There's another telling detail about the current usage of written words for "karaoke" in China. I was stunned by how "K" had become a functioning morpheme meaning "karaoke" in current Chinese. They also mentioned a karaoke app called "Quánmín K gē 全民K歌" ("Everybody's Karaoke Songs"). Now, they say that they refer to it as “chàng K 唱K“ ("sing K")，”K ge K歌“ ("K songs")，or “KTV” (where karaoke takes place).
#NO NOT ONE KARAOKE PLUS#
When I told the above story to my new students from China in two different classes ("Language, Script, and Society in China" and "Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese", plus those taking other classes), more than twenty students all together, they told me that "kǎlā OK 卡拉OK" was outmoded and that people barely used it any longer. In any event, I thought it was simply fascinating that the origin of "orchestra" has to do with dance rather than music. I think that Jaan added a colorful Hittite aspect to his exposition, but I forget what it was. Much to our amusement, he showed graphically the Greek basis for our English word (orkheisthai "to dance"). They had been convinced that the OK was simply the English term meaning "all right," but they had no idea what to make of the kǎlā portion.Ī final note on the etymology of karaoke is my pleasant recollection of the UCLA Hittitologist, Jaan Puhvel, some years later demonstrating the origins of the word "orchestra" by doing a little jig before an admiring audience at an Indo-European workshop at the University of Texas in Austin. When I reported this to my Chinese linguist friends (Zhou Youguang, Yin Binyong, and others) back in Beijing the next year, they were absolutely flabbergasted. It took a lot more time and effort before I figured out that karaoke is the abbreviated Japanese translation-transliteration of English "empty orchestra," viz., kara (空) "empty" and ōkesutora (オーケストラ). It was only when I returned to the United States that I realized kǎlā OK 卡拉OK was the Chinese transcription for Japanese karaoke. I asked all my Chinese scholar friends what this mysterious sign meant, but not one of them knew (remember that this was back in the mid-80s). The best I could make of that novel expression was "card pull OK," and I thought that it might have something to do with documentation. There wasn't much unusual, interesting, or attractive about the place (though they had bidets in the bathrooms, as did many other Russian style accommodations in China at that time), but I was deeply intrigued by a small sign at the back of one of the buildings that led to a basement room.
He lived in the old Russian-built Friendship Hotel, a very spartan place compared to today's luxury accommodations in big Chinese cities. My first acquaintance with the word "karaoke" was back in the 1980s, when I was visiting my brother Denis, who was then a translator for Foreign Languages Press in Beijing.
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