cites "Eskimos and their infinite ways to say 'snow,' their ability to see differences in snowflake conflagrations, thanks to the richness of their vocabulary."Not exactly. See Anthony C. Woodbury's Counting Eskimo words for snow: A citizen's guide, which points out that
Tan seems not to realize that this old canard about the Inuit having 32 different words for snow, or whatever the number, is pure myth.
Eskimo languages are inflectionally so complicated that each single noun lexeme may have about 280 distinct inflected forms, while each verb lexeme may have over 1000.But he still comes up with some terms that don't really exist in English.
Tan also
quotes from an article in the New York Times Magazine that said the Chinese were so "discreet and modest" they didn't even have words of "yes" and "no." Was she wishy-washy, Tan wonders, because of linguistic programming rather than some innate aspect of her personality?In "THERE'S MORE TO CHINATOWN", the novelist D. Keith Mano wrote in the NYT Magazine on April 24, 1988,
So discreet and modest are Chinese that, strictly speaking, there aren't even Cantonese words for "yes" or "no."Anyway, she points out that there are equivalents for yes or no in Chinese. They depend on the grammatical context.
Still, why go to Amy Tan for advice about Chinese? I'm still laughing at her efforts to use romanization in her first novel. There was something like yi ta fa duo for yi ta hu tu 一塌糊塗 (even in Cantonese the last two are wu4tou4).
2 comments:
could it be that Amy Tan is wishy-washy because she is a bimbo? Her Chinese, in any case, is pretty awful, and surely has nothing to do with it. That's the first I've heard of Chinese having no words for 'yes' and 'no'. No wonder I've never been able to refuse when a Chinese friend offers me a drink.
For awhile (maybe even now) there was a run on chick lit by Asian women describing how awful life was for them. Amy Tan seems to have a love-hate relationship with Chinese culture that's mostly hate. I think it's a problem a lot of second generation immigrants have--they're often appalled by their parents' culture and want to assimilate themselves into American culture, but at the same time, they can't escape their origins (especially if they look "foreign"). Anyway to use her as a guide to Chinese is ridiculous.
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