What’s in a word? A Chinese dictionary updates
Qin, Amy and Didi Kirsten Tatlow. What’s in a word? A Chinese dictionary updates. The New York Times. Sinosphere, 31 August 2014. En ligne : http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/sinosphere/2014/08/31/whats-in-a-word-a-chinese-dictionary-updates/ [Consulté le 1er septembre 2014].
The revised edition of the Dictionary of Modern Standard Chinese has just been released, and with it, more than 100 new terms — many slang or online neologisms — have been granted admission to the august realm of official Chinese lexicons.
The new entries include weixin (微信), or WeChat, the hugely popular social messaging service operated by Tencent. There are also some older words recently revived and repurposed for contemporary use, such as tuhao (土豪), literally translated as tu, or “dirt,” and hao, or “despotic.” Commonly used in the 1930s to refer to local tyrants, tuhao today derides a new privileged class that has emerged in China: people who are “extremely wealthy but lacking in education or values,” according to the dictionary’s definition.
But why did weixin and tuhao make the cut, while other, seemingly equally popular terms were shut out? Not admitted to the new edition were such words as diaosi (屌丝), literally “silk penis” but meaning “loser”; shengnü (剩女), or “leftover woman”; shengnan (剩男), “leftover man”; and baifumei (白富美), meaning “white, rich and beautiful.”
Voir aussi
- 赵婀娜.《现代汉语规范词典》推新版 增补“吐槽”等热词. 人民日报, 2014年08月27日. En ligne : http://culture.ifeng.com/a/20140827/41747652_0.shtml [Consulté le 1er septembre 2014].
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Monique Abud (3 septembre 2014). What’s in a word? A Chinese dictionary updates. ChinElectrodoc. Consulté le 18 septembre 2024 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mqk6
