I don’t know of any evidence that “yao” is formed from 一 and 号. There is a character for that yao1: 幺. I don’t have any etymological dictionaries here that happen to include that character (it’s very infrequent), so I can’t check it and give you any reference, but I wouldn’t assume there was any relationship between 幺, 一, and 号.

People use 幺 when saying phone numbers and other non-quantitative numbers presumably to add more contrast with 七.

You can say:
一个, 两个

But you cannot say:
*幺个, *二个

When yao1 is written nowadays, it is written like this: “1″.

Thanks for the tip! I’m now a subscriber of Beijing Shengr. I enjoyed some of the posts so much that I’m thinking about doing a little feature on them.

http://www.bjshengr.com/bjs/?p=21

And, ‘important’ in Chinese is zhòngyào.
There are some words like
yàodiǎn要点:main point
yàowén要闻:the important news
Yàojiàn要件:the important document.
So, I guess, maybe the people speak ‘yao’ to show the special meaning of ‘yi hao’.

I never knew that’s where “yao” came from. But that makes sense. It’s kind of like my theory for where “zheige” and “neige” came from (the alternative pronunciations of “zhege” 这个 and “nage” 那个). I thought, probably people were saying “zhe yi ge” 这一个 so much it just became “zheige” when spoken because the number one (“yi” 一) isn’t really necessary there. I just thought of that riding my bike home one day in Kunming, but maybe there’s some linguistic evidence that can confirm or deny my little theory. Anyone know?

Great to hear from you. It seems like it’s been a while since you chimed in. As always, you’re contributions are very useful and highly entertaining. I love the accent approximations and combos! I had no idea. But to people ever SAY “biao” when they mean “bu yao” or is it just for texting?

浆(jiang4, “sauce”) for 这样(zhe4 yang4, “like this”)
表(biao3) for 不要(bu2 yao4)

There’s a complex world out there of 火星文 (huo3 xing1 wen2, “Martian”), the way people refer in Taiwan to wierd, unorthodox little conventions of speech used by young people on their cell phones. Totally contrary to what I thought when first understood Chinese was an ideographic language, there seems to be a way to write anything! Take this:

偶口以吗？(ou3 kou3 yi3 ma?, “Can I?”)
Some people use 偶(ou3) for 我(wo3) and 口(kou3) for 可(ke3) because it represents how someone would say this sentence with a strong Taiwanese accent.

They’ve got Taiwanese-isms, Cantonese-isms, even loan words that came from English through Japanese:

麻吉(ma2 ji2) from Japanese マッチ(macchi, I think) from the English word “match”.

The ones they use straight from English are the coolest:

黑皮(hei1 pi2) from “happy”
咕狗(gu1 gou3, “muttering dog”?) from “Google”
3Q (san1 Q) for “thank you”

Hope that was interesting. +U everyone! 886!