User Comments - aert
aert
Posted on: Automated Phone Recordings
December 17, 2007 at 9:46 AMHi, Goulniky For "static" my Dutch-Chinese dictionary gives your záyīn and also zàoshēng, the Chinese-Dutch one has only záyīn. The Dutch word I started from means any kind of "accompanying noise" (crackling, hissing). There is another word that is the equivalent of English "hiss", and is also used for this sort of continuous background noise on telephone or radio. The D-C dict. gives only characters, no pinyin, but translates this as what I am almost sure is sīsīshēng (where sī is " silk" with the mouth radical before it; I do not find it in my dictionaries). It would be interesting to know how the notion "signal to noise ratio" is expressed in Chinese.
Posted on: A Taxi for Tired Feet
December 17, 2007 at 8:25 AMHi, Changye I am much impressed by the information you gathered on the traditional symbol for "unicorn". But that leaves the question under which radical a putonghua dictionary lists this word lín, since the old radical is eliminated. Not that I need to know, just interested. The only possibility seems to be mǐ "rice". But if there are more such cases there may not always be such a simple way out.
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 16, 2007 at 3:38 PMHi Auntie68 and Changye This series of comments, filling assorted gaps in my education, ranges from Tibetan monasteries to brands of beer. I'll see how far I get. I want to begin with a homage to Hokusai, who was born in the year of the dragon 1760, so he is not really off topic. He is one of my top heroes, and has been since my student days. I have a number of books on him, including a good selection of the Manga. He has this in common with the above comments (I quote from Richard Lane's "Hokusai. Life and work"): who says in connection with the Ehon hayabiki of 1817: "arranged in the order of the Japanese syllabary, with all sorts of unrelated figures packed into each and every page [...] each one such leaf would require some pages to explicate" (he reproduces two). I stop now, saying only that I admire and love the man and his work. Next suject: dragons. The Greek word drakōn means "snake". The first dragon killer is said to be Kadmos (latinised Cadmus), founder of the city of Thebes, but on the numerous pictures of the event on Greek ceramics what he killed was a giant snake. The Greeks had no cats, and for mouse catching purposes used snakes (with which children would play, ladies cool their neck and bosom). The Romans took their word draco from Greek but with our meaning "dragon", this notion is thought to go back to that of crocodile because of the similarity in shape. But such things are never quite certain, eg. the English word "deer" originally meant any animal (Dutch dier, German Tier, etc.), the Russian word for camel has developed from "elephant" in other languages, some Salish(an) languages of British Columbia I worked on have for horse a compound deer-dog, better "deer-sized domestic animal" since dogs were the only such animals they had before horses were introduced. Anyway, in imperial times the Romans had images of dragons on the banners of their legions, and the word draco acquired the meaning "banner". In 9AD Arminius, chief of the Germanic tribe of the Cherusci destroyed three Roman legions in the battle of the Teutoburger wood, after which the Romans withdrew to the Rhine. Arminius became a legendary national hero and it is possible (but cannot be proved) that the next dragon slayer, Siegfried, thanks his reputation to that of Arminius, who destroyed the Roman "dracones". The next dragon slayer is StGeorge, about whom I know nothing but the name, and you can look this up in Wikipedia as well as I if you want to know. As for me, I have more pressing business, as my competence in Chinese is like a pail with a hole in the bottom: as long as you pour more in than runs out the level slowly rises. The story of the only Tibetan lama I ever saw can wait till the next Jizhou lesson. Knowing what I know of him he could well be in it. Cheers!
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 15, 2007 at 9:22 PMHi,Auntie68 You must be right, I have since found the same thing in the 4th line of Changye's first comment above but wasn't aware of the existence of a palace by that name. Thanks!
