Found another word English shares with Dutch: winter.
There’s also zomer (summer) which is fairly obvious, and lente (spring), related to Lent. Old English lencten apparently also retained this broader meaning.
… in Japan, historically, we can go back to kurai, as first recorded in the excellent advice of Honinbo Sanetsu in the early 17th century. He points to the defective way of playing called kuraizume, which effectively means too much influence/thickness.
I like that term. It’s rather more smooth than “over-influential position”.
The Chinese-style phrase “empty stomach centre” is also appealing.
Chinese tongue-twisters added to SL by tderz in 2005, originally from the Chinese-learning site yellowbridge.
I have done some reformatting.
@Groin will like these, I think.
西施死時四十四
xī shī sǐ shí sìshí sì
Xi Shi died at 44.
四是四 / 十是十 / 十四是十四 / 四十是四十 / 四十四是四十四 / 四十四隻石獅子是死的
sì shì sì / shí shì shí / shísì shì shísì / sìshí shì sìshí / sìshísì shì sìshísì / sìshísì zhī shí shīzi shì sǐ de
Four is four,
ten is ten,
fourteen is fourteen,
forty is forty,
forty four is forty four,
at forty four one of the stone lions died.
吃葡萄不吐葡萄皮jí / 不吃葡萄倒吐葡萄皮
pútao bù tù pútao pí / bùchī pútao dào tù pútao pí
If eating grapes, don’t spit out the grape skins.
If (/When) not (anymore) eating grapes, (then) spit out the grape skins.
盆和瓶 / 桌上有個盆 / 盆裡有個瓶 / 砰砰砰 / 是瓶碰盆 / 還是盆碰瓶
pén hé píng / zhuōshàngxíng yǒu gè pén / pén lǐ yǒu gè píng / pēng pēng pēng / shì píng pèng pén / háishì pén pèng píng
Pan and table,
the desktop has a pan,
inside the pan there’s a bottle,
bang, bang, bang.
Is it the bottle hitting the pan
or the pan hitting the bottle?
青青山上一根藤
青藤底下挂銅鈴
風吹藤動銅鈴動
風停藤停銅鈴停
qīng qīng shān shàng yī gēn téng / qīng téng dǐxia guà tóng líng / fēng chuī téng dòng tóng líng dòng / fēng tíng téng tíng tóng líng tíng
Atop a green mountain grows a vine,
under the green vine hangs a copper bell,
when the wind blows, the vine moves and the bell moves,
when the wind stops, the vine stops and the bell stops.
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Related: A Spectre is Haunting Unicode
To sum up - in 1978 a series of small mistakes created some characters out of nothing. The errors went undiscovered just long enough to be set in stone, and now these ghosts are, at least in potential, a part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the dark corners of character tables.
The core ghost characters: 妛挧暃椦槞蟐袮閠駲墸壥彁
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Processing professionals on SL, I’ve seen more and more instances of reduplicated names.
Check out this variant on the theme, in which the first character of the given name is the phonetic component of the second.
葛 凡帆 Ge Fanfan
凡 is rising, 帆 can be either rising or neutral.
Examples (often partial) I can think of in Western naming are:
- Coco / Choco, from Maria del Socorro
- Dido, of classical origin
- Fifi
- Leela / Lila, from Sanskrit
- Lily
- Lola, from Dolores
- Lyla / Leila, from Arabic
- Lulu, from Lucy, Louise etc.
- Mimi, from Maria or Domenico
- Nina and Nino
- Pepe
- Susan / Susanna, from Hebrew
- Tito / Titus
- the surname Toto
- Vivian, from Latin Viviana / -us
And less Western or modern, Xerxes.
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This professional’s name looks hard to pronounce.
姜 志强
Jiāng Zhìqiáng
If he had taught abroad, I bet Westerners would have called him Jangji, like how Jiang Zhujiu became Jujo.
Have you ever observed that noticeable has an e but practicable doesn’t?
raceable and faceable also have the e. So does placeable and laceable.
chasable omits the e, though.
We also have the e-less risible.
What if I asked you to make a word to describe something which can be turned into rice-like grains, like couscous? riceable? ricable? riceible? ricible?
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On topic of names.
It’s probably an obvious thought, but remembering names isn’t just remembering sounds. The name makes sense in its own language, it’s constructed with respect to the sounds and rules of that language. It’s similar to how good chess players can remember chess position quickly if it makes sense. If it doesn’t then it’s very hard. So foreign name can be the position that doesn’t make sense in your language so it’s hard.
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The Japanese reading (kanon) of 姜志强 Jiāng Zhìqiáng would be Kyō Shikyō.
The latter is a rather easier read for me.
Hmm, now I want to explore this deeper.
| Hanzi | Mandarin | Japanese (kanon) |
|---|---|---|
| 柯洁 | Ke Jie | Ka Kiyoshi |
| 芈昱廷 | Mi Yuting | Mi Ikutei |
| 杨鼎新 | Yang Dingxin | Yo Teishin |
| 辜梓豪 | Gu Zihao | Ko Shiko |
| 范廷钰 | Fan Tingyu | Han Teigoku |
Fun name: 吴 昊 Wu Hao
I just ran into 鑫. It’s composed of three 金 (gold) and means “prosperous”.
This has to do with the value of c which can never be /s/ unless it is in front of a front vowel like e, i, oe or ae. If you want c to be a /s/ in front of a back vowel like a, o or u, you need a ç like in façade.
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Huh. I was about to say that every rule has its exception, but I actually didn’t know that the c in practicable was hard.
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In French there are similar spelling constructs for soft and hard “g”. Like e and i after g make the g soft, as in gitane and gendarme. To make the g hard when it is followed by i or e, you insert a “u”, as in guitar and guerre.
I thought that English also uses that spelling rule, but that is not the case with the verb “get”. That should be spelled “guet” by the French spelling rule. Can anyone explain this anomaly?
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There are plenty of examples of hard-g gi in English: gig, gill, girl, girt, give, giddy…
Hard ge is rarer. Consider:
- genkI (energetic, anime / manga term)
- Gent (variant spelling of Ghent, Dutch)
- gear
- Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopian)
The answer is that both get and gear do not come from French but rather Norse, get from geta and gear from gervi.
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gig is possibly from Norse gigja, gill from gjǫlnar, girl from O.E. (or perhaps, again Norse), girt from Norse gjǫrð, give from Norse gefa, giddy from O.E. gidiġ.
However, Norse gestr became guest. guile is French, though.
Let’s also not forget the h convention in ghost, ghoul, ghastly… sorghum … Ghent, etc.
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… a question that puzzles many people. Where does the L come from in Lee for Yi?
It is from the Oriental habit of trying to adapt their names for a western audience. They therefore reverse their natural order of surname-personal name. Yi Ch’ang-ho thus becomes Ch’ang-ho Yi, but the sound Yi is not used after a vowel in Korean and an L is inserted (or N in some parts of Korea). This give us Changho Lee.
In more recent times it has become common even in the west to use the Oriental order, and so we end up with Lee Changho.
TIL that 田 is exactly #30000 in whatever encoding system SL uses.
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I just heard an interesting quote on Modern History TV:
“Pottage is anything that’s cooked in a pot.”
Compare that to modern fry-up, which is anything one cooks in a frying pan.
The word pottage has sunk into obscurity, by the way. stew is the current term, or perhaps soup or casserole.