New expressions for karaoke: the phoneticization of Chinese

My first acquaintance with the word "karaoke" was back in the 1980s, when I was visiting my brother Denis, who was then a translator for Foreign Languages Press in Beijing.  He lived in the old Russian-built Friendship Hotel, a very spartan place compared to today's luxury accommodations in big Chinese cities. There wasn't much unusual, interesting, or attractive about the place (though they had bidets in the bathrooms, as did many other Russian style accommodations in China at that time), but I was deeply intrigued by a small sign at the back of one of the buildings that led to a basement room. On it was written "kǎlā OK 卡拉OK". The best I could make of that novel expression was "card pull OK," and I thought that it might have something to do with documentation. I asked all my Chinese scholar friends what this mysterious sign meant, but not one of them knew (remember that this was back in the mid-80s). It was only when I returned to the United States that I realized kǎlā OK 卡拉OK was the Chinese transcription for Japanese karaoke. It took a lot more time and effort before I figured out that karaoke is the abbreviated Japanese translation-transliteration of English "empty orchestra," viz., kara (空) "empty" and ōkesutora (オーケストラ). When I reported this to my Chinese linguist friends (Zhou Youguang, Yin Binyong, and others) back in Beijing the next year, they were absolutely flabbergasted. They had been convinced that the OK was simply the English term meaning "all right," but they had no idea what to make of the kǎlā portion.

A final note on the etymology of karaoke is my pleasant recollection of the UCLA Hittitologist, Jaan Puhvel, some years later demonstrating the origins of the word "orchestra" by doing a little jig before an admiring audience at an Indo-European workshop at the University of Texas in Austin. Much to our amusement, he showed graphically the Greek basis for our English word (orkheisthai "to dance"). I think that Jaan added a colorful Hittite aspect to his exposition, but I forget what it was. In any event, I thought it was simply fascinating that the origin of "orchestra" has to do with dance rather than music.

When I told the above story to my new students from China in two different classes ("Language, Script, and Society in China" and "Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese", plus those taking other classes), more than twenty students all together, they told me that "kǎlā OK 卡拉OK" was outmoded and that people barely used it any longer.  Now, they say that they refer to it as “chàng K 唱K“ ("sing K")，”K ge K歌“ ("K songs")，or “KTV” (where karaoke takes place). They also mentioned a karaoke app called "Quánmín K gē 全民K歌" ("Everybody's Karaoke Songs").

I was stunned by how "K" had become a functioning morpheme meaning "karaoke" in current Chinese.

There's another telling detail about the current usage of written words for "karaoke" in China.  When I asked students to write "karaoke" in Chinese on the board, some of them wrote "卡拉OK", but some of them wrote it thus:  "卡啦OK".  I was amazed, but also gratified.  The difference may seem tiny, but its implications are vast.

In effect, the addition of the little mouth radical to 拉, making it 啦, wipes away the semantic content ("pull; draw; drag; haul") of the former, making it a purely phonetic symbol.  This technique is very common in written Cantonese and in efforts to write other topolects.  This validates a phenomenon in the evolution of the Chinese writing system that I have been predicting since the time I first began studying and teaching Sinitic languages in 1967.  Namely, due to the exigencies of modern technology and communications, the phoneticization of Chinese writing is inevitable.  It is happening before our very eyes (and ears).

 

Selected readings   

• "'Between the Eyes and the Ears': SPP turns 300" (7/20/20)
• "Keep on -inging" (10/30/17)
• "The MaxPlanckForschung Cover Fiasco: How It Happened" (1/3/09)
• "Burlesque Matinée at the Max Planck Gesellschaft" (12/4/06)
• "The actuality of emerging digraphia" (3/10/19)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese" (8/30/12)
• "Nerd, geek, PK: Creeping Romanization (and Englishization), part 2" (3/5/13)
• "The Westernization of Chinese" (9/6/12)
• "Creeping English in Chinese" (1/23/17)
• "Character amnesia and the emergence of digraphia" (9/25/13)
• "Substituting Pinyin for unknown Chinese characters " (9/3/13)
• "A child's substitution of Pinyin (Romanization) for characters " (11/9/14)
• "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia " (10/18/14)
• "The naturalness of emerging digraphia" (7/28/17)
• "Digraphia and intentional miswriting" (3/12/15)
• "Pinyin as subversive subtext" (3/17/17)
• "YouCool" (3/7/08)
• "Official digraphia" (9/13/18)
• "Biscriptal juxtaposition in Chinese, part 3" (4/24/17)
• "Biscriptal juxtaposition in Chinese, part 2" (10/15/14)
• "Biscriptal juxtaposition in Chinese" (8/17/14)
• "Zhao C: a Man Who Lost His Name" (2/27/09)
• "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17)
• "East Asian multilingual pop culture" (10/31/17)
• "'Let's' in Chinese " (10/19/17)
• "Keep on -inging " (10/30/17)
• "A New Morpheme in Mandarin" (4/26/11)
• "Zhao C: a Man Who Lost His Name" (2/27/09)
• "A trilingual, biscriptal note (with emoji)" (2/5/17)
• "Digraphia and intentional miswriting" (3/12/15)
• "I don't feel OK" (12/27/18)
• "Sino-English graphic tour de force" (12/2018)
• "Creeping Romanization in Chinese, part 4" (12/15/18)
• "English as an official language in Taiwan" (12/8/18)
• "I don't feel OK" (12/27/18)
• "Pinyin without Chinese characters" (7/5/15)
• "Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)
• "The impact of phonetic inputting on Chinese languages" (12/9/19)

 

[Thanks to Zihan Guo,  Qinlin Li, and Tian Chen]