I was originally writing this as a response in the thread Could someone let me know some facts about ASD? but given this goes off on a tangent, I thought it might be better to create a separate thread.
I want to note that I do not have a background in linguistics, and my knowledge of Chinese is limited - I took it in college a number of years ago.
Chinese is kind of like Latin in that the grammatical structure is looser (making it a great language for puns), and often one has to rely on the context to figure out the meaning of something.
One notable part of Chinese is the lack of distinction between the noun and adjective forms of a word.
玛丽喜欢吃墨西哥餐
Mǎlì xǐhuān chī mòxīgē cān
Mary likes to eat Mexican food.
玛丽是墨西哥人
Mǎlì shì mòxīgē rén
Mary is Mexican. (lit. Mary is (a) Mexican person)
玛丽住在墨西哥
Mǎlì zhù zài mòxīgē
Mary lives in Mexico. (lit. Mary lives at Mexico)
With Chinese, you can't really invent a new character, so usually one would use some combination of characters to approximate something.
Sometimes, transliteration (matching the sound, even if the result is otherwise nonsensical) is used, especially for given names as with Mary and Mexico shown above.
Other times, the term would be an approximation of the meaning, or something related to the meaning.
I like using diabetes as an example because it shows both how a combination of characters represents something new, and just as above, we needed context to differentiate whether 墨西哥 refers to Mexico or Mexican, that here, 糖 could refer to "sugar" or "sweet" and from the context we know it's "sweet".
糖尿病
Tángniàobìng
Diabetes (lit. Sweet urine disease)
That brings me to autism.
One advantage of English is that it's very easy to coin new words and acronyms. The ease of doing so, and the limitless number of languages that can be drawn from means we often don't notice the root word.
Autism, for example, is drawn from Autos (Greek: self) and "ism." Basically, self-ism.
We can see the shared root with other English words like autonomous (self-governing) and automobile (self-mobile)
In Chinese, there is:
自闭
Zìbì
Autistic (lit. self closed)
自闭症
Zìbìzhèng
Autism (lit. self closed illness-condition)
阿斯伯格综合症
Āsībógé zònghézhèng
Asperger's Syndrome (lit. Asperger composite/collective illness-condition)
So to loop things back to the original post, and in considering that China has gone through a number of COVID-related lockdowns in the past year, one can see the pun in someone saying that they've autistic ("self closed") when they're referring to being in a lockdown.
I'm not defending that (I find it regrettable), but it's a major drawback of a language that basically sets up puns. For medical and psychological conditions, it also creates and perpetuates a lot of misunderstandings.
I want to note that I do not have a background in linguistics, and my knowledge of Chinese is limited - I took it in college a number of years ago.
Chinese is kind of like Latin in that the grammatical structure is looser (making it a great language for puns), and often one has to rely on the context to figure out the meaning of something.
One notable part of Chinese is the lack of distinction between the noun and adjective forms of a word.
玛丽喜欢吃墨西哥餐
Mǎlì xǐhuān chī mòxīgē cān
Mary likes to eat Mexican food.
玛丽是墨西哥人
Mǎlì shì mòxīgē rén
Mary is Mexican. (lit. Mary is (a) Mexican person)
玛丽住在墨西哥
Mǎlì zhù zài mòxīgē
Mary lives in Mexico. (lit. Mary lives at Mexico)
With Chinese, you can't really invent a new character, so usually one would use some combination of characters to approximate something.
Sometimes, transliteration (matching the sound, even if the result is otherwise nonsensical) is used, especially for given names as with Mary and Mexico shown above.
Other times, the term would be an approximation of the meaning, or something related to the meaning.
I like using diabetes as an example because it shows both how a combination of characters represents something new, and just as above, we needed context to differentiate whether 墨西哥 refers to Mexico or Mexican, that here, 糖 could refer to "sugar" or "sweet" and from the context we know it's "sweet".
糖尿病
Tángniàobìng
Diabetes (lit. Sweet urine disease)
That brings me to autism.
One advantage of English is that it's very easy to coin new words and acronyms. The ease of doing so, and the limitless number of languages that can be drawn from means we often don't notice the root word.
Autism, for example, is drawn from Autos (Greek: self) and "ism." Basically, self-ism.
We can see the shared root with other English words like autonomous (self-governing) and automobile (self-mobile)
In Chinese, there is:
自闭
Zìbì
Autistic (lit. self closed)
自闭症
Zìbìzhèng
Autism (lit. self closed illness-condition)
阿斯伯格综合症
Āsībógé zònghézhèng
Asperger's Syndrome (lit. Asperger composite/collective illness-condition)
So to loop things back to the original post, and in considering that China has gone through a number of COVID-related lockdowns in the past year, one can see the pun in someone saying that they've autistic ("self closed") when they're referring to being in a lockdown.
I'm not defending that (I find it regrettable), but it's a major drawback of a language that basically sets up puns. For medical and psychological conditions, it also creates and perpetuates a lot of misunderstandings.
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