Friday, June 27, 2008

Spicy Food

My friend from Taiwan just told me about a neat little way the chinese (ethnic chinese - not just the PRC comrades) have of describing how spicy they want their food.

Note: This is for people who WANT spicy food. None of these is equivalent to "mild".

They use 3 words in 3 different arrangements:
La (spicy)
Bu (not)
Pa (worry/ fear)

In levels of increasing heat then...
1) Bu pa la = not worried if it's spicy
2) La bu pa = spicy does not worry me
3) Pa bu la = I am worried that it might not be spicy.

Isn't that fun?

1 comment:

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

it is also an introduction to the, by our standards, very economic (not to say elliptic) ways of Chinese syntax