Some Chinese Interrogatives

The object of this note is to suggest that in certain specific uses of the characters for nan ‘difficult’ and hao ‘good’ (Nos. 8 and 7 in the table), used to write vernacular expressions, we ought possibly to recognize well-known interrogatives which are written in an already acknowledged variety of wa3’s. The nan which has long troubled me belongs to the expression nan tao , seeming to mean literally ‘hard to say’; the hao belongs to the phrase hao jung-i ‘very difficult’, generally explained as ironic (jung-i means ‘easy’). My thesis demands preliminary consideration of those forms of interrogation in Chinese which use initially in the phrase some word that might be called an adverb or a particle of interrogation

Interrogative word · Linguistics · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism · Translation Studies and Practices