开始起步

[Pedroski]

IT企业的电子商务也在1999年开始起步。literally ‘IT companies' e-commerce business also in 1999 startstart’

 

Is 开始起步 really 'startstart'?? This is some kind of emphasis??  I suppose just '开始’ would suffice.

 

Elsewhere in this text I have '中国电子商务起步和发展‘ which is easier to understand.

 

[skylee]

I suppose it depends on how you define "start". Does it happen in a split second, or is it a process? While a marathon might not be a very suitable example, but it has just come up in my head that the start of a marathon is a process because of the large number of runners.

[Secniz]

开始起步 means getting start or start to improve .

[wushucrab20]

Sounds like it could translate to "was just getting started", whereas if you just used 开始 it would feel more like "started".

[L-F-J]

Began to set in motion.

[Pedroski]

IT企业的电子商务也在1999年开始起步。maybe 'IT companies' e-commerce (volume?) really started to take off in 1999.'

[Altair]

 

IT企业的电子商务也在1999年开始起步。literally ‘IT companies' e-commerce business also in 1999 startstart’

I personally like the method of starting with somewhat literal translations; however, you have to go all the way.

 

开始 and 起步 are different words, so you have to use different words in English too and not settle for "start start," despite what a quick glance in a dictionary might tell you.

 

While 开始 is arguably "start" or "begin," 起步 is more like "raise the (first) step(s)."  That would give you a literal "IT companies' e-commerce business also in 1999 begin raise step."  More colloquially, that would be "In 1999, the e-commerce business of IT companies also began getting off the ground (or began their first stages)"

 

开始 works well with processes and activities.  起步 is itself an activity or process, but goes well with undertakings like companies and their projects.  The ranges of what the two words apply to is a little different and so using them together is not as problematic as saying "begin starting."

[Pedroski]

I've noticed that Chinese uses doubling up quite a lot. Adjectives are often doubled, for emphasis I presume. This is similar to Spanish. Lets say you are in the countryside, you can say 'estoy en el campo', but if you really want to indicate you are deep in the country, far away from anything or anyone, you just double up 'estoy en el campo campo'

 

So I thought, 开始起步 was perhaps a version of this method of emphasis. 'really got going'

[陳德聰]

Chinese does reduplicate for emphasis and diminutives as well, but in this situation it's not 开始开始. It's 开始起步.

 

My suggestion for when you come across something that on its face value is clearly not two of the same word, assume that they are two different words representing two different things, rather than assuming they are the same meaning. Since if they were representing exactly the same meaning, then we'd likely just use exactly the same word twice over.

[Altair]

 

I've noticed that Chinese uses doubling up quite a lot. Adjectives are often doubled, for emphasis I presume.

It is arguably true to say that Chinese uses reduplication for "emphasis"; however, different things can be emphasized according to the structure.

 

Adjectives are duplicated to indicate vividness, which is hard to express in English.  Not all adjectives can be duplicated, however.  Two-syllable adjectives typically duplicate AB as AABB, but there are other less used patterns as well.

 

红的花  red flowers

 

 

红红的花 strikingly red flowers

 

Related to this pattern is the duplication of adjectives to form manner adverbs.  These focus on the appearance of an action, rather than the objective criteria that are brought out by complements of degree.

 

快快得走  walk quickly: walk with an appearance of quick movements regardless of how long it actually takes to move along

 

走得快     walk quickly: take a short time walking to the destination regardless of the speed of the movements

 

Volitional verbs are duplicated to indicate doing something a little bit.  They are frequently used to make requests sound more tentative and more polite.  Monosyllabic verbs can often have an 一 inserted between them with the same meaning.

 

看      look

看看   take a look

 

睡       sleep

睡睡    sleep some

 

考虑          consider

考虑考虑   give some consideration

 

Measure words are reduplicated in several patterns with different meanings.  The most frequent one indicates "every."

 

人     person

人人  every person

 

个人  a person

个个人 each person

[Pedroski]

Just exactly much difference do you see between '开始‘ and '起步’?zdic gives English for '起步‘ = start and '开始’ = begin, start, commence. The difference is not exactly large. Clearly they can have exactly the same meaning in the right context. Is this sentence 'IT企业的电子商务也在1999年开始起步。' not such a context? Gf said straight away, 'it just means startstart'. Who am I to contradict her? That can lead to complications!

 

红红的花 strikingly red flowers = 西班牙语 ‘flores rojas rojas’

 

Personally, I think this kind of doubling up is a kind of genitive, in this case 'red (even) of red'.

 

And of course there is UB40 'red red wine you make me feel so fine'. Prosit!

[anonymoose]

Just exactly much difference do you see between '开始‘ and '起步’?zdic gives English for '起步‘ = start and '开始’ = begin, start, commence. The difference is not exactly large.

 

Did you not read Altair's post?

 

While 开始 is arguably "start" or "begin," 起步 is more like "raise the (first) step(s)."  That would give you a literal "IT companies' e-commerce business also in 1999 begin raise step."  More colloquially, that would be "In 1999, the e-commerce business of IT companies also began getting off the ground (or began their first stages)"

 

Doesn't this post explain it fairly clearly? I really don't see why there is still any confusion.

[Pedroski]

The confusion is, I'm not sure if they mean 'just got started', which is counterfactual, or 'really took off', namely the dot-com boom (1997-2000). Obviously, 电子商务 was around before 1999. That was not when it first began.

 

The text is not very clear on this, according to that font of all wisdom, my gf!

 

So I thought, someone here might say 'It clearly means 'just began'' or 'It clearly means 'really took off''. 

[Secniz]

It should be just began 

[anonymoose]

I'm not a native speaker, so I can't comment on whether the original sentence is written well or not, but it does pay to bear in mind that not everything you see written in Chinese is good Chinese. So it may not be a problem of the language itself, but just that it was not used well by the author.

Anyway, as far as this sentence goes, I think the intended meaning is transparent. Whilst your dictionary says 开始 and 起步 both mean "start", if you actually analyse these words, clearly the latter means to "take steps", or maybe more colloquially, to "get going". (I was going to say it means to "start taking steps", but then we'll be back to the double "start" again.) So 开始起步 just means to "start get going". Let's think of a graph of business volume against time. It's unlikely that in 1999, there would be a discontinuous upward change in the gradient of the line (which would signify a sudden change happening at a point in time), but rather a gradually increasing upward slope of the line. So you could think of this sloping upward as the 起步, and the point at where this increasingly upward trend begins as the 开始起步.