If you are learning Chinese in China, you will often meet the situations of homophone in your life, such as literature works, folk jokes, puzzles, internet slangs or advertisements. To help students better understand the homophone phenomenon, here we have one explanation of one type of homophone——noumenon semantic

Noumenon semantic refers to the phenomenon that the harmonic body only represents pronunciation but not meaning. The real meaning is represented by the hidden noumenon behind harmonic body. These homophone phenomena mostly are used in internet slang, transliterated alien words and some rising entertainment languages. Since you are learning Mandarin, some homophone words or expressions will be useful.

Internet slang is a kind of written communication essentially, which is used to improve the input speed and make written expression novel. Netizens will choose character which has similar pronunciation with noumenon but easier to be input to replace the noumenon. If you try to learn Mandarin through internet, you’d better know some similar expressions.

For example, one student who is learning Chinese in China found that his Chinese friends will use “1314” to replace “一生一世” on internet. “1314” is only a carrier of speech sounds and its only function is to prompt the pronunciation of “一生一世”. The real meaning aiming to express is still the conception of “一生一世”. Therefore, this kind of internet homophone completely depends on the noumenon meaning hidden behind harmonic body to show its meaning. There are a variety of forms. The harmonic body can be numbers, English letters, or the combination of numbers and English letters or even Chinese characters. The noumenon can be not only Chinese, but also foreign languages. Although the forms are really diversified, the patterns of expressing semantics are the same. By grasping this expression way, your learning Mandarin will be much easier.

We regard transliterated alien words as one of the homophone phenomena. But it is not the complete homophone of inner Chinese language, but a Chinese homophone of other language. If you are new in learning Mandarin, you may find that this is a little complicated than the former one, for the inner transliterated alien words can be divided into several small categories and they have different semantic patterns.

The first one is pure transliterated word. For example, the word “咖啡” uses Chinese syllables to imitate the pronunciation of foreign language. The images of Chinese characters have no meaning only to be used to show the speech sound. They only represent the meaning of the original alien words. This kind of words will be easier to remember for English speakers who are learning Mandarin.

The second one is some special transliterated words. These words have their own meaning as they are imitating the pronunciation of foreign languages. But the meaning of the Chinese words is not the original meaning of foreign words. These transliterated words are often be used to translate some foreign trademarks or in some informal occasions, such as “coca cola” is translated as “可口可乐”, “e-mail” is translated as “伊妹儿”. For some foreign trademarks which are quite difficult to be translated, we can only use transliteration to choose some meaningful Chinese words or phrases and imitate its foreign pronunciation. In this way, it will be easy to be accepted and remembered by local people. “Coca cola” is an excellent example. It imitates the foreign pronunciation exactly while it picks two most common Chinese words. These two words are very suitable to describe the product they represent so that people will be easily impressed by this product.

Another interesting translation is a little bit informal. Take “伊妹儿” an example, in addition to imitating the original pronunciation, its two morpheme “伊” and “妹儿” are lovely and nifty which make the translation humorous. The longer you lean mandarin, the more interesting translations you will find.
These homophone expressions bring much interest to Chinese language. The analysis on these homophone phenomena will help both foreign students and Chinese teachers.