Inter-lingual Homophony: Neige as a Demonstrative/Filler in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

The demonstrative/filler neige in Mandarin Chinese is potentially contentious outside that language, as it bears resemblance in terms of pronunciation with a racial slur in English. Nonetheless, neige does not possess any racist connotation in Mandarin Chinese, and its analysis needs to take into consideration historical and contextual information. The form neige is a colloquialism of its formal equivalent nage, which has functioned as a demonstrative determiner/pronoun or a discourse marker in verbal communication since ancient periods. The derivation of nei from na is realised via suppression of the demonstrative with the numeral yi ‘one’, and this phenomenon occurred even before Mandarin was invented as a national lingua franca. Differently from languages such as English in which the number of homophones is limited, Chinese contains an enormous amount of syllables with myriads of homophones, owing to the fact that Chinese is a tone language that depends on tone implications to differentiate meanings and syllables/words are hence predominantly mono- or bi-morphemic. As a consequence, homophones pertaining to Chinese abound both language-internally and cross-linguistically. Among the repercussions of homophony are the literary inquisitions during the Qing era that sabotaged freedom of creation. Therefore, the interpretation and comprehension of neige need to be objective and impartial.

Keywords

• colloquialism
• cross-language homophones
• intra-lingual homophones
• literary inquisitions
• nage/neige