GA

One of my favorite Chinese words is GANGA (pronounce as in "Lady Gaga", but put a nasal at the end of the first syllable).  It is so special and has had such a deep impact upon me since I began learning Chinese half a century ago that, in this post, I shall refer to it simply as "GANGA", in capital letters only, except when discussing its more precise pronunciation, derivation, meaning, and written representation in Chinese characters.  Referring to this unusual word as "GANGA" is meant to emphasize the iconic quality it has for me personally, in the sense that its nature reveals many verities about Sinitic languages and Chinese writing.

Before going further, I am obliged to tell you what GANGA means:  "awkward; embarrassed".  It's obviously a useful word, and its very sounds synesthetically mimic the feelings that it designates.  Of course, English "awkward" is pretty good at doing that too, but with the English word each syllable is a morpheme, so you can analyze it as "back-handed" and "turned toward".

With GANGA, neither of the syllables by itself means anything.  It's one of those disyllabic morphemes, of which there are plenty in Sinitic:  wēiyí 委蛇 / 逶迤 ("meandering; winding"), qílín 麒麟 ("kirin" [not "unicorn"] — I will write a paper or post about its true identity sometime), fènghuáng 鳳凰 (so-called "phoenix"), pípá 琵琶 ("biwa; lute"), pútáo 葡萄 ("grape"),  zhīzhū 蜘蛛 ("spider"), shānhú 珊瑚 ("coral"), qiūyǐn 蚯蚓 ("earthworm"), xīshuài 蟋蟀 ("cricket"), húdié 蝴蝶 ("butterfly" — of mythical proportions, deftly dissected by George Kennedy (1901-1960), the brilliant Yale professor), and so forth.  See "'Butterfly' words as a source of etymological confusion" (1/28/16).  Most of these expressions are ancient and have more than one Sinographic form, and several of them have Iranian antecedents.  All of them provide powerful evidence of the priority of sound over written Sinographic form.  GANGA, as we shall see below, belongs squarely to this salient class of words.

GANGA is a strange creature.  I don't know how I was exposed to such an odd expression during the first year of my study of Mandarin, probably from my wife and in-laws.  They were Shandongese, but had spent a decade in Sichuan during WWII, before moving on to Taiwan where they settled for about thirty years.  As I have described in numerous Language Log posts, when I began the study of Mandarin, I was only interested in the spoken language and really didn't care about the characters.  So I learned how to say GANGA long before I knew how to write it in characters.

When I finally did learn how to write GANGA in characters, I found it all the more fascinating, because the very Sinographic written form of this word appeared bizarre to me.  Like the sound, the written form of GANGA evinces awkwardness.  Here's what it looks like:

尴尬 (simpl.) 尷尬 (trad.) / 尲尬

(The Hanyu Pinyin romanization for Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is gāngà.)

First of all, GANGA is written with a rare and ungainly radical, which I shall discuss in greater detail below.  Second, the phonophores used to render the sounds of the two syllables would normally be read as jian and jie (not taking tones into consideration for the moment) in MSM.  Thus both the semantophore and phonophores underscore the weirdness of the written form of this word.

In their Concise Dictionary of Spoken Chinese, Yuen Ren Chao and Lien Sheng Yang say that GANGA is a Wu topolect word.  The Chinese linguist Qian Nairong, who is a researcher and advocate of Shanghainese, also considers GANGA to be a Wu topolect expression.  I'm not surprised at this, because somehow it doesn't seem like a Mandarin expression, but rather like a southernism (pronounced roughly kamkai).  It has always sounded to me like something Shanghainese would say.  Since I don't know of it in Cantonese and Taiwanese, except as a superficial borrowing, and since it has spread fairly widely in Mandarin, it seems possible, or even likely, that it might well have come from Wu.  GANGA may have come into Cantonese when large numbers of Shanghainese people arrived in Hong Kong during the 1940s and 1950s, but it could well have been earlier since there has long been a considerable Cantonese-speaking population in Shanghai.

GANGA is a common expression in Shanghainese, where it means:  1. "awkward; embarrassed", 2. "in straits".  In its modern incarnation, I'm content to accept GANGA as fundamentally a Wu topolect word that has spread across much of the Sinophone world, though not deeply into the other topolects, although it has become extensively assimilated by MSM (the national language).  However, despite its manifestly close association with the spoken realm, GANGA — like the other disyllabic morpheme words cited above — can be securely traced to ancient times.

From Wiktionary:

The original form, 尲尬 (OC *kreːm kreːds), was attested in the ancient dictionary of Shuowen [2^nd century CE] and was discernibly an ideophonic, disyllabic word of reduplicative nature (連綿詞).

The term 尲尬 seemed to have fallen into disuse by medieval times, except dialectally, in the Wu region. The dialectal form of it was revived in literature in the form of 尷尬 since the Yuan dynasty, and the colloquial Mandarin pronunciation gāngà was borrowed thence.

Others may disagree with me, but when I see the Old Sinitic reconstruction of a binom like *kreːm kreːds, I cannot help but invoke dimidiation, which in this case would yield something like *kremds.  Perhaps this might suggest cognates in Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burmese, IE, or other language families.

