New Members Vivitix Posted January 11, 2011 at 02:41 AM New Members Report Posted January 11, 2011 at 02:41 AM Hi guys and gals. Okay, I'm kind of new to this forum, so I'm not sure where this goes. But I have a few questions to native Shanghai-nese speakers who know a lot of those cute and funny phrases in Shanghainese that are unique to that language and not found in any other dialect. For example, when you want to say "to fire somebody; to dismiss" in Mandarin, it's just "解雇"(jie3 gu4). However, my parents usually say something along the lines of 炒由鱼 in Shanghainese or something similar to that. It would be nice if somebody could teach me where and how sayings like these originate from. I'm really curious about these idiom-like phrases, and it would be nice if I could share it with my Chinese classmates at my high school, since nobody there seems to even know what Shanghainese is. Thanks in advance if you could help this busy little non-grown up high schooler! Quote
wai ming Posted January 13, 2011 at 11:17 AM Report Posted January 13, 2011 at 11:17 AM Sorry I can't help you with the Shanghainese phrases, but I was interested to see how your parents say 'to fire somebody': in Cantonese it is 炒魷魚. A brief explanation of that saying can be found here Quote
xiaocai Posted January 13, 2011 at 02:55 PM Report Posted January 13, 2011 at 02:55 PM I'm not a native speaker, but my grandfather is. He always likes to say 冲头/斩冲头. Can't explain what exactly it means, maybe you can ask your parents? Quote
anonymoose Posted January 13, 2011 at 03:38 PM Report Posted January 13, 2011 at 03:38 PM I thought it was 斩葱头. Could be wrong, though. Quote
xiaocai Posted January 15, 2011 at 01:28 PM Report Posted January 15, 2011 at 01:28 PM Alright, I'm not sure myself either. I shall ask him when I see him next time. Another one I can remember is 吃生活, which apparently is a very common saying. Quote
Goujian Posted April 7, 2011 at 01:55 PM Report Posted April 7, 2011 at 01:55 PM I'm a semi-native speaker. (Competent speaker of Shanghainese, just not completely fluent. Born to Shanghainese parents in the US) Those aren't idioms, they're slang expressions. 炒魷魚 and 斩葱头 are both used in Shanghainese to mean 'getting fired' or something like that. 吃生活 actually means to punish somebody or to beat someone up. 吃耳光 chiq nyi kuaon means to slap someone in the face (It wasn't written like that, 光 is a result of a Shanghainese erhua event, so it's more like 吃耳括兒.) http://www.shanghaidialect.com/slangs/htm/search.aspx A lot of words there aren't slang expressions however. Idioms typically have 4 characters and are quite complex. Quote
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