Alberto Monteiro wrote:
>
> PS: do half Chinese words have _sh_ sounds? I could even learn
> some Chinese... There's an answer, _shu_ [or something like that],
> that was rendered as "sure" by the br subtitlers :-)
It's been a long while since I took those Mandarin classes, but
in that case it was probably the Chinese grammatical convention
of using the verb to affirm someone else's statement. They would
have said "shi" as "yes" and "bu shi" as "no." A semi-literal
translation of this convention would go:
Person A: Do you want this?
Person B: Don't want.
-- or --
Person B: Want.
As for the "sh" sound, there's really several distinct versions
of it that are used, (and what you do with the tone counts!) much
the same way that someone might confuse "f", "v", and "th" in
spoken English.
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