Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Goong Hee Fat Choy!
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2025 22:52:15 +1300
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
Lines: 32
Message-ID: <vnfi4u$2svnc$1@dont-email.me>
Reply-To: r.clark@auckland.ac.nz
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Thu, 30 Jan 2025 10:52:31 +0100 (CET)
Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="7fac4a9d59987515fdae8db240b93034";
	logging-data="3047148"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+EUSFAi3f++TX+EAPsCrZQq1LH0SDG/00="
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/52.9.1
Cancel-Lock: sha1:xELCpGZC4Q/aY9r3Mdnsyn+tBEw=
X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://news.eternal-september.org:119
Content-Language: en-GB
Bytes: 2256

Sorry, I meant to add an ObSci.lang note to the Chinese New Year alert. 
But I missed the moment.
Nevertheless, the subject line is what I remember hearing years ago as 
"how you say Happy New Year in Chinese".
And it's true (more or less).
Let's break it down (as the AI bots say when they're being chummy).

恭喜發財

恭  respect
喜  happy
發  realize
財  wealth

(These are pretty arbitrary one-word glosses.)

So in Cantonese: gung1 hei2 faat3 coi4  (The numerals represent tones -- 
the 1234 sequence is coincidental). This would be the form most likely 
to be heard by people in North America, at least in my time.

In Mandarin it's gong1 xi3 fa1 cai2.

More idiomatically, 恭喜 'congratulations'  'good wishes'
		    發財  'make lots of money'  'get rich'

So, a wish for prosperity, but no overt reference to the festival or the 
year. I've seen other translations that seemed to include the characters 
for 'new' and 'year'. I suspect they are more recent creations; but I 
would be happy to be corrected by any one of the countless millions of 
people who know more Chinese than I do.

Audio here: https://forvo.com/word/%E6%81%AD%E5%96%9C%E7%99%BC%E8%B2%A1/