Daddy talk in Chinese

From Politico's "China Watcher" Potpourri this morning (6/18/20):

Chinese now has a term for “mansplaining”: die wei, or “daddy flavor.” Chinese internet users are increasingly using it as a derogatory term to describe anyone — male or female — who claim unwarranted authority and give unsolicited advice, reports Shen Lu. Chinese feminist organizer Lü Pin tells China Watcher that the term’s popularity shows growing resistance from young people — mostly women — to a patriarchal culture. But she adds, the term is mainly “internet catharsis; the hierarchy in real life is not likely to change.”

Here's the term they're talking about:

diē wèi 爹味 "dad flavor"

Diē 爹 ("dad") is often reduplicated as diēdie 爹爹 ("daddy").

Here's how diēdie 爹爹 sounds in various topolects:

 

• Cantonese (Jyutping): de¹ de¹
• Wu (Wiktionary): tia tia (T1)
• Xiang (Wiktionary): die¹ die

 

1. (dialectal Mandarin, dialectal Gan, dialectal Hakka, dialectal Jin, Wu, Xiang, colloquial) daddy

 

• Min Bei (KCR): dié-dié
• Xiang (Wiktionary): dia¹ dia

 

1. (dialectal Mandarin, dialectal Gan, dialectal Hakka, Min Bei, dialectal Wu, Xiang) paternal grandfather
2. (dialectal Mandarin, Xiang, polite) Term of address for an older male.

Source

And here is how diē 爹 looks in historical reconstructions and sounds in a few other topolects not mentioned above:

Mandarin

 

• • (Chengdu, SP): die¹

    (Dungan, Cyrillic): де (di͡ə, I)

• • Min Nan

    (Hokkien, POJ): tia

    (Teochew, Peng'im): dia¹

 

Middle Sinitic: /ʈia/, /dɑ^X/

Old Sinitic:

(Zhengzhang): /*daːʔ/, /*tjaː/

Source

One cannot help but notice the resemblance to English "dad" and "daddy"

Etymological Dictionary Online

dad (n.)

"a father, papa," recorded from c. 1500, but probably much older, from child's speech, nearly universal and probably prehistoric (compare Welsh tad, Irish daid, Lithuanian tėtė, Sanskrit tatah, Czech tata, Latin tata "father," Greek tata, used by youths to their elders).

Compare the much more detailed and extensive entry in Wiktionary:

From Middle English dadd, dadde, of uncertain origin. Possibly related to Low German detta (“grandfather”). Possibly from a metathetic variation of unrecorded Old English *ætta, *atta (“father”), from Proto-Germanic *attô ("father, forefather"; whence also North Frisian ate, aatj, taatje, tääte (“father; dad”), Cimbrian tatta (“dad”)), from Proto-Indo-European *átta (“father”), whence Sanskrit तत (tata, “father”); or perhaps of Celtic origin, compare Welsh and Breton tad, Old Irish data; and possibly related to Russian дя́дя (djádja, “uncle”) and/or Russian де́душка (déduška, “grandfather”).

The Indic words remind me of Tata Motors, India's largest automobile manufacturer and the Tata Group, the massive multinational conglomerate that owns Tata Motors and many other companies in various lines of business. The Tatas are a Parsi family who originally came to Mumbai from Navsari in the state of Gujarat.

Diē 爹 ("dad") starts to show up in Chinese writing by the early 7th c. AD.  The reduplicated form diēdie 爹爹 ("daddy") occurs from around the 12th century.  See Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn 漢語大詞典 (Unabridged dictionary of Sinitic), 6.1119b.

[h.t. Don Keyser]