Bye-bye

[Jimmy/ Chun]

And the two Chinese characters appropriated for the loan 
expression bye-bye originally means "to worship".

But then the problem is: when these two characters are fixed for 
writing down the expression (and they are pretty much fixed now), 
I wonder how many Chinese varieties would pronounce them as close 
to English bye-bye. That is, Mandarin speakers would pronounce 
these two characters as [bai-bai] or [bay-bay]; but speakers of 
some other Chinese/Han language varieties may not.

the danger of making Mandarin the default "Chinese language" + the 
danger of writing bias...


Jimmy/Chun



On Tue Jun 03 12:02:51 EDT 2008, "awebster at siu.edu" 
<awebster at SIU.EDU> wrote:

> Rudy Troike's post reminded me of the native speaker of Wuhan (a 
> dialect of Mandarin) I had working for my linguistic fieldmethods 
> class this spring. When we elicited the word for goodbye, she 
> gave the standard zia jian, but then added that all the young 
> speakers (she herself was young), said "bye-bye." And it was the 
> reduplicated form, not just "bye" as I would say. best, akw
> 
> ---------Included Message----------
>> Date: 3-jun-2008 02:19:30 -0500
>> From: "Rudy Troike" <rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU>
>> Reply-To: "Indigenous Languages and Technology"
> <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
>> To: <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
>> Subject: [ILAT] Bye-bye
>> 
>> Recently I was watching a program on Chinese, and was amused
> to hear two
>> characters parting company say "Bye-bye" -- a new Chinese
> expression!
>> 
>>   Rudy
>> 
>> 
> ---------End of Included Message----------
> 
> Anthony K. Webster, Ph.D.
> Department of Anthropology &
> Native American Studies Minor
> Southern Illinois University
> Mail Code 4502
> Carbondale, IL 62901-4502
> 618-453-5027
> 
>