‘A Deer With a Long Neck’
The word for ‘giraffe’ in Chinese is literally translated as ‘long-neck deer’.
When my father told me this, I thought about one thing:
I wish that my father spend time with me starting as an infant to tell me all the Chinese proverbs he knew and the wonders of the Chinese language, particularly his native Cantonese, which I can get only details of when it’s spoken on the streets, and only a gist most of the time when I hear it on TV or films. I would have had memories of what I did at younger than five years of age if my parents had interacted with me. I wish I grew up with gentle conversations with my father on how the Chinese written language worked and how Cantonese words were put together to get ideas across.
The word ‘giraffe’ is the same in many languages (as I’m in Istanbul now, I’d like to confirm that ‘giraffe’ is said the same way in Turkish) so I was delighted to imagine a brown deer with its neck stretched long enough to be able to eat leaves on high branches. The day that my father told me that, long ago, the Chinese thought that a giraffe looked exactly like a deer (or maybe they thought it was a type of deer even) so they called it a ‘long-neck deer’. I agreed with the Chinese perception of a giraffe being like a deer with a long neck.
