Verified answer

Short answer:

"Tiger" is "虎". Spoken by itself, 虎 (hu3) can be confused with other words, so "老" is added as an "empty" word that specifies this is a tiger we're talking about, and not something else.

Correction/details:

The measure word for tiger is 只, you should say:

看那*只*老虎。

I've never come across this myself, but you should probably say:

看那只老的老虎。

Expansion:

This naming feature can be found in a variety of animals:

老鼠--mouse (not "old mouse")

老鹰--eagle (not "old eagle")

Here, 老 behaves as an affix, not as a word with the meaning of "old", observe:

老师 is not "an old teacher", but just "a teacher".

This addition of an "empty affix" to specify the word is quite common, and in the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, occurs in many words:

The 老 series: 老虎、老鼠、老師

The 子 series: 桌子 (table)、筷子 (chopsticks)、房子 (room/house)、扇子(fan)、面子("face")

The 头 series 甜头 (sweetness/benefit)、苦头 (difficulty/hardship/bitterness)、骨头 (bone(s))、罐头 (a can)、念头 (an idea)

Further pointless expansion/delving into linguistics now:

These types of words are a subset of a larger feature of Mandarin called 偏正词. These are words where the meaning of the word is found in one part of the word, and a second "helping" word is added to avoid confusion.

As a language, especially when written, Chinese can express pretty much any idea in a single syllable/character. Of course, sometimes you need to specify, and when speaking you need to do this very often.

This is generally accomplished by:

(1) Combining words with almost the same exact meaning for clarity, you can notice this because they can sometimes be reversed with no effect on meaning:

嫉妒/妒嫉 = jealousy/envy

命运 = fate/destiny

冒犯 = to harass/violate

(2) Combining a "main word" and a word that is kind of "filler":

秘密 (secret+tight/closed = secret)

赌博* (gamble + gamble/play games = gamble)

The third becomes clearer when you understand "free" and "bound" morphemes, but we actually won't go into that.

*I am aware that in classical Chinese, each character had a specific, well known and *used* shade of meaning, I am only discussing modern Mandarin here.

Lao Hu