http://www.xiaoma.info/hanzi.php?hz=%E5%85%B5

Is there any way to find out if the fact that 乒乓 looks a bit like a ping pong table is intentional? If it is, is this the only example of a multi-character pictogram?

All I know is I’m gonna wield my paddle with the intensity of a Chinesean (or Mandarinian) from now on!!

Something about the word ping-pong caused Matt to ask if it had any meaning in Mandarin. He would never have asked if “fried chicken” had any meaning in Chinese, right?

These are my conclusions:
1. Ping-pong does not have an obvious English meaning the way that fried chicken does.

2. The Chinese are well known for their prowess in table tennis, so ping-pong could well have been transplanted from Mandarin to English.

3. Since all Mandarin words end in a vowel, -n or -ng, ping-pong sounds just like other Chinese words.

This fearsome trio must have teamed up to do Matt in.

Chinese is so fun!!

The words are derived from the character for soldier (same as 乒 or 乓 but with two “legs” at the bottom – sorry I don’t have a computer that can “write” Chinese) – 乒乓 therefore is suggestive of the sound of weapons clashing.

乒 and 乓 are onomatopoeias suggesting the sound of weapons clashing. Both characters are slight variations (as can be seen) of the character 兵 bing, meaning weapon. This character actually depicts two hands holding an axe (can’t you tell?).

No wonder the Chinese take ping-pong so seriously.

Now we need someone to tell us what a literal translation of 乒乓 would be.

1. I unconsciously ignored that ping-pong is a game (with a real name in Chinese) and therefore did not translate “ping-pong” into its equivalent Chinese name “ping-pang qiu” before translating.

2. I said ping-pong aloud and thought to myself, “If I were a foreign devil trying to speak Chinese and came up with ‘ping-pong’, what might I actually be attempting to say?”

3. I came up with the most similar sounding Chinese words that I knew: flat 平 fat 胖.

The Chinese characters ping pang (乒乓) may have just been chosen for the way they sound. But since I don’t read Chinese, I don’t know if the characters 乒乓 have any clever meaning the way that 可口可樂 (kuh-ko-kuh-luh, Coca Cola in Chinese) means “thirsty mouth, happy mouth” or that 宜家 (yi-jia, Ikea in Chinese) means “easy home”.

I suppose it was transliterated from the English, but I wonder where the actual characters come from since “ping” and “pang” both kinda look almost the same. . . they must be “place holders” for sounds only.

Hmm . . .