忙 an activity?

[Moving_away]

Hello everyone,

Yesterday I was reading one of the Chinese breeze readers and came across the following phrase: ...忙完了...

This seemed a little unnatural to me. In my understanding 完 expresses that an activity has finished (看完，卖完， 做完). Can 忙 be considered an activity?

To me 忙 feels like expressing a state, which seems to be confirmed by the fact that it is one of those adjectives that can also be used as a verb, busy and to be busy, of which Chinese has so many and which do generally describe a state. Can words like 好，红 and 醉 also be followed by 完了? My feeling says they can't, but what makes them different from 忙?

Places like the Chinese grammar wiki and my Schaum's grammar just give the general cases with clear activities but don't explain more gray area cases like these, so I turn to this forum hoping that the members that are more knowledgeable than me can enlighten me...

Thanks in advance.

[imron]

忙 is both an adjective and a verb, so the usage of 完 here is fine。

[anonymoose]

In this context, I think 忙 could be understood to mean "be busy doing something", so 忙完 just means "finish (being busy) doing whatever". Another common expression along the same line is 你继续忙吧 which means "(I'll stop bothering you and let you) get on with whatever you are doing".

In this case, 忙 is an action (of doing something busily) rather than a state, so it is different from 红 in that sense. Nevertheless, I'm sure a sentence could be contrived to include 红完, but I'll leave that for native speakers.

[dwq]

Do these work?

他的運氣好完了。

那個明星紅完了。

For 醉, I'd use 醒了, but 完了 sounds okay to me also.

[Moving_away]

Thanks for the quick responses and clarifications.

忙 is both an adjective and a verb, so the usage of 完 here is fine。

... so 忙完 just means "finish (being busy) doing whatever".

Does that hold for all words that have this property ( both adj and verb), like dwq seems so show?

Could you say '<adj>完了' should be seen as 'finished being <adj>', and <adj> is an activity because something changes?

[li3wei1]

It's not always helpful to try to pin Chinese words down to the noun/verb/adjective/adverb labels we use in English and many other languages. Sometimes it is, of course, but not always. I suspect that the native grammars (written by and for Chinese speakers) are still heavily influenced by Western grammar (just as English grammar is influenced by Latin grammar, hence the 'never split infinitives' rule), but maybe someday someone will come up with an explanation of Chinese sentence structure that will either use a different set of word functions, or none at all.

[danny1997]

@dwq

Do these work?

他的運氣好完了。

那個明星紅完了。

For 醉, I'd use 醒了, but 完了 sounds okay to me also.

The 2 phrases:" 他的運氣好完了。那個明星紅完了。" are understandable if you use them under certain context and pronounce them correctly. In fact, the grammar of Chinese language is very flexible, especially in recent years. People keep inventing new usages of Chinese words or sentences.

But for a Chinese learner, I would suggest you saying them in a more traditional way, in order to avoid any misunderstanding.

他的運氣好完了。 -> 他的好运结束了。

那個明星紅完了。 -> 那个明星不红了。or 那个明星过气了。

他醉完了. -> 他酒醒了

[anonymoose]

Does that hold for all words that have this property ( both adj and verb), like dwq seems so show?

Could you say '<adj>完了' should be seen as 'finished being <adj>', and <adj> is an activity because something changes?

What other adjectives were you thinking of?

I think it would be more correct to say that if an adjective also has an identity as an action verb, then using it as a verb (and ignoring the fact that in other situations it functions as an adjective, which is irrelevant here), one could say '<verb>完了' should be seen as 'finished doing <verb>'.

[crystal123]

他的運氣好完了。It does not work.

You can say 他的运气用完了。

[Moving_away]

Again, thanks everyone for the explanations/opinions.

@li3wei1

Yes, I do realize that it doesn't map as nicely as all the indo-european languages. But I guess to a certain extent it is easier to talk about an adjective instead of about 'a word that tells something about that other word that is an object in the real world' . But I do agree that trouble comes up when you do it across languages and words start to cross functions.

@anonymoose

I guess my trouble is to see how such a adjective actually can have an identity of an action verb. To me (but I'm of course open to be proven otherwise), an adjective describes an atribute or state of an object, and therefore is something passive. In Chinese these can also act as a verb, meaning 'to be ...', in other words, having the property of that adjective. Having a property to me doesn't seem active, but passive. Is being tired (累) an action? Or thirsty (渴)? Are they any different from 忙 in this matter?

[anonymoose]

I guess my trouble is to see how such a adjective actually can have an identity of an action verb.

I think that's probably where the problem lies. It is not that the adjective 忙 is functioning as an action verb, but rather that 忙 meaning "busily do something" is an independent action verb that just happens to share the same character as the adjective.

To me (but I'm of course open to be proven otherwise), an adjective describes an atribute or state of an object, and therefore is something passive. In Chinese these can also act as a verb, meaning 'to be ...', in other words, having the property of that adjective.

You are right. Such adjectives when performing this verbal role are known as stative verbs, because they describe the state of something. 忙, 累 and 渴 all fall into this category.

However, where 忙 differs from 累 and 渴 is that the same character 忙 also happens to have an independent use as an action verb (as mentioned above).

[Moving_away]

Ok, so it is a specific property of 忙 here, and not a property of other adj/verb words (although others might exist to haunt us in the future ). I will approach them as you suggest, as two independent words meaning something close.

Thanks!

[creamyhorror]

Ok, so it is a specific property of 忙 here, and not a property of other adj/verb words (although others might exist to haunt us in the future ). I will approach them as you suggest, as two independent words meaning something close.

It's not a specific property or anything, man. All anonymoose is telling you is that

- Words that operate as adjectives follow adjectival rules.

- Words that operate as verbs follow rules for verbs.

- Words can operate in more than one role (but not at the same time).

- 忙 can operate as an adjective or as a verb, so it can follow either set of rules at a time.

There is nothing special about 忙, nothing that sets it apart from other words which can function both as verb or adjective. Either it's being used as an adjective, or it's being used as a verb. End of story.

Here's an example from English:

"dry"

[verb] I'm drying my clothes on the verandah.

[adjective] My clothes are dry already.

There's nothing special about "dry" in this example; it's just being used in two different ways.

[imron]

I guess my trouble is to see how such a adjective actually can have an identity of an action verb

Think of it as two separate words with the same spelling, e.g. object vs object, present vs present, permit vs permit etc.

[Moving_away]

@creamyhorror

I do understand that adjectives and verbs follow their own rules and in Chinese there are words that can be either one or the other. No problem there at all. I do also understand that 完 indicates that an action/activity has finished. Still no problem. Where it went wrong for me was that the way I understood these overlapping words (both verb and adjective), I could not see them being actions/activities and therefore thought they could not be used with 完. Apparently 忙 can be an action (a property 累 and 渴 don't seem to have, which made me call it a specific property of 忙), as anonymoose and imron indicate. Sorry if I pressed for clarification too much. I can have a tendency to over-analyze.

@imron

Thanks for further explaining anonymoose's last point, I get it now.