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There are two more cultural aspects that need to be addressed before I
leave the subject of marketing: that of the importance of numbers and colors. Many loan, escrow, and real estate agents, as well as new home salespeople have discovered that among some
Asians, especially the Chinese, numbers and numerology constitute an important wrinkle in doing business.
Before I get into some numbers that have special meanings, I'd like to
share a bit of general information about the Chinese language. It has over 230,000 written characters, which originated from symbols, and has no alphabet. Each word is a separate character
that may become a part of another. The average person knows about 4,000 to 6,000 words or characters; the scholor approximately 8,000. There are no tenses but there are four or five tones or
pitches, depending on whether you are speaking the Mandarin or Cantonese dialect.
New words to describe inventions are formed by description or sounds. For
example, the word radio in English is five letters long, the letters that comprise it have no meaning individually. In Chinese, it takes three words to say "radio" - "receive + sound + machine." A telephone is "electronic speech" and a fax machine is a "transmit + real(ity) + machine." And the Chinese who loves a play on words or double meanings are very imaginative with their puns. In the 1960s when the mini skirt came into fashion, an anonymous pundit called it a "may nay kwun", the first two words sound like "mini" skirt. But everyone realized what a wit the inventor of that word was, for "may nay" in Cantonese means to hypnotize. Thus a may nay kwun is a skirt that will hypnotize you!
Although the dialects of Chinese can be very different, the written
language is the same. It is from Chinese that the Japanese and Korean languages have derived and therefore some of the beliefs regarding numbers are similar. There are many homonyms, but the
variation in pitch will make the meaning of a word a completely different one. Just as in English, the word red and read (past tense) are pronounced exactly the same, but have distinct
denotations.
In the different dialects of China, a word may be said a completely
different way. This means that a number may suggest something good or bad in one dialect and may have no connotations in another. Last, but no least, many words have meaning only because they
are close to sounding like other lucky and unlucky words. Are the Cantonese speakers more conscious of numbers or are the Mandarin speakers? The answer is like asking how many people belive
that 13 is unlucky and 7 brings good luck.
In the Taoist tradition throughout Asia, odd numbers are considered to be male or yang; even numbers are feminine or yin.
There are many degrees in the belief in the mystical powers of numbers and no generalizations can be made about who believes in numberology and who does not. But it is worth mentioning that
between May 1973 and December 1985, the Hong Kong Transport Department was able to raise over HK$36.4 million for its charity lottery fund by auctioning off a select group of "lucky numbers"
for autombile license plates.
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