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No wonder I can't find anything
BySeveral days ago I was looking for the entrance to one of the big Carrefour outlets in Shanghai. This is the French-based retailer that is second to Wal-Mart in overall global sales but is far more successful than Wal-Mart in China. A Wal-Mart official once told me that he thought hostility to recent U.S. foreign policy had been a drag on the firm’s brand-image in China. Who knows — that certainly hasn’t slowed down McDonald’s, Apple, Dell, Buick, or Starbucks.
On a sidewalk I asked a security guard, in Chinese, where the store might be. The “could you tell me where” part of the question seemed to come across serviceably. But the store’s name, as I phrased it, led to a look of utter bafflement on the guard’s face. I used the Chinese sounds I thought most comparable — ka ri fu ah — and added the words for department store, but I got nowhere.
Then I stepped back and looked up, and saw that the guard and I were standing right in front of Carrefour’s main entrance. I thanked him and stepped into the store, only to wonder: how can this be? I mean, apart from cognitive failure on the guard’s side, and linguistic on mine?
There is an answer, and it involves one strange way in which China is less directly open to foreign influence than, say, Japan. In general, China seems more easy-going and matter-of-fact about incorporating foreign ideas, customs, and people than Japan is. The why and how of this assertion is for another day. But when it comes to adopting foreign words, China seems for some reason more restrained than Japan.
Japan has a special phonetic alphabet used largely (but not only) for writing foreign-derived words. This is katakana, and much like the use of italics in this very sentence, it often indicates a word that’s been appropriated from another language. Since the sounds of katakana are so easy to learn, and since so many of the imported words come from English, English speakers can very quickly make sense of some crucial parts of the written Japanese around them. You’re looking for Carrefour in Tokyo? It’s spelled カル
