Biscriptalism on Starbucks cups, part 2

Language Log 2017-09-16

In "Impromptu biscriptalism on a Starbucks cup" (9/8/17), we encountered a Starbucks cup from Shenyang, northeast China that had the following handwritten notation on the side:  wài's 外's ("foreigner's").  I referred to the "'s" as impromptu because I thought that it was essentially a one-off phenomenon.  Nonetheless, I considered the "'s" to be linguistically significant in two major ways:  1. evidence of biscriptalism; 2. incorporation of an English morpheme in Chinese.

It turns out that that this use of "'s" on a Starbucks cup in the far northeast of China was by no means a unique or rare occurrence.  One of the commenters, Nicki, wrote in:

My coffee usually comes labeled like that, although I order in Chinese and do have a Chinese name, they never ask. They do ask my Chinese (or Chinese looking) companions for their names, and I have a few photos of our cups sitting together, labeled 王's and 欧's and 外's.*

Yes, all three with the apostrophe s, from a Starbucks in Haikou, Hainan. As I recall, I ordered last.

[*VHM:  "Wang's", "Ou's", and "foreigner's".]

Nicki mentioned that she had posted a photo that documents what she wrote in the first paragraph of her comment.  With the help of others who are more familiar than I with the ways of Facebook, I tracked the photo down.  Here it is:

(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.10"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

Can you guess which one is mine? #Starbucks #laowai #foreigner

Posted by Erik-Nicki Johnson on Saturday, August 2, 2014

So here, from Haikou in the far southeast of China, which is roughly 1,500 miles to the southeast from Shenyang, we have not one Starbuck's cup using the "'s" suffix, but using it with Chinese surnames as well as with the Chinese word for "foreigner".  All the more, this shows how widespread and natural this usage is.

[Thanks to TK Mair, Yixue Yang, Jinyi Cai, and Frédéric Grosshans]