Tag: Latin (LA)

A radical, “gen(i)us” new idea for learning Chinese characters

Chimpanzee head sketch
Monkey with character?

My idea stems from the fact that I always had a facility for learning the Linnean binomials of animals and plants which as you probably know are made up of a genus name, bearing a capital initial letter and then a species name. Sometimes you get a third part, which is subspecies.

For example, chimpanzees and bonobos share the genus Pan, bonobos being Pan paniscus and there are no subspecies, whereas common chimps are Pan troglodytes and there are four subspecies, P.t.troglogytes, P.t.schweinfurthii (North Zaire) and two others.

So my idea was to give each Chinese character a linnaean binomial as a way to drive it home. It might be a way to help people latch mentally onto some of the harder characters. I don’t have ZH font installed on the machine I’m writing on now, so I will just describe it in terms of the “rules” for doing it.

The “genus” name would show the radical of the character, but in Latin. So if you have the hand radical in a character, it would be in the genus “Manus“.  “拍” to beat or clap has the hand radical and the white component, so its Linnean binomial would be Manus albus, the common beat or clap.

You could consider the link ups of two characters in one word as like symbiotic relationships of two living things, its frequency in linguistic use could be acquainted with its rarity or endangeredness, whether it’s in the list also for Korean and Japanese could be the zoogeography, and even the stress could determine what kind of an organism it is. The first tone could be for herbivores, the second for carnivores, as they have to jump up and pounce on often larger prey, the fourth for insectivores, pouncing on the lower prey, and third tone for omnivores.

It just may be a way to learn some of them. I don’t think it’s any crazier than Drs Goodman, Heisig or Hoenig, all of whom are pretty much in the mainstream, so please don’t unfollow or call for the white van just yet!

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De impossibilitate parodiae

Picture of Julian Assange during a talk at 26C3
Master wikileaker Julius "Seize 'er" Assange of alledgedly leaking winky...

This week a number of interesting developments hit the headlines as I was travelling around Europe. There is in fact so much going on at the moment that it’s impossible to comment on everything, or indeed stay abreast of everything. Of course one of the main things which caught my eye, and I am sure the eye of every Internet denizen is the goings-on with Mr Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks, currently under arrest in London and awaiting extradition to Sweden, a country quite happy to overlook and not investigate or prosecute Saab’s dealings in the BAE affair, but extremely concerned to deal out every justice to Mr Assange for allegedly raping two women, whereby the detail seems to be not that he had sex with somebody that was unhappy to have sex with him, but that he did so without wearing a condom when he was supposed to be wearing one. Whether this was two occasions with each of the two women separately or during a threesome, the press has not deemed needful to elucidate. There we go, then, not exactly the next Peter Sutcliffe, but nevertheless enough to put him on the Interpol list in several countries. This apparently has nothing to do with the leaks he is doing other than those involving his genital member, as if anyone is going to believe that. Before you can say Jåkk Røbbænsen, or whatever Jack Robinson is in Swedish, this person will be extraordinarily rendered to the States and called to account before the Senate, some of whom have already issued Iran-style fatwas on him for treachery against their deen.

So concerned that the powers-that-be to nail missed a sandwich (sorry, but that’s how the voice recognition software heard “Mr Assange”) for failure to wear a condom when that was a pre-condition for the sex that in the meantime they even managed to lean on Pope Benedict the 16th to abandon the Roman Catholic Church’s strict ban on blob-wearing, so now Mr A cannot even claim conscientious reasons for his failure to don. That’s how far up the conspiracy to nail this ultraleaker has gone.

And so the wikileaker has been arrested for allowing his own winky to leak into somebody else’s pubic domain, and there has been a scramble for the Internet domain “winkyleaks.com” – one I went to see if I could get it in order to do some interesting parodies of the recently emerging wholly un-astonishing but for some reason scandalous depeches, I saw that the domain http://www.winkyleaks.com had in fact already been nabbed, and moreover even put into effect with some very stylish, Onion-style parodies of the recent news.  Evidently it was not written on high that this domain should fall into my lot, but at least it seems to have gone into good hands, so go and see if you feel like a good chuckle.

No worries though, I can always do a series on Huliganov TV of my own parody wikileaks, so watch this space. If I do them they will be like a mini-series with their own little section on here. Whether they will be as funny as the ones over at http://www.winkyleaks.com is anyone’s guess, though.  They’re doing a jolly good job.

Another interesting headline this week was that Google Translate have now included Latin in their list of languages to translate into and out of. The problem is that of course everything which isn’t in their database which at the moment are still very small is left in the original even if it is a word which seems to have been available to that classical language anyway. At the moment if you ask it to translate “On the impossibility of parody“, for example, it gives you “De impossibilitate parody” – so it doesn’t recognise the perfectly good Latin word “parodia” which presumably takes a genitive “parodiae”. But it’s early days yet, for Latin, I dare say.

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