2009年1月28日星期三

What the fuck is 万万 anyway? 万万, 千万, and 完全

So, I never got a good introduction to 万万, I always just saw it pop up on test questions next to 千万 as one of the answer choices. For a long time I never got a good explanation of it either. I also never ever heard any one say it in real life or even in teaching material "dialogues", etc.) and almost never saw it written. One day I decided to look it up and it turns out, 万万 really doesn't have anything to do with 千万. To a native English speaker 千万 feels like something, it has a strong feeling of suggestion and exhortation for a positive or negative thing. 万万 on the other hand is used only in the negative sense with a meaning and usage equal of 完全

我完全不同意。 = 我万万不同意。

My dictionary has the line 那是万万不行的。 When I look at this line all I can think is that any person would more likely say 那是完全不行的, or maybe its just me.

And yes, 万万等于一亿, in some older books you will actually not see the character 亿, this character may have been a later invention, who knows.

2 条评论:

  1. From the good old 康熙:
    億-《禮·內則·降德于衆兆民疏》算法,億之數有大小二法。小數以十爲等,十萬爲億,十億爲兆也。大數以萬爲等,萬至萬,是萬萬爲億也。
    So you can see that in classical Chinese, an 億 was either 100,000 or 100 million.

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  2. Kangxi isn't that old. I think that if you far enough back you don't have the character 亿. And even if you do have some appearances in some very old texts, that doesn't necessarily mean it was in widespread use. But thanks though, didn't know 亿 indicated two different things back in the day.

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