[沙河粉]

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddly...rpc=22&sp=true

Modern marriage, mortgages enter Chinese lexicon

Tue Aug 21, 2007 11:51AM EDT

BEIJING (Reuters) - Rapid social change, Western pop culture and the use of English have prompted Chinese authorities to add 171 terms to the national language registry, including those to denote mortgage slaves and loose marital arrangements.

Economic reforms and soaring rates of home ownership have coined a new moniker for the tribe of youth struggling to pay off home loans in traditionally debt-wary China: "fang nu," or "house slaves."

And young, married professionals who live in separate homes to keep the romance alive and maintain their own space have been branded "Semi-honey couples" ("ban tang fu qi"), the official Xinhua news agency said, citing education officials.

"(The new terms) reflect rapid cultural and social changes in recent years as well as thriving new concepts in our daily lives," the agency quoted Li Yuming, a senior education official, as saying.

The new terms were registered after two years researching more than 900 million commonly used words and phrases in Chinese, the report said, and showed how pervasive Western movies and the English language had become.

"Young Chinese moving in fashionable circles often drop phrases like 'duan bei', with a literal meaning of 'brokeback'," to euphemistically refer to male homosexuals, Xinhua said.

"Brokeback Mountain" was an Oscar-award winning film by Taiwanese director Ang Lee about a love affair between two cowboys in the United States.

The emergence of city-dwelling couples choosing a pet over children had seen the use of "ding chong jia ting," in Chinese, or "DINKS with pets," in English, the report added.

DINK -- short for "double income no kids" -- was coined in the 1980s, to describe couples eschewing children in favor of lifestyle and financial advancement.

"I have not had much Chinese language training since my middle school years and now English is the predominantly important course," Xinhua quoted Xie Lei, a journalism student at a Shanghai university, as saying.

Parents recently tried to register their child's name as "@" -- the father claiming the name was hip because of its common use in email and its similar sound to "ai ta," or "love him," for Mandarin speakers.

The "wild creativity" in naming children in modern China was in part a response to the staid, politicized names favored at the height of China's Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), when such names as "Wei Dong" -- "guarding Chairman Mao" were in vogue, the report said.

[Bob]

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