Noodle-Noodle-Noodle Noodle Shop

Wow, this is quite the noodle shop name I photographed here in Shanghai:

麵麵麵麵馆
麵麵麵麵馆

The Chinese name is 麵麵麵麵館 which is written in traditional characters. (Sometimes shops do that because they simply prefer the traditional character aesthetic.) The simplified characters would be 面面面面馆.

It’s kind of fun how the traditional character has as a meaning component, which means “wheat.” And of course wheat is the main ingredient of noodles. You could say that the character ingredient is the main noodle component. Or whatever. The simplified version, , retains none of those semantic shenanigans, using just the no-nonsense “miàn” sound component to mean “noodles.”

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John Pasden

John is a Shanghai-based linguist and entrepreneur, founder of AllSet Learning.

Comments

  1. Enjoyed visiting your shop! Please put a poster up.

  2. Could also be translated as noooooooodle shop? 🙂

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