This comes from military, amateur and CB radio communication
"Do you copy?" or "Copy that!" is likely from when a message had to be written down to be shown to a superior officer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_procedure
Some words with specialized meanings
are used in radio communication
throughout the English-speaking world,
and in international radio
communications, where English is the
lingua franca.
Affirmative — Yes
Negative — No
Reading you Five / Loud and clear — I understand what you say 5x5.
Over — I have finished talking and I am listening for your reply. Short for "Over to you."
Out — I have finished talking to you and do not expect a reply.
Clear — I have finished talking to you and will be shutting my radio off.
Roger — Information received/understood.
Copy — Mostly used to acknowledge received information. [May also mean Repeat back to me the information I just gave you. ed.]
Wilco — Will comply (after receiving new directions).
Go ahead or Send your traffic — Send your transmission.
Say again — Please repeat your last message (Repeat is not used as it is a specific command when calling for artillery fire)
Break — Signals a pause during a long transmission to open the channel for other transmissions, especially for allowing any potential emergency traffic to get through.
Break-Break — Signals to all listeners on the frequency, the message to follow is priority.
http://www.dyerlabs.com/communications/procedural_codes.html
Copy probably originally referred to
writing or typing a received message,
but now has is essentially the same as
'Reading you ...'.
The origin seems clear enough: an abbreviation for karaoke television. Whether or not the average person in China understands the origin is probably not relevant as to its popularity; after all, I think relatively few Americans could write out the long form for RSVP.
Several years ago, it was widely reported in anglophone media that some arm of the Chinese government was trying to discourage the use of roman acronyms like NBA (but not Q?), and while I think this is probably an example of press misunderstanding or exaggeration, the reports acknowledge that various acronyms are commonly used in China— indeed that various organs of the Chinese state itself are best known by their English abbreviations, like CCTV and SARFT.
KTV returns zero results from the British National Corpus, and the one entry in the Corpus of Contempotary American English is the name of a television news show. So I turn to the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWbE), which turns up the following results by country:
- Singapore 67
- Hong Kong 35
- The Philippines 20
- Malaysia 6
Almost all of these refer to karaoke or karaoke parlors, so depending on your standard for "English-speaking country," it does seem to be in use in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Malaysia.
There are 8 results for the US, of which 5 come from websites about China and three come from travel blogs about China. The 11 results for the UK, similarly, are about travel in China or entertainment in China. In both cases, KTV is invariably described as the local name for a karaoke parlor.
In contrast, results for karaoke alone show
- GB 867
- US 528
- Singapore 233
- Malaysia 235
- Philippines 198
- Hong Kong 174
In fact, there are even more results for noraebang (the more obscure Korean term for the same entertainment; venues are signed with NRB) in Singapore than for KTV in either the US or UK corpora. The Google Books results for KTV, similarly, refer exclusively to karaoke parlors as they exist in China, Taiwan, or Southeast Asia.
The Yelp category is karaoke (though KTV turns up in some reviews, along the lines of This place reminds me of a KTV/karaoke place in Guangzhou). For Google Maps/Google Local in my area, there are 414 results for karaoke, and only 3 of any kind for KTV, only one of which is for a karaoke joint.
All of this suggests very strongly to me that KTV as a term referring to a karaoke establishment is not a mainstream usage in the US (and does not seem to be in the UK or Canada, either), though expats or tourists might use it, and any businesses catering to them.
Best Answer
This is basically lifted from the German Wikipedia entry -- the term is not that uncommon in German, though with negative connotations.
The word has its origins in Greek (παραβολή), and from there was adapted by Latin (parabola), Portuguese (palavra), and eventually, English.
The general meaning is "idle talk".
In many African cultures, this is considered good manners -- you get to know the other person before you start talking about the subject that really got you together.
The meaning your husband associated with the term is probably the way the Portuguese used it when trading with African people. I doubt the African people considering it good manners to this day would agree with his interpretation that it's a talk between a civilized and a savage, though.