User Comments - sclim

Posted on: Cold Noodles

QUESTION FOR CHINESEPOD TEAM: Maybe this doesn't have an exact answer because food dishes just get named arbitrarily, then the name gets stuck. But what's the difference between 冷 and 凉 which is used in the dialogue? 冷 means cold, but I sort of understand that it's in the environmental sense, so 冷 temperatures I would expect to be colder than dish temperatures, which would be, I would have thought, room temperature rather than "cold". Now I just realized that 凉 in this context was the verb form, liàng to cool down as in 凉拌; but my residual question was does this imply the same temperature as 凉 in the adjectival sense liáng (which my dictionary suggests cool, cold, which seems to me not as cold as 冷)? 哎呀, the more I look at it, this seems like a meaningless question because of the arbitrariness of food dish names...but if there is actually a sensible answer, I'm curious to hear it. 

Posted on: Cold Noodles

Not really so wierd. If you're familiar with Satay (Sate) of Singapore-Malay cuisine (the thin meat strips threaded on sticks over charcoal heat, with chili and peanut sauce), it's heavily peanut based, and borrowed heavily into, also, Vietnamese and Thai soup-noodle dishes. It kinda grows on you. I just love it!

Posted on: The 着 (zhe) Chronicles: How We Verb

CHINESEPOD: HELP! :

Hmm, this is tricky, trying to transcribe what she said on the fly; it sounds to me like she actually started with yet one more 走 than your version shows, but in the context, although the string of several written down 走's looks odd, I think the sense of it is more clear:

走路,走着走着走...看到了

(In) walking down the road, (while) walking, walking, walking (along, not particularly looking for anything)...I spotted (the 200 yuan).

It isn't 看,"look", 到了"I arrived", so much as 看到了 "my eyes actually zeroed in on the 200 yuan." The 着, in fact the series of alternating 走着 sets up the sense that one was walking aimlessly, or at least not specifically looking for anything, when incidentally the sighting of the 200 yuan grabbed one's attention. At least that's the sense I make of it. Perhaps, now we've all busted our brains over this, perhaps management can advise us?

Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities

Hmm, this is very interesting. From everything I could gather about the "Water-Splashing Festival" of the Dai Ethnic minority of Yunnan which wasn't much, or at least, was hard to evaluate for scholarly accuracy as opposed to Local Tourist Bureau Version, this festival is the cognate of the Songkran New Year Festival of Thailand, which I am more familiar with. They both are Buddhist festivals and involve throwing water at passers-by and both occur in early April which is the traditional New Year in both cultures. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songkran

Interestingly, ethno-liguistically, as far as I can make out, Dai is closely related to Thai, and they are both branches of the Tai-Kadai group of languages, which was once thought to be part of the Sino-Tibetan Family (which includes Chinese) but more recently, most Western linguists now feel it doesn't, although, even more interestingly Chinese scholars still adhere to this old belief. So, apparently, this is an ancient festival celebrated, perhaps a couple thousand years ago, before the Thais and Dai's split off from each other as quasi distinct entities, but still celebrating the same New Year Water Festival! I gotta find out more about the Dai language and see how close it is to Thai!. Interestingly, official Chinese for Dai is 傣, and for Thai it is 泰. Does this similarity reflect some knowledge that they are closely related? This is so tantalizing!

Posted on: Why is everyone looking at me?

Of course my apology should be also directed at you, yoming8808; so everything I said to pretzelllogic62 applies to you too; no offense intended; I had no idea what level of English facility you were at, and if I sounded officious and condescending, that was not my intent. My apologies.

Posted on: Strong

From what I understand, it would seem to me that in 中文, 厉害 would be the bon mot equivalent of "formidable" in the French and English sense of devastating, overwhelming, ferocious, as an opponent. Perhaps we can have confirmation from the team, (or peut-être next week's promised Qingwen follow up on the more abstract senses of "strong" may even include 厉害!)

Posted on: Chinese Ethnic Minorities

I was just thinking, in the spirit of celebrating the diversity of 民族, not forgetting the  外国人族, we should wish Big John...no, that doesn't sound right, make that Florida John a Happy and Auspicious 4th of July.

Posted on: Why is everyone looking at me?

"It's me" falls into this category. "It is I" would be technically correct; but when was the last time you heard someone actually say that? Much less the contracted form, as one would use in casual speech "It's I". I have to say, that last example, as written there, looks WRONG to me even though it's "correct".

Oops, I'm sure I've strayed far from the original topic, so I won't say any more. It feels like a bad dream and I'm the only one talking loudly without any clothes on. Why is everyone staring at me?

Posted on: Why is everyone looking at me?

I fully agree "to who are you speaking to" SOUNDS wrong and IS wrong. But most colloquial speakers around where I live (Urban West North America) would not use that construction. They'd say:

"Who are you talking to" or more likely "Who d'ya think yer talkin' to". In this construction, "whom" is still obviously the grammatically correct form, but "who" here doesn't sound so glaring. The speakers I'm talking about would not use "to who are you speaking to" any more than they would use "to whom are you speaking to" . IMHO this might be the beginning of one of those usage shifts that has been going on in English since English started being recognizable as English in Shakespeare's time, and obviously even before that, in 600-700 AD when Old English demanded the use of 5 declensions in Noun Use. But mine is a subtle point on whether a given usage is more common nowadays, and, even more tenuously, is it acceptable. Your point, that it is grammatically incorrect by Standard English Rules, is, of course, absolutely correct.

Posted on: Retired Life

Yes, it appears to be 野馬分鬃 -- parting the wild horse's mane