Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun

Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.

Comments

Chinese puns

[DNS-and-BIND]

Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context. It's a real downer for learning the language when you see two native speakers misunderstanding each other. It is also a gold mine for puns, like the story says. Different characters from motherfucker, but sounds the same. Since the internet is not spoken, then technically it's not offensive.

I would be careful reading any subversive meaning into this - they're just tweaking the noses of the net.cops. Most Chinese people think that the government does a good job keeping society clean. To them, unrestricted freedom means chaos, and China certainly has lots of experience with chaos ruining their country. I mean, the 1949 takover by radical lefists was considered an improvement, and they killed 60,000,000 of their own countrymen.

Re:Chinese puns

[cozziewozzie]

Despite the bewildering complexity and variety of Chinese characters, there are actually a very limited set of ways to pronounce them. This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context. It's a real downer for learning the language when you see two native speakers misunderstanding each other. It is also a gold mine for puns, like the story says. Different characters from motherfucker, but sounds the same. Since the internet is not spoken, then technically it's not offensive.

There are about 1200 ways to pronounce a syllable in modern Mandarin, and about 1800 in modern Cantonese. Compare this to the 8000 of English and around 100 in Japanese, and you'll find that Chinese is not that poor phonetically (see DeFrancis: "The Chinese Language" for more details). Furthermore, most words in modern Chinese are composed of several characters. The number of different characters that sound exactly the same is huge, but the number of actual words that sound exactly the same is actually very small. It's still a very context-heavy language, but not as much as people sometimes imagine.

The problem is that people ignore the tones in Chinese, which are extremely important. Grass-mud-horse (cao3 ni2 ma3) sounds very different from "motherfucker" (cao4 ni3 ma1), but it is close enough to be humorous and to get the message across.

Re:Chinese puns

[gardyloo]

And yet, if you research the legend even on the Wikipedia page you link to, you find out that the way Kennedy used the phrase is perfectly fine, non-idiomatic, and the people of Berlin loved it. The story is interesting, not as an illustration of bad background research by a foreigner, but as an example of a (literal) urban legend.

Re:Chinese puns

[Emb3rz]

If those words happen to be the same as they are in mandarin (both sounding like bow and transliterated to 'bao' with different accents) then yes, tonal differences aside, the words are pronounced the same.

The differences, if I remember correctly (and, again, if they're the same in cantonese as they are in mandarin), is that the 'bread' bao is said with a 'falling' tone, so it sounds like you shout! the 'b' sound and the 'ao' comes out in a lower tone. On the other hand, the 'full' bao is said with a 'falling-rising' tone, so you start it at your baseline, drop down a note, and come back up to baseline.

Any of these words spoken slowly enough can be differentiated with practice. Unless, of course, the listener is tone-deaf. That would present some difficulties.

Re:Chinese puns

[HungWeiLo]

In the case of "bread" and "full", the Cantonese pronunciation is about the same as Mandarin. They're both "bao", but have distinct intonations that should be pretty obvious.

Mandarin's much easier to learn, as it only has 4 distinct tones, whereas Cantonese has something like 9 or 13. The southern Chinese dialects pretty much require you to go "native" to learn it with the proper intonations.

Re:Chinese puns

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes.
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
When couldn't the plural of pan be called pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot - would a pair be called beet?

If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
If the singular is this and plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be nicknamed kese?

Then one may be that, and three may be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim!
So our English, I think you will all agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see. I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you
On hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?

Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.

And dead; it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother.
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there.
And dear and fear for bear and pear.

And then there's dose and rose and lose --
Just look them up -- and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.

And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why, man alive,
I'd learned to talk it when I was five.

And yet to write it, the more I tried,
I hadn't learned it at fifty-five!

Re:Chinese puns

[steelfood]

Every dialect has its own set of puns, and interchangability between dialects varies with the pun. And on top of that, Cantonese, in particular, the Hong Kong version, has a completely different set of colloquialisms.

For example, this pun doesn't work with Cantonese. There aren't just more tones in Cantonese, but more beginning and ending consonants. In Cantonese, the phrase in question sounds like "Cho Nai Ma" while "fuck your mother" is "Cou Nay Ma."

Besides, the Cantonese slang for "fuck" doesn't actually exist as a word. The old word used in this pun has since been sanitized (maybe due to British influence in Hong Kong) over time to mean "to court" or "to pick up."

One pun I've heard bandied about occasionally in the US is "delay no more." It has a passing resemblance to "fuck your mother" in the Toisan dialect of Cantonese. Since the majority of the immigrants to the US were from Toisan or from the Seiyap area, and very few of them spoke English, most of them would automatically assume the Chinese meaning upon hearing the phrase. The pun doesn't work as well with Hong Kong Cantonese though.

Re:Chinese puns

[JianTian13]

I just thought about that -- A camera named "penis"? That'd be just too awesome :)

Wonder what they call it when there's a summit of the leaders of the eight largest economies?

Re:Chinese puns

[TheoMurpse]

As someone who speaks Japanese and basic Mandarin: no. Mandarin is much more fertile. I know this is a gross oversimplication (by virtue of the fact that "word" is an inadequate term for many things in Mandarin), but Mandarin "words" are all monosyllabic. Japanese has many polysyllabic words.

Also, because agglutinating "words" in Japanese can change pronunciation ("tuka" (use) and "you" (use) put together becomes "siyou" (use, formal)) but Mandarin can, at worst, change only the tone (which still doesn't destroy a potential pun oftentimes), Mandarin still looks like it's going to win the trophy for punniest language.

