“Let’s discuss this offline.” Sound familiar? Here’s a short guide to what some common business phrases really mean: https://econ.st/3r4R2FM
Illustration: Paul Blow
劉半農說更早說不定稱之為"紅毛鬼話" (有有書名曰：華洋買賣紅毛鬼話)
A slightly fuller account was printed two years later, in a monthly journal which was produced by and for American missionaries in Canton - The Chinese Repository. In January 1836 it contained an article headed 'Jargon Spoken in Canton', which included:
"Chop-chop - pidgin Cantonese phrase for 'Hurry up!'"
And the countries groped towards each other in terms of language by developing a curious hybrid mixture of language, which we now call Pidgin English. I don't know how many people know Pidgin English now, but it was a kind of newly coined language form in which, using Chinese grammatical sentences and a mixture of English and Portuguese and Indian and other words, a simplified trading language was developed that let the two countries communicate. And it had an extraordinary life as a language. It let people very rapidly deal in goods and tariff issues and a few basic legal issues and some problems of the exact nature of the trade items you were dealing with. It let you handle all these things with the vocabulary of only a few hundred words. I'm not saying we should add this to our curriculum in our overburdened schools, but still it is a fascinating linguistic structure.
諸國摸索交往所發展出的雜交混合的語言甚有趣，我們現在稱其為洋涇浜英語。我不知道現在還有多少人通曉洋涇浜英語，它是一種新創的語言形式，句子採用漢語語法，單字混合英語、葡萄牙語、印度及其他語種，換言之，它是一種簡化的貿易用語，得以讓異國人溝通。此語言的一生，頗不尋常呢。它讓人們在作生意上頗為方便：貨物和關稅的問題上，某些基本的法律議題和一些貿易項目的確切性質之問題等，都能十分迅速處理。處理所有這些，所需的詞彙只要幾百字即可。我不是說我們應該在業已不堪負荷的學校課程加入它，但它仍不失為一種迷人的語言結構。
pidgin
(pĭj'ən)
pidgin
n.
A simplified form of speech that is usually a mixture of two or more languages, has a rudimentary grammar and vocabulary, is used for communication between groups speaking different languages, and is not spoken as a first or native language. Also called contact language.
[From PIDGIN ENGLISH.]
pidgin
NOUN
Origin
Late 19th century: Chinese alteration of English business.
More
- A pidgin is nothing to do with a pigeon, but is a simplified form of a language used for communication between people not sharing a language. It originally represented a Chinese pronunciation of the English word business, and with the meanings ‘business, occupation, or affair’ became part of the simple language used between European and Chinese traders from the 1820s. By the 1850s people were also using pidgin to describe the language itself, especially in the fuller form pidgin English.
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