Bing Means Disease In Chinese | Hacker News Reader

Bing Means Disease In Chinese

brandinfection.com

26 pointsnader38 comments

Yeah, there is a joke in Chinese twitter sphere (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%E8%82%A1%E6%B2%9F%E6%9C%...):

    谷歌有钱，百度有啊，微软有病

literally it means

    Google is rich, Baidu has YouA(youa.baidu.com), Microsoft has Bing (Microsoft is sick)

It's more funny if there's domain like you.bing.com then it totally means "has disease"

Officially Bing was translated as 必应, which derives from 有求必应(when there's a request there must be anwser)

必 means 'must' 应 means 'response'

and PinYin domain for 必应 BiYing.com is registered by MSFT already

    Registrant:
            Domain Administrator
            Microsoft Corporation
            One Microsoft Way
             Redmond WA 98052
            US
            domains@microsoft.com +1.4258828080 Fax: +1.4259367329

        Domain Name: biying.com

            Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
            Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
            Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

        Administrative Contact:
            Domain Administrator
            Microsoft Corporation
            One Microsoft Way
             Redmond WA 98052
            US
            domains@microsoft.com +1.4258828080 Fax: +1.4259367329
        Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
            MSN Hostmaster
            Microsoft Corporation
            One Microsoft Way
             Redmond WA 98052
            US
            msnhst@microsoft.com +1.4258828080 Fax: +1.4259367329

        Created on..............: 2003-09-07.
        Expires on..............: 2011-09-07.
        Record last updated on..: 2009-05-26.

        Domain servers in listed order:

        ns5.msft.net
        ns1.msft.net
        ns3.msft.net
        ns2.msft.net
        ns4.msft.net




    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    MarkMonitor, the Global Leader in Enterprise Brand Protection

    Domain Management
    Online Trademark Protection
    Online Channel Protection
    AntiPhishing Solutions
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------

but BiYing.cn is registered by someone else:

    Domain Name: biying.cn
    ROID: 20060514s10001s52568323-cn
    Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited
    Registrant Organization: 王志刚
    Registrant Name: 王志刚
    Administrative Email: yeetung@163.com
    Sponsoring Registrar: 北京万网志成科技有限公司
    Name Server:dns8.66.cn
    Name Server:dns9.66.cn
    Registration Date: 2006-05-14 19:56
    Expiration Date: 2014-05-14 19:56

I don't think this name will troublesome at all in Mandarin-speaking countries. Bing also refers to bread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(Chinese_flatbread) or pastry http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Jian-Bing-Chinese-Crepes/Detail... or ice http://taiwandays.blogspot.com/2007/07/bing-ice.html. Bing means a bunch of things depending upon tone of voice. Bing(sickness) isn't an immediately obvious translation.

when someone says 'ass' do you think of the donkey? or when someone says 'bitch' do you think female dog?

Yes although I've heard Chinese are very sensitive in some respects.

A lot of people don't realize that Chinese is dependent upon the intonation of the word spoken for meaning. Standard Mandarin has four separate tones. When it comes to bing, the fourth tone can mean aliment or disease, but the others mean several vastly different concepts or ideas.

Care to share what those several vastly different concepts or ideas are?

Tone 1: Ice

Tone 3: Cake/pie

Tone 4: Illness/disease

So what? In English, a yahoo is "a brute, a crude person, often lacking in intelligence, and uninterested in culture", and a million jokes were made about the Wii on launch. I doubt it's impacted their popularity at all.

It can also mean "ice" therefore it means "cool". As long as it is a good product and give people what they want. Making fun at the name is really childish.

I'm pretty sure it usually means other things. I know for sure that there are Chinese people named 'Bing'.

The author is mistaken, disease is bing with the fourth tone. I'm sure MS meant bing with first tone :)

As a Chinese, Bing.com accures to me as disease when I first saw it.

I like the recursive acronym 'Bing Is Not Google' more :-)

I wonder if that little accent-like looking thing on the ì indicates the right tone?

In fact it does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Mandarin#Tones

So this ì is Pinyin diacritic?

Too bad that the accents are used in different ways in the different diacritics, it seems.

not really. there's a lot of chinese characters pronounced "bing", especially since the tone is unspecified. look at e.g. http://zhongwen.com/s/v19.htm -- the first three rows are all "bing" characters.

Upvoted as the best link here to the wide variety of Chinese morphemes that are all spelled "bing" in Hanyu pinyin.

No, the Microsoft logo for the new web service doesn't look like a standard tone mark at all.

couldn't it be mistaken for the negative meaning?

If it's Microsoft, is there any question which tone to pick? They are, after all, the masters of infection through embrace and extend. (Which could also describe the strategy of the newly hatched Alien movie nymphs.)

It also means pancake and cold, make of that what you will

edit: post dictionary lookup, 冰 (bing) is cold as in ice cold or ice itself.

there are a lot of other meanings too: military, merge, third, bright - all depend on intonation of bing

Are you referring to Tzong Yo Bing (sp?) which mean onion oil pancake. One of my favorites, we often make these with the left over jaotze dough.

The tones have always been hard for me, my favorite is the words for buy and sell. Same word different tones. I wouldn't do well as a stock trader in China :)

You are making my mouth water here. I been way too long since I had this.

cold, diseased pancake?

Hm... cold is not really positive, pancake neutral?

Still not as bad as Chevy Nova. They should have called Vista Nova... now that would have filed neatly in the truth in advertising section.

Kind of the same thing. People worried that "Nova" would sound like 'no va' in spanish, which meant "no go". In reality they are pronounced differently and it was no big deal.

The anecdote about the Chevy Nova sounds like a fabrication trying to explain a failure. The people in México (where the Chevy Nova failed) don't associate the word Nova with No Go. If you want a negative association, we used to have a gasoline brand called Nova. It was formulated with lead and was discontinued for more ecological formulas.

I heard that anecdote in a linguistics class back in college. The same professor shared another:

Back when the advertising slogan for Coca-Cola was "Coke adds life," an unfortunate Chinese translation came through as "Coke brings your ancestors back from the grave". And, of course, they take their ancestors pretty seriously, adding to the hilarity.

The "brings your ancestors back from the grave" claim is unsubstantiated, and is about Pepsi anyway.

http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/ancestor.asp

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that a professor related something apocryphal for the sake of illustration.

:-)

I also heard said anecdote, along with the fact that it didn't actually effect Chevy Nova sales; it sold admirably.

Microsoft is kinda trying to keep going with bad names for their products.

you mean like Microsoft's horrible Songsmith? :)

I don't think Songsmith isn't a particularly bad name for the product. Unlike Bing, it sums up the program pretty well.

Bing is going to spread like an epidemic :-)

OK, so which tone most accurately translates the English pronunciation of "bing"?

Hard to say, since English isn't a tonal language. It would depend on how you said it.

Have you seen Microsoft Bing? - Second tone (rising) I don't care for Microsoft Bing. - Fourth tone (falling) Microsoft goes BING! - First tone (Kinda like singing)

I can't think of a way to make it do the third tone, which is kind of like the long falling then rising sound you make when somebody say "Yeah.....", as in "Yeah..... but it's still Microsoft."

Thanks. For some reason, I think I know exactly what you mean re how to pronounce each tone.

I usually say "bing" to rhyme with "ping" as in "ping news.ycombinator.com".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com