17 Şubat 2013 Pazar

2013 New Year's Wish: Less new usage of 被 (bei)

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被 (bèi) is the character denoting passive voice of a Chinese sentence and optionally serves as the preposition "by" in front of the acting agent, as in "树被�倒了" (The tree is blown down) or "树被风�倒了" (The tree is blown down by the wind). But in recent years, Chinese netizens have been using this character in a new sense: a prefix to an intransitive verb or even a noun or adjective, as in 被自� ("bei-suicide", or literally "be suicided"), 被精神病 ("bei-psychopath", or "be psychopath'ed"). This intentionally ungrammatical new usage of 被, where 被 is roughly equivalent to "forced to (acknowledge)", reflects Chinese Internet users' discontent about the much to be desired legal and political system. Hopefully, the new leaders of the government will usher in an era of an improved system and as a side effect, bring this new sense of 被 to the end of its short, ugly, "un-harmonious" linguistic period, naturally not 被-ended. That's my 2013 New Year's Wish.

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