Shanghai Bob

I was chatting with a conversation partner who used “88″ to sign off. This turned out to be a numerical representation of a Chinese approximation of an English farewell:

88 = 八八 ＝ bā bā = “bye-bye”

Because “I”, “you”, “be/am/are/is” and “love” all have close approximations in Chinese digits, you can actually say a lot. Some super-methodical person put up this list of Chinese codes and their translations. My favorite is the self-refuting

8006 = 不理你了 = “Not paying attention to you anymore”

I learned today that in the local Shanghainese dialect a left turn is called a “big turn” (because you cross half the road) and a right turn is called a “little turn”.

In class we learned buy (mǎi; 买) and sell (mài; 卖). The characters differ only by one component and the pronunciation differs only in the tone. I asked how traders confirm buys and sells on the phone, but our teacher didn’t know. I was at a CFA happy hour over the weekend with Andrew and we found a member who could tell us: they add an extra character to each: “buy in” (买 进) and “sell out” (卖 出).

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 10:12 am and is filed under chinese.