Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (5 page)

The distinction made in Italian between “giocare” (for sports) and “suonare” (for musical instruments) might seem a bit precious. After all, not only English but plenty of other languages are happy to use exactly the same verb for both kinds of activities —
thus French uses “jouer”, German uses “spielen”, Russian uses
, and so on. What about Chinese?

It turns out that Mandarin speakers are considerably more finicky in this matter than Italian speakers: they linguistically perceive four broad types of musical instruments, each type meriting its own special verb. Thus for stringed instruments there is the verb
(pronounced “lā”), meaning roughly “to pull”, while for wind instruments one says
(“chuī”), which means “to blow”. Then for instruments such as the guitar, whose strings are plucked by the fingers, or the piano, whose keys are pushed by the fingers, the verb is
(“tán”) — and finally, for drums, which are banged, what one says is
(“dâ”).

Curiously enough, it’s possible to apply the verb that means “to play” (as in “play with a toy”) to any musical instrument (it is
, pronounced “wán”); unfortunately, however, the meaning is not what an English speaker might expect: it’s essentially the idea of
fussing around
with the instrument in question, and moreover this usage of
is extremely informal, indeed slangy.