Kiss kiss / BER: Chinese photoshop victim

David Moser sent this photo to me about five years ago and I’m only now getting around to unearthing it from the masses of files scattered over my desktop:

As David exclaimed when I told him that I had found his old message, «Ha! Great! At any rate, nothing has changed in five years, it’s still a timely problem.»

In Pekingese colloquial, the word BER is often used to describe a quick, light kiss, a «peck» as we would say in English, hence the irony of this photo. It is not an uncommon term in Pekingese; if you listen in on the conversations of real BeijingeRs (PekingeRs, if I may), chances are that you’ll hear it surface in their rapid fire patois from time to time.

The problem is that we have this morpheme in spoken Pekingese, but nobody is really sure how to write it in characters. The same is true of many other morphemes in the spoken language, although frequently frustrated character enthusiasts will retroactively assign this or that combination of characters to write an expression from the spoken language and then ex post facto justify their reading (e.g., the contortions they go through to explain the different ways [«bury the bill; buy the bill», etc.] they write Cantonese MAIDAN [«bring the bill»]).

David remarks:

The short Chinese question, which reads «Ber yīge me? / Ber一個么?», roughly meaning «Do you wanna give me a kiss?» is intended to be funny. «Ber yīge ba / Ber一个吧 is a common cutesy phrase, usually used with kids, that means «Give me a kiss». (Hard to reproduce the tone of it, but something like «Gimme a kissy-kissy» or the like.)

First of all, we may assume that the me 么 is meant to substitute for ma 吗 (interrogative particle), but the main thing is the pinyin. I’ve heard this phrase often myself, and never knew the character for it, and apparently most Chinese aren’t sure, either. I just tried searching on the Internet, and found numerous instances on blogs and other websites where others had resorted to this, a lot of hits for «ber一个«, indicating that a huge number of people don’t know which character this is. I’ve never been sure, either, whether it’s «bei + r» or «ben +r» or «beng + r» or what. I asked my wife and a few other people, and most either don’t know or seem to think the proper character is bo1 波, though one guessed 啵 with a mouth radical, and I did find many hits for «啵儿一个«, which would maybe be pronounced «ber» as well, I guess. This surprised me. I haven’t been able to find a dictionary that gives the definition of «kiss» for any of these characters, which makes me think there perhaps isn’t a standard graph for this item. I don’t know if you’ve written about this one yet, but «ber yige ba» (or «bor yige ba», however you would write it) is really very, very common in Beijing at least, and I don’t know to what extent in other parts of China.

Whoever did this photoshop was no doubt completely clueless as to how to write it, and had to resort to an alien writing system to write their native language. It’s just our old friend the «morpheme with no graph». I’m sure the morpheme probably does have a graph, just that virtually no one knows it. I’m not sure if the retroflex syllable is «ben» or «beng» or maybe even «bo», which I think someone once told me it was. I could find no one who knew the appropriate graph.

By the way, «benr yi ge» is usually used by parents talking to children, or adults being silly with each other, and just means something like «give me a kissy-poo’, «kissy-kiss».

If we do a Google search now (the middle of 2014; David wrote the above in 2009) on 啵儿一个 or 波儿一个, we do get a lot of hits, but many of them are false hits because they are broken up by punctuation and refer to something else than the expression under discussion in this post.

Two days ago I did a search on «ber一个» and got 19,100 hits.

For the record, bō 波 means «wave» and bo 啵 is a particle whose usage is similar to that of ba “吧” for denoting a request, command, etc., mainly used in early vernacular. So neither of these characters can be the true běnzì 本字 («original graph») for the «ber» of «ber一个«.

I seldom (almost never) disagree with David on anything, but I would not be so sure that there is a character for writing this morpheme (anyway, David qualified his «sure» with «probably»).

I’ve even seen this «ber一个» written as «吅儿一个» where the two mouths are graphically meant to depict a kiss. But this is not the true character for writing the «ber» of «ber一个» either, since 吅 is actually pronounced as xuān (said to be equal to 喧) and mean «clamor; call out loudly» or sòng (said to be equal to 讼) and mean («dispute; argue; debate; litigate; bring a case to court»). Consequently, the two characters that are most often pressed into service to write the «ber» of «ber一个» are definitely not the true běnzì 本字 («original graph») for the «ber» of «ber一个«.

As if that were not dismaying enough for hanzi enthusiasts, the situation is further complicated by phonological constraints. Knowledgeable informants on Pekingese pronunciation have told me that the «ber» of «ber一个» is actually closer to «benr» or «beir» than just «ber».

Nonetheless, we also find the character with the mouth radical used in related expressions such as dǎbobo 打啵啵 and dǎbor 打啵儿, both of which mean «to kiss» (dǎ 打 is the multipurpose verb meaning «strike; beat; hit; do» — there are at least two dozen more meanings for this verb).

«Ber yīge / Ber一個» («kissy-poo; kiss-kiss») now has a competitor, «mua yīge / mua一個» («smooch; smack»), something I was completely unaware of five years ago. A web search for «mua一個» will get you a mind-boggling 244,000 ghits.

Now, if the character for the «ber» of «ber一个» is uncertain, the «mua» of «mua一個» is even less writable in sinographs, since it’s not even a permissible syllable in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM). This is further evidence that the Roman alphabet has become a part of the Chinese writing system. See here, here, here, here, here (no. 45), and here.

It would be interesting to see how Wang Shuo or other writers of highly colloquial Pekingese fiction write these expressions. I would imagine that, if they are being true to the speech of real Pekingers, they would often be faced with the dilemma of how to write popular expressions in characters (Lao She, the famous Peking novelist of a previous generation, often confronted this challenge). Ditto for authors who wish to write colloquial expressions from other topolects.

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