Too much Victor Mair

September 27, 2013 @ 4:26 am · Filed by under Errors, Esthetics, Humor, Ideography, Language and art, Language exotification, Language play, Languages, Lost in translation, Names, Pragmatics, Psychology of language, Punctuation, Reading, Silliness, Slogans, Typography, Writing systems, WTF

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I've been reading way too much Victor Mair. In the restaurant of my hotel in London I just saw an English girl wearing a T-shirt on which it said this:

H O
P E

And I immediately thought, who is Ho Pe?

Not a Chinese name, I decided; more like Vietnamese (think of Ho Chi Minh, for example, though Ho was not his birth name), or more likely Burmese (there was a famous linguist named Hla Pe). But why would a girl in London have a Burmese personal name on her T-shirt?

Considering that I have almost no knowledge of Asian languages, and I'm in England, and the T-shirt slogan was in English, my willingness to think so readily in terms of Asian languages was rather surprising. And I blame Victor Mair.

September 27, 2013 @ 4:26 am · Filed by under Errors, Esthetics, Humor, Ideography, Language and art, Language exotification, Language play, Languages, Lost in translation, Names, Pragmatics, Psychology of language, Punctuation, Reading, Silliness, Slogans, Typography, Writing systems, WTF


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