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This video totally opened my eyes. I never realized genomics can link to so many different things, and most of all, I feel fearful.

It’s 2 a.m. in the morning, two young man still working hard in the school….Maybe.

So they were accidentally captured by school’s security camera.

I’m now sitting in Tea Lounge with Alex, and we are trying to order some tea.

One tea flatters me by its name, it’s called: mandarin.

Then Alex explains to me: Mandarin is a fruit, it’s a type of orange:

Why was our ancestors so foolish to name our dialect after a stupid tropical fruit? Or it was just a discriminating joke from the British?

Bewildered, I read this up on Wikipedia, and I found these interesting results:

Well, our people do hate the name “Mandarin”:

Moreover, it is of note that despite its wide use in the Occident, most native Mandarin speakers are reluctant to recognize the term ‘Mandarin’, since the word does not reflect any Chinese origin. Instead, they would rather call the language simply ‘standard Chinese’.

As a matter of fact, there is a reason:

term comes from the Portuguese mandarim or Dutch mandarijn, from Malay məntəri, from Hindi mantrī, from Sanskrit mantrinTagalog intsek, meaning councilor or minister[1]); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話), which literally means the language of the mandarins (imperial magistrates). The term Guānhuà is often considered archaic by Chinese speakers of today, though it is often used by linguists as a collective term to refer to all varieties and dialects of Mandarin, not just standard Mandarin. Another term commonly used to refer to all varieties of Mandarin is Běifānghuà (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方話), or the dialect(s) of the North, although this term is used less and less among Chinese linguists in favour of “Guānhuà”.

I am thinking probably most of the Chinese readers will have trouble understanding that. True, I couldn’t understand it either, these “direct translations” don’t make any sense to me at all.

There’s only one man who has the solution: My dad.

So I asked him what the name means (I did when I was a freshman), Mandarin is just a direct translation from the way we pronounce “满大人”. Because back then Beijing(PeKing… hehe) was controlled by a bunch of Man People.

I guess that Wiki article is partly right, but will make more sense with my dad’s explanation.

P.S. Tea Lounge is one of the best places to hang out, it very much feels like Central Park (Did I spell it right?) in Friends.

P.P.S. My dad is the man.