I have the “Insta-dict” with the Oxford English Dictionary built in and a Longman dictionary card.
I looked up toast. The first entry is a verb. Translated back on the dictionary it says to bake, to roast, to toast. The Chinese word is Kao. Then there are a few similar words. Then there is the word toast as in
Toast is a good one. I think in ‘Taiwan English’ it just means thickly sliced bread.
Here’s an obvious one:
‘Hello’ - people who don’t speak a word of (real) English, say this all the time and it means ‘hey/oi/excuse me’, not ‘good day’.
MC - menstrual cycle not DJ “jintian bu yao, wo you MC” or something
NG - can;t quite figure this one out, but it’s something like ‘offcuts’
711 put out some toast products recently, NT$15 for a piece of buttered bread, and they spelled it BUTTER TOASS, i called them up on it, and they changed the packaging to the correct TOAST although it is NOT toast.
Hey, Saddam, you’re toast!
I believe the taiwanese picked up this incorrect use of toast from the Japanese who call all breads “toastu” – so blame it on our friends in Tokyo.
NG means No GOod, ie, this take was NOT GOOD< cannot use it.
Also, ever noticed the pronunciation of the letter “N”? It’s not SNG, but S “un” G.
Another pronunciation phenomenon is that they never pronounce an acronym as a word, e.g., AIDS is always referred to as A.I.D.S., four individual letters. Samething with the latest SARS bug that’s going around.
Actually serendipity, this is pretty much what I had in mind when I started the thread. If you have a problem with a particular poster, why not call them on it rather than insult everyone. If I misunderstood your post and you are a big fan of Tealit, sorry, I’m kinda slow.
I asked a friend about toast, actually about ‘tusi’, and she said that all bread is mianbao, but that bread from which one would normally make toast; i.e. square cut, sliced etc. is properly called ‘tusi mianbao’; so ‘the toast type of bread’. This gets shortened to tusi, hence the confusion.