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Some Chinese Interrogatives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
Extract
The object of this note is to suggest that in certain specific uses of the characters for nan ‘difficult’ and hao ‘good’ (Nos. 8 and 7 in the table), used to write vernacular expressions, we ought possibly to recognize well-known interrogatives which are written in an already acknowledged variety of wa3’s. The nan which has long troubled me belongs to the expression nan tao, seeming to mean literally ‘hard to say’; the hao belongs to the phrase hao jung-i ‘very difficult’, generally explained as ironic (jung-i means ‘easy’). My thesis demands preliminary consideration of those forms of interrogation in Chinese which use initially in the phrase some word that might be called an adverb or a particle of interrogation.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1949 by the Linguistic Society of America
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1 Exactly 25 years ago, in the spring, I was writing my first Brief Note under the painstaking tutelage of Professor R.G. Kent, to whom a dean’s office had assigned me as advisee when I entered college five years previously. That first article, occupying less than three pages in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, dealt with an example of word contamination. The present greeting then treats most appropriately a type of contamination: why should words which normally mean ‘peace’, ‘difficult’, ‘good’, ‘evil’ also have an interrogative value? I suppose the explanation might well be called ‘orthographic contamination’, which is probably endemic to all ideography.