3 ms·

What are the offending words in French and Chinese?

• contingencies 9y ago
  Two different classic words for excrement, caca and 屎 (shǐ).
  • vtange 9y ago
    If that's the case then 屎 would appear all over Japanese, it's literally one of their syllables.
    • seren 9y ago
      It seems it has the same meaning in Japanese as well. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B1%8E#Kanji https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B1%8E#Kanji
      • jerf 9y ago
        That Kanji may be pronounced "shi", but dozens of other ones are too [1], so it'll depend on context. Kanji are more like roots in English words than they are words themselves. (Many words consist only of a single Kanji, in a way that English doesn't have a whole lot of words that are just roots in isolation like "geo" or "hydro". But I'd still say you're better off analogizing them to roots than words.) Certainly Japanese speakers aren't hearing "poo" every time they hear "shi". [1]: I assume. I'm not counting. But most sounds are covered dozens of times over from what I've seen.
  • cli 9y ago
    The Chinese word shi3 has a different tone than し, which in Mandarin would be shi1 or shi4. Chinese speakers are not going to confuse every use of し with shi3.
  • spacehunt 9y ago
    They may share the same Romanisation form, but Japanese shi and Mandarin shi sound totally different.