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Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

It's a portmanteau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau); the Chinese aren't exactly unaware of the existence of sounds outside the pinyin system. 穷 (qiong4) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make "qiou", though I can't even guess which tone it would be.

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Someone already commented [0] on that below the Weibo post linked in the article. The Pinyin system doesn't always represent the same sound by the same letter sequence. There are usually two forms, depending on whether the syllable starts with a consonant or a (semi-)vowel. The combination "iou" is written "you" when it stands alone and "qiu" when the syllable starts with "q". Writing it "qiou" is just to emphasize the parts of the portmanteau.

[0] https://m.weibo.cn/status/4319254188133873

Thank you for answering my question and not confusing phonetics and orthography.

> 穷 (qiong4) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make "qiou",

穷 is actually qiong2, i.e. 2nd tone

> though I can't even guess which tone it would be.

Because 没 (mei2) and 有 (you3) combine to make 冇 (mao3), I'm guessing 穷 (qiong2) and 丑 (chou3) combine to make qiou3, i.e. 3rd tone.

re 冇: cool, didn't know about that one (My mandarin is shit). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%86%87 says it's actually a lone from Cantonese, which contradicts what you said a bit, but is also cool. I wonder what other examples of non-Madarin dialects influencing the national slang exist.

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