The 北京话儿 Beijing Pirate T-shirt
Speaking of t-shirts, I’d been toying with a t-shirt idea for the past year or two: a Beijing Pirate t-shirt. Let me explain…
A distinctive feature of Beijing dialect of Mandarin (and, indeed, most northern Chinese dialects) is the very frequent rhoticization (adding to or replacing the end of a word with “arr”) whose function is often glossed as a diminutive suffix. This phenomenon is called 儿化 (érhùa) in Chinese. Here are some examples, blatantly stolen from Wikipedia:
- 公园(gōngyuán)(public garden) → 公园儿(gōngyuánr), pronounced “gōngyuár”
- 小孩(xiǎohái) (small child) → 小孩儿(xiǎoháir), pronounced “xǐaohár”
- 事 (shì) (thing) → 事儿(shìr), pronounced “shèr”
The result of this variation is that it makes you sound like a pirate… and thus my t-shirt idea was born:
I’m happy to say that I recently found exactly what I’d been looking for—someone to print the shirts, store them, and handle shipments—in the form of PrintMojo, and yesterday constructed the website to go along with it: beijinghuar.com. The shirts are printed on very comfortable Hanes shirts with nice white cross-stitching. They’re $20 a piece, plus shipping.1 Sure, not the cheapest shirt, but pretty awesome. Make sure to check it out.
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Friends, ask me for a discount code. ↩
Related posts:
- 北京 Part 3: The Great Wall of China! and noodles
- 北京 Part 2: Summer Palace, bargaining, The Tree, and fried apple pie
- Taipei find: a dictionary of Chinese-Japanese false cognates
- 北京 Part 1: Fulbright love, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and Houhai
- Introducing Smartdate
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Tags: Beijing, Chinese, code, t-shirt
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July 6th, 2008 at 2:57 am
哈哈。。。儿！ I noticed this in my Mandarin class and to a lesser degree in my Cantonese class.
July 18th, 2008 at 11:18 am
I love this so much. I am sending this link to my former Chinese teacher/Beijing friend.
July 29th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Reminds me of my first year Mandarin project where I made up a story about my pirate alter ego pretty much for the sole purpose of declaring that she’s 22 years old and getting to point somewhere on a map and say “She lives here!”
October 3rd, 2009 at 2:25 pm
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December 9th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
[…] n't know there is a pirate accent! This blog says that it is because Beijing accent is rhotic. mitcho > blog > The 北京话儿 Beijing Pirate T-shirt Does it mean Americans sound like pirates too? Originally Posted by virago A non Man […]
October 27th, 2011 at 6:50 pm
I’ve noticed this for years. Actually, after learning Mandarin in Taiwan for a while, I am now able to hear a Beijinger from miles away. They totally do sound like pirates compared to southern Chinese people’s Mandarin.