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1633

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.

2 Likes
1634

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

3 Likes
1635

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.

1 Like
1636

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.

1637

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?

1 Like
1638

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.

1 Like
1639

The Japanese reading (kanon) of 姜志强 Jiāng Zhìqiáng would be Kyō Shikyō.

The latter is a rather easier read for me.

1640

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
1641

Fun name: 吴 昊 Wu Hao

I just ran into 鑫. It’s composed of three 金 (gold) and means “prosperous”.

1642

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.

2 Likes
1644

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.

1 Like
1645

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?

2 Likes
1646

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.

3 Likes
1647

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.

3 Likes
1648

… 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.

– Fairbairn, Minezine, 2000

1649

TIL that 田 is exactly #30000 in whatever encoding system SL uses.

2 Likes
1650

See kanji - 噌 variants in different fonts - Japanese Language Stack Exchange

1 Like
1651

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.

1652

By the way, that video was on food that a lower-middle class English vassal might provide to his knight.

It was:

  • a pea stew
  • brown bread
  • salmon

I’d take that any day.

By the way, I’m reminded of how, 200 years ago, oysters and lobsters were lower-class food. Now, again, I’d consider myself extremely lucky to dine on oysters and lobster with a nice rye loaf.

1 Like
1653

On the topic of experimental archaeology, which is what that video is about, I’ve read that the mainstream view was initially that straw-roofed houses would have had a hole in their roofs to allow the smoke to exit. However, this was disproven by experimental archaeology; if a hole was provided, too much oxygen could enter the dwelling and it caught fire.

Now I think, as well, of one of David Attenborough’s autobiographies where he related entering a straw-roofed dwelling, probably in the '50s or perhaps '60s. He said that there was a very great concentration of smoke inside the house, which would be expected by there being no hole in the roof.

1 Like