Comments | liukaiqin: Nin or ni?

liukaiqin

Nin or ni?

Jan 20, 2006 19:57

Could one of you Chinese speakers put me right on this? I've met a guy from Hong Kong whose Mandarin isn't fluent but he likes practising it on me with my much worse Mandarin, and he calls me 您. Since we're both kind of 19 or 20 and I call him 你, what's going on? It reminds me of a party in Germany where a guy chatted to me sober as "du", but ( Read more... )

Comments 10

You are correct 5_rings January 20 2006, 20:13:28 UTC

You shouldn't say it unless you want to be oddly polite to everyone. It's not normal to use nin when talking to peers.

Re: You are correct liukaiqin January 20 2006, 23:33:27 UTC

Thank you. So it's as odd as I thought it was. Now I'm a bit put out by a new instance, though - we read a (mainland) text in class in which a child called its father "nin". Our Taiwanese teacher said that was standard. Am I going crazy? Do modern PRC children do this?

Re: You are correct 5_rings January 21 2006, 06:23:51 UTC

In Confucianism, parent-child is an superior-inferior relationship, and the Confucian tradition is stronger in Taiwan than in the mainland, so "nin" might be proper. I know that adult children in the mainland don't normally call their parents "nin," though I'm not so sure about young children.

Re: You are correct liukaiqin January 21 2006, 17:01:48 UTC

It did seem incongruously Confucian. I wonder.

...... yangchencen January 21 2006, 04:28:24 UTC

we read a (mainland) text in class in which a child called its father "nin". Our Taiwanese teacher said that was standard.

First things first, is this text wrote by a Beijing-er? They Beijing-ers call everyone nin, even one minute before crack each other's head open. That's a part of the Beijing dialect. Don't mind it. And if that's the case, you can happily nin back without worrying.

The second possibility, is this text old? Like before the PRC, in 20s or something? If that's the case and the family in it is wealthy, ignore it as well. That's old-world crap.

As for the Hong Kong guy, I suspect he's got a Beijing-er tutor...

Re: ...... liukaiqin January 21 2006, 17:10:44 UTC

It was a reading comprehension thing in the 新实用汉语课本, so definitely Beijing! They don't 您 each other much in the rest of the book though.

It must have been weird in times when they called their elders 您, even their own parents. They all did it, though - I think the nobility in Germany did the same thing, called their parents 'Sie' instead of 'du'. And the French. Probably the English too, 'you' instead of 'thou'. Not sure. Weird, though.

bokane January 31 2006, 08:09:39 UTC

yangchencen is right -- Beijingers love their 您. Absolutely love it. Other people hardly ever use it, except maybe in artificial situations like phone-tree messages, hotel clerks, and that kind of thing.

I'm actually not sure when 您 entered use. I don't remember having seen it in anything old, and I really want to say that it was a recent creation (like the distinction between 他 and 她, which was created as part of the post-Qing language reforms). Not sure about it, though -- can check my etymological dictionary when I get back to Beijing.

liukaiqin January 31 2006, 21:51:33 UTC

Hum. So everyone was once 他? And what about 妳, where's that used?

Incidentally, the Hong Kong boy has now stopped 您ing me.

bokane February 1 2006, 01:50:35 UTC

妳 I've only seen used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. There was also a form of 你 and 他 using the 'altar' radical - I can't type it on this computer, unfortunately - devised by missionaries for use in references to God.

liukaiqin February 1 2006, 17:44:56 UTC

Really - that's dead good. Way to manipulate a language for one's own ideological purposes. My computer doesn't give that combination either. Maybe they got sick of it.