals, Xinhua said. 斷背 (duan4 bei4) which translates to broken back. I found it very interesting they’re using this phrase to refer to homosexual people and is a clear example of how Hollywood has affected the Chinese language.
- The emergence of city-dwelling couples choosing a pet over children had seen the use of “ding chong jia ting,” in Chinese, or “DINKS with pets,” in English, the report added. 丁寵家庭 (ding1 chong3 jia1 ting2) actually uses a Chinese character (丁 – ding) to represent the DINK acronym. 寵 means pet and 家庭 means family, and as suggested earlier, it means double income no kids with pets.