Although TheoMurpse's postings on /. should take the prize for uncomfortably embedded parantheses.

hahahaah

[unity100]

that was one crazy fucked up video. here, this one has translation :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKx1aenJK08

i think that even would be on the borderline in u.s.... for the censor people in it probably sounds like someone's fucking their brain from the inside.

the description is not complete :D

[xizhi.zhu]

more background is still needed :D besides the "grass-mud horse", another animal, "river crab" is also popular in China now, which is the enemy of the "horse". in Chinese, "river crab" sounds like "harmony", which is what the Chinese government use as an excuse to shut down websites they don't like.

Chinese puns

[FRiC]

The youtube videos may be new to most people (and they're not new), but the grass-mud-horse and other Chinese puns are nothing new. I've heard them since I was a kid. (This is like why Canon's camera went from G7 to G9.)

some backgounds

[gzipped_tar]

As a Chinese, lemme explain some background..

The "grass-mud-horse" thingy used to appear in the Baidu Baike, Baidu's Wikipedia-like project. The Baidu Baike is widely regarded as part of government's effort to control Chinese people's source of information and a central hub of the whole "harmonization" stupidity, for Baidu is at the same side with the govn't. By creating a new webopedia it gives them more control over it. Naturally the contents in Baidu Baike are heavily censored against politically incorrect material but no one gives a shit about factual accuracy or copyright violations that's rampant there.

Some anonymous person thus put the articles for "grass-mud-horse", along with other jokes of this kind, to Baidu Baike. Unsurprisingly they stayed there for quite a long time without being removed, because there was no "political" stuff in them, even if the contents were outrageously out of touch with reality. This was seen as a punch in Baidu's face, and by extension, a joke on government's attempts to control online speech. After the "grass-mud-horse" became widely known the Baidu Baike articles were removed but the meme went wild.

So much for the background. I hope I made some points across the Great Language Barrier.. It's kinda surprising to see you guys here discussing the caonima stuff at /. ;)

Re:some backgounds

[sakdoctor]

Weird, I stumbled across this subject completely at random just last week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_10_Mythical_Creatures_(Internet_meme)

About the meaning beind "grass-mud-horse"

[GPLHost-Thomas]

Something the author of the first post seems to not have understand, is that "grass" and "fuck" is spelled the same way (eg: cao in pinying) but said with a different accent (the falling one means fuck). Same goes with "ma" that can mean mother or horse. I am really not sure about "mud" because I don't know what chinese word we are talking about here, but maybe someone can explain ?

Re:Ok, I am interested in the story but

[Anonymous Coward]

As the summary indicates, they're alpacas. Which look absolutely nothing like a horse. Go figure.

Re:If I'm supposed to be hearing "mother fucker"

[dsg123456789]

you're supposed to hear "mother fucker" in chinese.

what does the word "scale" mean to you?

[circletimessquare]

pretty much all the same you point out above is illegal in china. and then you get additional limitations: the worst being, no political free speech. this grass-mud horse revolt started because china was instituting a major crackdown on pornography. and then used that crackdown as a cover to shut down a number of pro-democracy sites, like charter 08

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_08

The Chinese government has said little publicly on the Charter.[8] On 8 December 2008, two days before the 60th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly's adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Liu Xiaobo was detained by police. His detention came hours before the online release of the Charter.[9] He has been retained at an undisclosed location, though he has been allowed to meet his wife on one occasion.[10] [11] Several Nobel Laureates have written a letter to President Hu Jintao asking for his release.[8] In reponse, the Chinese government is trying to crush[10] the dissidents: at least 70 of its 303 original signatories have been summoned or interrogated by police while domestic media have been forbidden to interview anyone who has signed the document.[10] Police have also searched for or questioned a journalist, Li Datong, and two lawyers, though none have been arrested.[8] State media has been banned from reporting on the manifesto.[12] A blogging website popular with activists, bullog.cn, has been shut down which may have had ties to the Charter.[13]

can you see that happening in the west? i'm talking prison JUST FOR SAYING YOU WANT POLITICAL CHANGE. people like you really bother me because you have no perception of scale, and you see a little censorship in the west, and therefore you find that a draconian harsh censorship practice elsewhere is the same thing. utter pure 100% bullshit. your point of view is logically incoherent, ignorant, and plain wrong. no, china and the usa aren't even in the same league. your comparison is utter busllshit

for example: you can't criticize the leaders in china. that will get you tracked and possibly arrested. but here in the west, i can call barack obama anything i want, and no one is going to arrest me. go ahead and try to say the kind of things you can freely say about barack obama in the west, and compare that with what you can get away with criticizing the leadership of china, or iran

that ACTUALLY MAKES A DIFFERENCE AND MEANS A LOT. the censorship in the west is nothing like that in china or iran, and that it is perfectly appropriate, acceptable, and logically coherent to criticize the draconian censorship in china or iran while at the same time celebrating the free speech in the west

the absurdity is that you wish to propose that SOME censorship, regardless of quantity, is the issue, rather than the RELATIVE amounts of censorship

look: in every society that ever existed, for all time, going in the past, and going to all of the future of mankind, there will be SOME rules about not being able to say something. so that means we can't criticize and compare the RELAITVE freedoms of one society to the next?

you really believe that?

your entire point of view on the issue is complete bullshit. you compare societies on the SCALE of their censorship, and then you arrive at a coherent and 100% factually true observation: that you have a lot more freedom of expression on the west. and that MEANS something. ESPECIALLY in regard to politics

you will NEVER have ABSOLUTE freedom of expression in ANY society, forever. and because there might be a few limits here and there in one society you honestly want to say that that society with few limitations on free speech is equivalent to one with draconian and severe limits on expression?

really? you think that's a valid and coherent belief on your part?

you're reasoning abilities have been found to have fallen short