The original meaning of 尲尬 (now written 尷尬) in Old Chinese was xíng bùzhèng yě 行不正也 ("not walking properly / correctly").  The semantophore 尢 (no. 43 in the Kangxi system, pron. wāng in MSM ["lame"]) for both sinographs of gāngà 尲尬 refers to "a bow-legged man" (qū jìng rén yě 曲脛人也).  Among the 25,000 or so highest frequency characters, only around 30 are classified under this semantophore, and most of them have something to do with such a handicap.

As for its Sinographic form, 尴尬 (simpl.) 尷尬 (trad.) and 尲尬, there are at least seven other different ways to write GANGA, including three sets of characters that use the "ghost" (guǐ 鬼) radical.  See Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn 漢語大詞典 (Unabridged dictionary of Sinitic), 2.1581b and 12.476ab.

Chau Wu, author of "Patterns of Sound Correspondence between Taiwanese and Germanic/Latin/Greek/Romance Lexicons, Part I", Sino-Platonic Papers, 262 (Aug., 2016), 239 pp. (free pdf) ("Eurasian eureka" [9'12'16), is currently preparing Part II of that study.  In it, he will delve deeply into a pattern of sound correspondences that will explain the trans-Sinitic pronunciations of gāngà 尷尬 and similar binoms.

Here's how Yixue Yang puts it:

I love gà 尬 ever since it flew solo from gān 尴, with its crispy and exotic sound. New words made with it, for example gàliáo 尬聊 ("chat awkwardly") and gàxiào 尬笑 ("laugh awkwardly"), exuberate with a strong sense of humor, even though referring to awkwardness of perhaps the severest kind.

The situation in Mainland China is much complicated by the fact that we seem to have two strains of GA interfusing into a single meme.  On the one hand, we have the GA of GANGA directly fissioned off from GANGA as described in the preceding paragraph, where it means "awkward(ly)", as in gàliáo 尬聊 ("chat awkwardly") and gàxiào 尬笑 ("laugh awkwardly"), but also gàchàng 尬唱 ("sing awkwardly") and above all (as we saw in the viral video) gàwǔ 尬舞 ("dance awkwardly").  In the latter two instances, the notion of "competing" also gets worked in, as with middle and older aged folk singing and dancing in public squares or in parks.  How did that happen?

Here it gets complicated, because we're dealing with opaque, cross-topolectal usage of characters.  What I describe in the following paragraphs probably won't make a lot of sense to many people reading it, but I have to go through with it anyway, because it is really how characters are used to write key elements of the topolects (when they are written).

Because the GA of GANGA sounds like Taiwanese kàu / khà / khah / kah / kà 較 ("compete; compare; comparatively; relatively"), 尬 can be used to write 較, so the meanings of 尬 detached from gāngà 尷尬 ("awkward; embarrassed") are apt to get mixed in with the meanings of 較 ("compete; compare; comparatively; relatively").  Thus we can have awkward, amateurish song and dance competitions designated by 尬 / 較.

[Interpolation:  if you think that writing Mandarin in Chinese characters is hard, you have no idea how difficult it is to write Taiwanese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc. in characters.]

The key point I wish to make here is that, years before gàwǔ 尬舞 ("dance awkwardly") became popular on the Mainland, there was an oline craze for dance competition in Taiwan that was styled 尬舞, where 尬 meant "compete" (= 較), not "awkward", which the first Chinese character of the Taiwanese term 尬舞 superficially indicates for non-Taiwanese speakers.  When the craze for amateur dance competitions transferred to the Mainland, the original, non-Taiwanese / Hokkienese meaning of gà 尬 came to the surface, and the idea of "awkward" asserted itself together with the latent idea of competition that came along as cultural Taiwanese / Hokkienese baggage from Taiwan.

In addition to the online game gàwǔ 尬舞 ("dance competition") that was so popular in Taiwan, there was also a song by the Taiwanese band May Day called yà / zhá / gá chē 軋車 or gàchē 尬車 (using MSM pronunciations in this paragraph) which was extremely popular. The song, which describes the thrill of motorcycle racing and teenage rebellion, also became phenomenally popular on the Mainland (see this Baidu article) and undoubtedly was an instrumental factor in transporting the Taiwanese meaning of "compete" for gà 尬 to China, where it otherwise would have been completely unknown.

In Taiwan, the character gà 尬 is commonly used for competition among the young generation, such as gàchē 尬車 ("racing motorcycles / cars"), gàwǔ 尬舞 ("dance competition"), gàgē 尬歌 ("singing competition"), gàqiú 尬球 ("sports competition involving a ball"), etc. However, in those contexts, gà 尬 has nothing to do with the original meaning in gāngà 尷尬 ("awkward; embarrassed"). Therefore, unlike in China, gàwǔ 尬舞 in Taiwan simply means a fierce dance competition (usually one-on-one), and doesn't carry the meaning of being awkward.

Apart from gà 尬 with the Taiwanese / Hokkienese meaning of "compete", gāngà 尷尬 with its Mandarin meaning of "awkward; embarrassed" became a hot topic in Taiwan recently when it was discovered that most young people didn't know how to pronounce it as gāngà, but were pronouncing it according to the more obvious sounds of the two phonophores, thus jiānjiè. The online dictionary of the Ministry of Education even made this wrong pronunciation official.  Go here and search for 尷尬.