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BYD — the look and the sound

Language Log 2023-02-16

Yesterday, Charlie Munger, the 99-year-old billionaire Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, declared that the Chinese company, BYD, was beating Tesla in the electric vehicle (EV) market.  I had never heard of BYD, so I asked my students from mainland China what "BYD" meant.

They all seemed to consider the apparent initialism as though it were an English word, pronouncing it Beeyah'di, making the second syllable long and stressed.  I pursued by asking, "But what does it mean?  What does it stand for?"

They said, "It doesn't mean anything and it doesn't stand for anything.  It's just the name of a car company:  Beeyah'di."

Wanting to get to the bottom of this mystery, I asked, "How do you write it in characters?" 

They kind of shrugged, as though the characters were not important.  What was important was the look of the name in Roman letters and their sounds when pronounced.  The way they pronounced it evinced an attitude of insouciance, "You know, Beeyah'di," as though they might be saying BMW or Mercedes or Audi, or maybe KIA:

According to the company, the name "Kia" derives from the Sino-Korean characters 起 (ki, 'to arise') and 亞 (a, which stands for 亞細亞, meaning 'Asia'); it is roughly translated as "Rising from (East) Asia".

(source)

That explanation sounds rather dubious to me, just as does this one for LG:

LG Corporation (or LG Group) (Korean: 엘지), known as LG and formerly Lucky-Goldstar from 1983 to 1995 (Korean: Leokki Geumseong; Korean: 럭키금성; Hanja: 樂喜金星)….

LG Corporation was established as Lak Hui Chemical Industrial Corp. in 1947 by Koo In-hwoi.[4] In 1952, Lak Hui (락희) (pronounced "Lucky"; now LG Chem)….

(source)

Anyway, I had to coax the characters for BYD out of the students, and they looked a bit sheepish when they wrote Bǐyǎdí 比亚迪, for they clearly were thinking of the letters and their sounds, not the characters and their sounds — Beeyah'di (where the second syllable is raised to a higher pitch) versus Bǐyǎdí 比亚迪 (where the second syllable is lowered to the lowest possible pitch.

A side-note on the sea changes of lifestyles that are taking place between my Chinese students and me may be seen in their attitudes toward financial instruments.  They do not use cash for any purposes.  They use their phones to pay for almost everything.  Today I had to reimburse one of them for an expense they incurred on my behalf, and they stared at it in disbelief.  They had never seen a check and had no idea what it was.  They even took a picture of me writing in my checkbook and said they were going to send it back to their parents in China, who also pay for everything electronically.

They've come a long, long way since the days of barter economy and solely sinoglyphic writing.  The vast majority of transactions are done electronically, and the alphabet is fast creeping up on the characters.

 

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