This system name is by far the most ironic... and unfortunate... and somewhat funny too

FoxTwo

FoxTwo
As I was doing missions today for the Empire, one of the systems in my jump route was this:

fouEev1.jpg


This got me chuckling... cuz:

BA PO in Mandarin Chinese, "八婆" means B**CH. In Hanyu Pinyin it's written exactly like this.
BA PO in Cantonese, has the same meaning.
BAPO in Malay (sometimes written as BAPOK) means a homosexual male person, or a transsexual (male to female)... but in a derogatory way ("Get away from me, you bapo!"). Essentially it used to mean "sissy" but now it's evolved.

It would be hilarious if this name had other offensive meanings in other languages too!

All of these are meant to be insults and to offend people :) I chuckle because I remember how sensitive FD's filters are.. and yet this system has a blatantly offensive name, just not in English :D

EDIT - I could not write S N I G G E R in this post exactly because of FD's filters :D Such irony!
 
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FoxTwo

FoxTwo
andicoombes said:
And OP - FoxTwo - your analysis made me lol properly - makes me wonder if FD did know this and have left it in out of sneakiness?! Lol ;)
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Actually when I first saw the name, I said it in Malay (in my head)... and I laughed. Then as I looked closer, I realised the Chinese meanings too :) So this one single system name, is a swear/insult in 3 different languages, none of which is English.

FD may have staff who will know though... like that female station announcer in Empire stations. She's definitely from around my parts and she'll know what I mean if she ever sees this thread.

Captain Willard said:
[h=3]白人看不懂 :)[/h]
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Actually we don't call you guys "white people" (白人)... in China they call you 洋人, which simply means "foreigner", or "outsider". That's the polite form. The insulting form is 洋鬼 which is "foreign devil/demon/ghost". But yeah blacks are "black people" (黑人).

In Hong Kong, it's "Gweilo" (鬼佬), which I'm sure you've heard by now. Not derogatory. White people must have looked like ghosts to them back in the day.

Here in Singapore though... Caucasians are "ang mo" (红毛), which means, in Hokkien language (or "Taiwanese"), "red hair". Nothing derogatory about it.

You guys are only "white people" in the Western world :D Here in Asia you're all colourful.
 
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Captain Willard

Captain Willard
FoxTwo said:
Actually when I first saw the name, I said it in Malay (in my head)... and I laughed. Then as I looked closer, I realised the Chinese meanings too :) So this one single system name, is a swear/insult in 3 different languages, none of which is English.

FD may have staff who will know though... like that female station announcer in Empire stations. She's definitely from around my parts and she'll know what I mean if she ever sees this thread.



Actually we don't call you guys "white people" (白人)... in China they call you 洋人, which simply means "foreigner", or "outsider". That's the polite form. The insulting form is 洋鬼 which is "foreign devil/demon/ghost". But yeah blacks are "black people" (黑人).

In Hong Kong, it's "Gweilo" (鬼佬), which I'm sure you've heard by now. Not derogatory. White people must have looked like ghosts to them back in the day.

Here in Singapore though... Caucasians are "ang mo" (红毛), which means, in Hokkien language (or "Taiwanese"), "red hair". Nothing derogatory about it.

You guys are only "white people" in the Western world :D Here in Asia you're all colourful.
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It's a t-shirt I've seen loosely as, White people can't read this, always thought I should get one.
 

Strangepork

Strangepork
FoxTwo said:
As I was doing missions today for the Empire, one of the systems in my jump route was this:

http://i.imgur.com/fouEev1.jpg

This got me chuckling... cuz:

BA PO in Mandarin Chinese, "八婆" means B**CH. In Hanyu Pinyin it's written exactly like this.
BA PO in Cantonese, has the same meaning.
BAPO in Malay (sometimes written as BAPOK) means a homosexual male person, or a transsexual (male to female)... but in a derogatory way ("Get away from me, you bapo!"). Essentially it used to mean "sissy" but now it's evolved.

It would be hilarious if this name had other offensive meanings in other languages too!

All of these are meant to be insults and to offend people :) I chuckle because I remember how sensitive FD's filters are.. and yet this system has a blatantly offensive name, just not in English :D

EDIT - I could not write S N I G G E R in this post exactly because of FD's filters :D Such irony!
Click to expand...

Good skills, cunning linguistics.
 

FoxTwo

FoxTwo
Zeeman said:
OMG... This is awesome. I must print up a shirt for myself like this...

Z...
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Ummm... my advice is "Don't"... Chinese don't call Caucasians "白人" as I've said. Any Chinese reading your T-Shirt will s n i g g e r but they will not be laughing at the T-shirt.. they'll be laughing at the dumb white folks who can't even translate properly....

Kinda like how we laugh at white folks getting tattoos of Chinese words that look cool but means "turtle" (龟) on their chest... that one we laugh hard, cuz "turtle" is meant as a derogatory word in the context of "stupid", "dumb", or "slow".
 
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Valethar

Valethar
FoxTwo said:
In Hong Kong, it's "Gweilo" (鬼佬), which I'm sure you've heard by now. Not derogatory. White people must have looked like ghosts to them back in the day.
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Heh.. Back in 2003, there was a game called Shadowbane. Open world PvP MMO type thing. There was a huge issue with gold farmers exploiting world architecture to farm mobs for RMT assets. They'd run automated macro bots 24/7 when they could get away with it. Most of the time, someone would figure out what was going on, and report them, and a GM would instagib the bots and clear out any assets on the account.