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 15, 2007 at 6:56 PMSorry, in line 7up " horn" should be replaced by "unicorn"
Posted on: 藏传佛教
December 15, 2007 at 6:50 PMAnother fine lesson, but not easy (for me, at least). Even on a repeated reading I don't know what to do with the word bùdálā (p. 4, A. speaking). A very different problem concerns the third element of the word "very rare" fèngmáolínjiǎo, lit "phoenix's feather unicorn's horn". The character used for lín I found only in Oshanin's 1952 Russian-Chinese dictionary, but it has the traditional radical #198 lù "deer", a radical which no longer appears in post-simplification publications. Curiously, Du's 2004 Chinese-Dutch dictionary gives the whole word with the 3rd character printed with the same phonetic (right half) but with the radical replaced by traditional # 195 yú "fish" (the 4 dots replaced by a horizontal), here translated as "horn", while the character is given by itself under lín with the sole meaning "fish scale". I wonder if some ministry or academy has by now established a definite order of the radicals of the simplified script, as everybody seems to be using his own in the books I have. P.S. I looked up "unicorn" in the Dutch-Chinese dictionary, but this avoids the difficulty by giving dú jiǎo shòu.
Posted on: Ten Four
December 13, 2007 at 3:04 PMHi, Jenny There are even worse confusions than the one caused by 14 and 40 in American English. The British pronounce "can't" as "cahn't" with the vowel of "father", but the Americans leave it as in "can". When registering for courses at Columbia University in 1948 several students from India became the dupes of hearing "you can't take that" as a positive answer in making up their combination of courses that would give them "points" towards a degree, finding out too late that their selection didn't. These same Indians became victims of another confusion, this time not a phonetic but a semantic one. They opened an information booth for foreign students on the campus. But American students also began to use this, and the campus weekly published an article under the heading "Booth popular also with natives". This elicited a furious letter from an Indian about the word "native" which was felt as degrading in his home country. One more confusion and than I'll stop. In Holland we have a kind of chocolates which because of their shape are called "cat's tongues". A New York tabloid published a furious letter from a cat-loving lady about American taxpayers' money (Marshall plan) going to people with such cruel eating habits. A later letter explained that it was as innocent as the cookies called "ladyfingers" which do not imply cannibalism.
Posted on: Ten Four
December 13, 2007 at 12:27 PMHi Changye I looked at all the links you mention and was surprised at the variety. The pictures remind me of the boy who came home from school and told his father proudly that he had learnt to count, and not only forward but also backward. He demonstrated by counting from 1 to 10 and then from 10 to 1. "OK", said papa, "now count your fingers!" Starting with his left hand he came up to 5, and finding this too easy he wanted to show off, saying "I'll count the others backward" and went 10 9 8 7 6, and 5+6=11. Knowing he had 10 fingers, he was himself surprised at this result. It is of course a question of cardinals and ordinals, but try and explain this in a simple way to a kid.
Posted on: Using ChinesePod
December 12, 2007 at 2:27 PMHi Amber and Peasant I apologise for thanking you so late for answering my question. I did check, but apparently before your comments were in. I had asked the question before in the Thanksgiving lesson (end). I do not repeat here what I said there. There was much confusion in the comments to that lesson, which was if I remember right, on the intermediate level (I can't check this, for then what I typed will have disappeared). At that level, students should know that Chinese "conjuctions" such as hé, gēn and "prepositions" such as yōng "with" all go back to verbs, and to a large extent still are. A simple example: "flatten it with a hammer" is just as intelligible in English as "flatten it using a hammer", which is the way Chinese expresses the same idea. In the gǔ wén the use of verbs in the function of what in Indoeuropean are conjunctions and prepositions is even more pronounced. The background of all this is that prepositions, like transitive verbs, express RELATIONS between things, and I have found it helpful to think of all these words as verbs. That hé and gēn both have the two meanings "and" and "with" is not so strange if you realise that both English words express a kind of "togetherness", and that Chinese uses notions of "agreeing","following" to express that same notion. In the same way, it is easiest to think of zài as a verb "(being) at". It is true that hé is no longer used as a verb (the same character but with a 4th tone I found in yī chàng bǎi hè "one person sings and everybody joins in"). But the general idea holds, for prepositions are often used in unpredictable ways, whereas Chinese is much clearer on this point.
Posted on: Automated Phone Recordings
December 17, 2007 at 10:00 AMPS I wonder if bèijǐngshēng could be used for background noise.