第六十三天

[nnozomi]

第七天！一个星期怎么这么快。No grammar points today, post something you like in Chinese (a song, a poem, a drama quotation, a useful study thing, a painting, something funny, you name it).

Mine: since someone brought up Chao Yuen Ren last week, here is one of his many interesting quotations (this one both Chinese linguistic-related and a bit 耽美-avant-la-lettre, although he didn't mean it that way).

In Dora Black's lectures [in 1920 in China], she mentioned the problem of marriage. At one of her lectures she mentioned "those young men and women who are not married." Since "to marry" in Chinese takes a different word whether it's a man or a woman, I had to translate by different verbs. But I twisted them around using the wrong verb and came out with something which would sound like "those young men who have no husbands and those young women who have no wives," and the audience, of course, roared with laughter. When Miss Black asked me what they were laughing about, I told her [whispered] "It'll take too long to explain; I'll have to explain to you afterwards." Ch'ü is the verb literally "to take," to marry by a man, and chia, literally "to go home," is a verb to marry on the part of a woman.

(Thank goodness we can just say 结婚 these days. I think the first verb must be 娶, which I had to look up, and the second one 嫁...)

Starting around tomorrow I hope to institute a slightly new format, adding some vocabulary along with grammar (so people can choose to practice either or both as preferred) and maybe doing one masterpost/review and one "share something fun" 第七天 on alternate weeks. Keep letting me know how it looks. 辛苦了或加油！

Comments

[grayswandir]

I didn't even realize those were less common than 结婚, though now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I've heard them more in historical dramas than modern ones. I thought they just had different... grammatical functions, I guess, with 结婚 for the intransitive "to get married" (with no direct object) versus 娶 and 嫁(给) as transitive verbs ("to marry [someone]," "to take [someone] as your husband/wife," etc.).

But thinking about it, I guess 结婚 can also indicate the person you're marrying (和...结婚), so you really don't need to indicate anybody's gender when you talk about marrying them. Which is honestly pretty cool, imo. I hadn't really compared all the different options before.

I've also heard 婚 used (in Cantonese) for talking about an "unmarried" woman, and I'm not sure what a non-gendered option for that could be. (Or how you'd say the same thing about a man, for that matter. I guess just "bachelor"? 单身汉？) Google Translate is telling me the way to say "unmarried woman" in Mandarin is 未婚女子? (The Canto construction would have led me to expect 未婚的女子, but maybe the 的 isn't necessary?)

[nnozomi]

Google Translate is telling me the way to say "unmarried woman" in Mandarin is 未婚女子?
Based on Japanese usage alone, I would say that you could say 未婚男人 for a man as well because 婚 itself isn't especially gendered (other than the radical), but I may be way out.

[grayswandir]

Oh no, this is me being terrible at reading characters! I meant to be talking about 嫁, not 婚. (I copy-pasted 未婚女子 from Google Translate, but I thought the second character was 嫁 because that's what I was expecting when I asked Google for the translation, and then I copied the character from there for the rest of the paragraph. Ay. I was trying to say 未嫁(的), which I've heard before. I've never heard 未婚, so I just... read the character as the one I expected it to be. :P But yeah, assuming 未婚 is a thing, I assume it could apply to either gender.)

[nnozomi]

I was trying to say 未嫁(的), which I've heard before.
Interesting! I don't know if that's a Cantonese thing or a general Chinese one, it doesn't seem to have made it into Japanese. As you say, curious about what the gendered male version would be if there is one!

[grayswandir]

Now that I'm thinking about it, I do know 未婚夫/未婚妻 as fiance/fiancee. So I think I probably have heard 未婚 before, and am just blanking on it right now because it wasn't what I thought I wrote. XD

[externalities]

未嫁的 is only used for unmarried women, while 未婚 is gender neutral.

I guess you can break down 未婚 as "yet to be married", with 未 used in the sense of "not yet" or "so far has never happened".

On the other hand, the "未" in "未婚夫/未婚妻" is a stand-in for "未来" (future) - so, "the husband/wife (I will be) married (to) in the future".

[presumenothing]

this is completely 文不对题 but thinking of 未婚 in the context of "so far has never happened" is cracking me up XD (status: woke up today, still not married. business as usual)

[grayswandir]

You know, it occurs to me that I do always interpret a certain amount of "not yet" in 未, so it would sound funny to me to talk about a historical figure as 未婚, because part of my brain would hear it as meaning they still hadn't married anyone... yet. XD

[presumenothing]

…there's always the zombie apocalypse? XD

[grayswandir]

Thanks! Yeah, 未婚 as "not (yet) married" makes sense, and I think I always took 未婚夫/未婚妻 as being like "the husband/wife that I haven't married yet (but am going to)." A lot of variation in the amount of "yet" going on in these usages!

(ETA: Oh, and interesting that 未嫁的 needs 的 at the end, but 未婚 does not! I guess that explains why there was no 的 in the phrase I got from Google Translate, since that was 未婚 and not 未嫁.)

[presumenothing]

You're right, they do kinda function in different ways grammatically so it's not like they're perfectly substitutable for each other either – maybe 娶/嫁 feeling less common is partly a function of people generally just mentioning marriage and/or being married without needing to specify who? Outside of like, idk, matchmaking or other specific situations. 结婚 already suffices for the eternal when-are-you-gonna-get-married nagging, after all, which could drive up usage counts to astronomical heights all by itself XD