For the past few years I have been learning Mandarin Chinese.  Many, many things have struck me, one of them being that my mistakes in Chinese are usually a mirror image of the mistakes my Chinese friends make in English.   Another striking thing has been the detailed attention the language pays to family relations.  In Greek or in English, we have single words for brother (αδερφός in Greek), sister (αδερφή), as well as sibling (αδέρφι in Greek, using the neutral gender).  Not so in Chinese.  There are distinct words for older brother (哥哥, gege), younger brother (弟弟, didi), older sister (姐姐, jiejie), and younger sister (妹妹, meimei).  You cannot directly ask someone whether they have brothers, sisters, siblings, you have to be specific.  There are of course terms for brothers (兄弟, xiongdi – 兄, xiong, being another term for older brother, and 兄弟 being the title of a beautiful novel by Yu Hua), sisters (姐妹, jiemei) and siblings (兄弟姐妹, xiongdijiemei), but are not typically used to find out what siblings one might have.  For that, one asks generally about family, 你家有几口人 (ni jia you ji kou ren = how many people does your family have?) or 你家有谁 (ni jia you shei = who are your family?).

The language extends this fine discrimination further, to uncles, cousins, grandparents, placing special emphasis on the male side of the family, consistent with patrilineality, and a strong preference of boys over girls – a preference that shows up in the highly skewed male-female ratio in areas of China.

This preference shows up in an interesting way in the terms for grandparents.  English, as well as Greek, have single words for grandfather (παππούς in Greek) and grandmother (γιαγιά in Greek).  Chinese on the other hand distinguishes between paternal grandfather (爷爷, yeye), paternal grandmother (奶奶, nainai), maternal grandfather (外公, waigong), and maternal grandmother (外婆, waipo).  What is particularly interesting – and the Chinese themselves joke about this – is that the first character in the maternal terms, 外 (wai), carries the meaning of ‘foreign’, ‘outside’, as in 外国 (waiguo = foreign), 外国人 (waiguoren = foreigner), 老外 (laowai = foreigner), 外面 (waimian = outside), 外空 (waikong = outer space).

Preference notwithstanding, Chinese nouns do not have genders, and even the pronouns for ‘he’ (他) and ‘she’ (她) are pronounced exactly the same, ta.  Which sheds some light on the common mixing of ‘he’ and ‘she’ by my Chinese friends in English.

And all this reminds me of the beautiful opening by Michel Foucault of the preface of “The Order of Things”:  “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”