"Brothers"...now in Chinese!

[starfishstar]

Someone translated another of my fics into Chinese!!

"Brothers," translated into Chinese by abloomedleaf, is here: 兄弟 Brothers

I love seeing something I wrote in another language. Even if it's a language I can't read beyond running it through Google Translate and trying to guess at what it actually says! It is just so, so cool.

And I learn something every time. For example, the title here, "兄弟," Google tells me translates literally to, not "brother" or "brother [plural]" but "elder brother" + "younger brother."

Oh, of course. Thai is the same: in describing relatives, relative age/status is important, more important than gender, so you could say "my older brother" or "my older [sibling, gender unspecified]" but I don't think you would ever just say "my brother [age unspecified]." The way to talk about siblings in general would not be to say "brothers and sisters," but rather, "older siblings and younger siblings." So it looks like Chinese is the same: the way to talk about two brothers is not to say "brother" + "[indication of plurality]" but rather "elder brother" + "younger brother."

Ahhhhhh I love languages so much!

Comments

[shimotsuki.livejournal.com]

That's very cool, to have a fic translated!

Japanese, which has borrowed words from Chinese in much the way that English has borrowed words from Latin and Greek, uses 兄弟 to mean 'brothers' or 'siblings' also. And like Chinese (and I guess Thai from what you say here), you can't just say 'brother' without specifying whether it's an older or a younger one.

Japanese -- and I presume also Chinese -- has a similar construction to mean specifically 'sisters', composed of 'older sister' and 'younger sister': 姉妹. This is used in the translation of the expression 'sister cities' as well.

Do you speak Thai? Very cool. That's a language I don't know much about, except that it's tonal and has a three-way stop contrast (http://phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter12/thai.html) (i.e., /p/~/ph/~/b/). Sorry, linguist trivia! ;)

[starfishstar]

Well, I *spoke* Thai pretty well when I was there as an exchange student at age 18, but it's been a long time and it's mostly dormant now. I hope I could relearn it, if I ever had an extended stay there and time to put my mind to it. Yes about the p/ph/b! When I was there, I just learned the sounds as I heard them, and only much more recently realized, oh, hey, I bet that sound was actually an unaspirated consonant! (Now that I've learned more about languages like Georgian, for example.)

Big sister-little sister cities! Oh, I love it. If one city refers to the other city, do they actually refer to it as "our little-sister city" or similar? If there's no word for "sister [age unspecified]," does that mean even something inanimate like a city has to be assigned an age ranking for the purposes of speech?