At one point I figured out how to use their exploits against them, essentially getting them killed by the mobs, leaving their graves open for me to loot. I made millions robbing them.

The name of the character I was using to kill them was Gweilo. :D

I must have cut into the profits at some point, because they started leaving a live person online to empty out the macro bots, and usually they'd try to kill me if I showed up. LOL
 

FoxTwo

FoxTwo
Valethar said:
Heh.. Back in 2003, there was a game called Shadowbane. Open world PvP MMO type thing. There was a huge issue with gold farmers exploiting world architecture to farm mobs for RMT assets. They'd run automated macro bots 24/7 when they could get away with it. Most of the time, someone would figure out what was going on, and report them, and a GM would instagib the bots and clear out any assets on the account.

At one point I figured out how to use their exploits against them, essentially getting them killed by the mobs, leaving their graves open for me to loot. I made millions robbing them.

The name of the character I was using to kill them was Gweilo. :D

I must have cut into the profits at some point, because they started leaving a live person online to empty out the macro bots, and usually they'd try to kill me if I showed up. LOL
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LOL yeah when Asians play on US/European servers, we can name our characters all kinds of offensive names but they'll never get banned because they look innocent in English.... eg I saw this toon called "Chao Chee Bai" which looks like a perfectly innocent Chinese name... except that in Taiwanese language, it means the C word that is the female genitals.

A friend whom I play together with, actually named his toon "Lanjiao Lang"... again innocent looking in English, but means "d*ckhead" in Taiwanese.

Except in your case, Gwai Lo isn't offensive in the first place. It was never meant to be offensive, just a label. We probably had no word(s) to describe you guys when Marco Polo turned up in China for the first time and everyone there was wondering what kind of man he was.... why was his skin so pale? Why was his hair not black? etc
 
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Valethar

Valethar
FoxTwo said:
Except in your case, Gwai Lo isn't offensive in the first place. It was never meant to be offensive, just a label. We probably had no word(s) to describe you guys when Marco Polo turned up in China for the first time and everyone there was wondering what kind of man he was.... why was his skin so pale? Why was his hair not black? etc
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That's exactly why I used it. 'Ghost' just seemed too.. Mundane. I was playing a stealth based (Rogue) Vampire character and got a giggle out of it. It was actually at the suggestion of a guildmate, when he figured out what I was doing, and where all the extra cash in the guild bank was coming from. His mother was from Taiwan, and his thought was that it would annoy the crap out of them, because when you die, the game would broadcast who was killed by whom. There was also a list on the character details of who had killed you, and when, as well as who you had killed.

I had no clue, but was aggravated enough by all the RMT spam in chat most days that it appealed to my juvenile side. :rolleyes:
 

the100thmonkey

the100thmonkey
FoxTwo said:
Ummm... my advice is "Don't"... Chinese don't call Caucasians "白人" as I've said. Any Chinese reading your T-Shirt will s n i g g e r but they will not be laughing at the T-shirt.. they'll be laughing at the dumb white folks who can't even translate properly....

Kinda like how we laugh at white folks getting tattoos of Chinese words that look cool but means "turtle" (龟) on their chest... that one we laugh hard, cuz "turtle" is meant as a derogatory word in the context of "stupid", "dumb", or "slow".
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But it has very different connotations to a Japanese person. (And the Japanese do refer to white people as 白人!)

A turtle tattoo would still look daft though.
 
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FoxTwo

FoxTwo
Mangal Oemie said:
If I am not mistaken, Niu Hsing comes out as 牛性, or "cow/cattle-nature", i.e. obstinacy

You kind-a need a cattle-nature to grind Fed, no? :D
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Niu Hsing, by having the 2nd word starting with an H, means it's a NAME of a person. That is not Hanyu Pinyin. It's the romanised form before the introduction of Pinyin. In Pinyin, it would have been Niu Xing. Before Pinyin, names and words get romanised phonetically based on the dialect the name is from. So a Fujian name and a Shanghai name would look VERY DIFFERENT in English romanization, but the Chinese characters would be exactly the same. Pinyin is the attempt to unify it under Mandarin Chinese. Good example - What is now "Beijing" is the Pinyin form of the older name "Peking", which was the romanised phonetic form. I personally don't speak that particular dialect so I couldn't tell which dialect "Pe King" is derived from.

As a name of a person, "Niu" would be cow, you are correct. As per stories passed down by parents, people generally get named "Cow", "dog", "pig" etc out in the rural areas of China in ancient times, cuz farmers had many children and they couldn't name them fast enough. Whether or not this is true, I don't know :D However it is/was pretty common to hear people get nicknamed "Ah Niu" (cow) or "Ah Gou" (dog) by family and friends.

But "Hsing" could be any number of words... need to see the actual character for it. For example. "star" could be one of the words. "New" (as in brand new) could be another word for it. Or "heart". Or "happiness". It depends on the tone.

Personally I'd think that "Hsing" would be the family name, for example 盛.
 
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Bottom Hat

Bottom Hat
This thread has really developed in an awesome way! It was amusing to begin with but has got much better, and in many ways I have learned a lot from it as well - and in case you are wondering, I am a foreign white devil too lmao!! ;)
 

Zieman

Zieman
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