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ge96 12 hours ago

Weird the red panda's name is Master Shifu

psnehanshu 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, that's "Master Master", just like Chai Tea, which means "Tea Tea" and East Timor, which means "East East".

tmtvl 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You mean Timor Leste, which still means 'East East', but they decided to replace the English bit with Portugese.

qskousen 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The master teacher.

ge96 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Ahh I took it as master master

thaumasiotes 11 hours ago | parent [-]

That's more accurate. Shifu is just intended to translate the English "master".†

Note that it isn't the Chinese word for "teacher", which is 老师 laoshi. (Same "shi".) Shifu is a different title.

ABC provides these glosses:

-----

师傅 shīfu

1. master worker

2. tutor of a king/emperor

3. [PRC] general term of address in the late 70s and 80s

4. [courteous] term of address for service workers [such as a carpenter]

-----

The Tuttle Learner's Dictionary provides this note:

> 师傅 shīfu is [] a polite form of address to a worker. For example, an electrician or a mechanic can be addressed as 师傅, or, if his family name is 李, 李师傅.

It is how martial arts instructors are addressed, but not how teachers are addressed. Teachers are white-collar.

† In the movie, it's pronounced with the FLEECE vowel, as if it were the English words "she foo", for no reason that I can understand. To an English speaker, the Mandarin word will sound like "shiffoo", using KIT and not FLEECE in the first syllable.

tines 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why weird? That movie is also set in China.