Benjamin Hull shared a unique application of Hanyu Pinyin that he noticed on a Pizza Hut (Bìshèng Kè) menu in Ānhūi Shěng Wúhú Shì (where he is currently studying Pǔtōnghùa) — see photos below. Ben notes: …the use of Pīnyīn as a guide to English pronunciation is new for me. For a moment I thought it was […]
In "Hong Kong Food Runes", World Literature Today (Spring, 2019), Lian-Hee Wee takes a highly literate look at the semiliteracy of Hong Kong restaurant workers. This is a different view from our earlier investigations on this topic, since Wee is writing from the vantage of a waiter who is intimately familiar with this stenographic script. […]
Adam Hermann, "Sienna Miller talks nailing the Philly accent for 'American Woman' on Jimmy Fallon", Philly Voice 6/15/2019: British actress Sienna Miller has an accent when she talks, but it's decidedly not something you normally hear from an eastern Pennsylvania resident. For the film "American Woman", which comes out next week and is set in […]
The word for "write" in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is xiě. The traditional form of the Sinograph used to write this word is 寫, var. 冩 (can you see the difference?). In Japanese that would be pronounced "sha" or "utsusu", but it is considered an uncommon character (hyōgaiji), and means not "write", but "transcribe; duplicate; […]
Somehow it happened: Any reasons why a simple statement would deliver the opposite translation on Google Translate? Just checked this a few minutes ago: pic.twitter.com/aso2TFrFUg — Joanna Chiu 趙淇欣 (@joannachiu) June 14, 2019
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its two-hundred-and-eighty-seventh issue: “Emotion, Reason, and Language: Meanings Are Made, Not Retrieved” by J. Marshall Unger. A free pdf of this paper is available here.
Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "If I really focus, I can distinguish between John Steinbeck and John Updike, or between Gore Vidal and Vidal Sassoon, but not both at once."
We just posted on a calligraphic ambigram that means both "go" and "Hong Kong": "'Go Hong Kong!'" (6/12/19). Here's another one that does not require rotation: (Source)
Whether in English or in Chinese (Xiānggǎng jiāyóu 香港加油!), "Go Hong Kong!" has been blocked and censored on the Chinese internet because of the massive protests against the hated extradition bill that Xi Jinping is trying to force upon the city. However, through the magic of Chinese calligraphy, there's a way to get around the […]
Jeff DeMarco writes: My son in Hong Kong made this insightful quip regarding the attached photo: “I feel cooperation with China is ultimately going to depend on us understanding each other's potato-chip flavors.” I presume the meaning is something along the line of “spaghetti sauce flavor….”
There's a new exhibition on "Writing: Making Your Mark" at the British Library. Judging from the homepage and all that I've heard about it, this is an exciting, informative, comprehensive display of more than a hundred objects and forty different systems pertaining to the history of writing during the past five millennia and drawn from […]
Babies start making speech-like vocalizations long before they start to produce recognizable words — various stages of these sounds are variously described as cries, grunts, coos, goos, yells, growls, squeals, and "reduplicated" or "variegated" babbling. Developmental progress is marked by variable mixtures of variable versions of these noises, and their analysis may provide early evidence […]
Today xkcd: Mouse-over title: "Even the powerful, tart Granny Smith cultivar is proving ineffective against new Gran-negative doctors."