[Lexicog] Re: The irony of thou

[Bill Poser]

These political changes in usage can lead to embarassing confusion.
This happened to me in 1986 in China when I had a conversation in
Japanese with a North Korean student. He was learning Japanese in
China. At one point he asked me if I had an "aijin", which in
Japanese means "lover", with about the same connotation of "illicit
lover" as in English. I took him to be asking me if I had a girlfriend
and answered yes. A little later he asked me if I had any children.
When I said no, he asked why not, and I responded that I was not
married, using the Japanese verb "to be married". He did not understand
this verb. At this point things got a bit complicated. I finally
realized that he thought that "aijin" meant "wife" and had been
trying to ask me if I was married. 

"aijin" is a loan from Chinese. When it was borrowed, it meant "lover",
as it does etymologically, and as cognates still do in most Chinese
dialects. However, at one point the Communist Party decided that the
traditional terms for husband and wife were sexist and decreed that
henceforth airen (the Mandarin form) would be used with the
meaning of "spouse". Since my interlocuter was learning Japanese
in Communist China, he had learned Chinese airen with the meaning of
"spouse" and had assumed that Japanese aijin meant the same thing.
He had therefore taken my affirmative response to his question as to
whether I had an aijin as indicating that I was married.

Once I figured this out, I was able to sort things out by explaining
in Chinese that I had a girlfriend, not a wife.



 
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