Let's do Chinese together.
So this medieval Chinese novel popped up in logs recently and made me somewhat curious. As it turns out, the supposed "culture" of the supposedly cultured Western world (it's not) doesn't have a version. And if they did - it'd be by some sort of infrequentable nigger or otheri, and, of course... unavailable.ii
What am I to do ? Every language I've learned to date I've learned from women that knew it. While the general principle seems sound, I am not particularly hopeful I'll ever encounter a pancake faced girl I can stand to look at for long enough, and so I'm reasonably satisfied that I shall never learn any Chinese the normal way.
But rather than sit and bemoan our sad fate, let's try something. Here's the first sentence of the damned thingiii :
太史公曰：“《說難》、《孤憤》，賢聖發憤之所作也。”由此觀之，古之聖賢不憤則不作矣。不憤而作，譬如不寒而顫，不病而呻吟也。雖作，何觀乎？
Now what we'll do is take every single character, look it up, then see what the hell we can sum the whole thing up to. The time now is three minutes past noon, an' we begin!
- 太 A superlative variant of "big".
- 史 History, chronicle, annals.
- 公 Fair, equitable ; Public ; Warlord ; Male beastiv
- 曰 To say.
- 說 To say, speak, explain, discuss ; To reference ; To discuss, theory, explanation ; To intermediate
- 難 Difficult ; Unpleasant
- 孤 Orphan ; Solitary
- 憤 To resent ; Indignant
- 賢 Virtuous ; Clever, vise ; Worthy ; Able, capable
- 聖 Sacred ; Saint ; Possibly Confucius, may his inept name be forever cursed in the Hells he inhabits.
- 發 To issue, to produce (such as electricity) ; To depart ; To become
- 憤 To resent ; Indignant (cf. supra).
- 之 This ; To appear, to come ; Indicates possession or flexion from previous to next icon
- 所 Place, location ; "That which"
- 作 To do, perform ; To work ; To write ; To act, or perform
- 也 Also, too, or neither ; Even
- 由 By
- 此 This, these ; In this case
- 觀 See, observe ; Appearance
- 之 Posessive or as supra or else "it him her them" or "go to".v
- 古 Old, classic, ancient ; Story
- 之 Whatever.
- 聖 Sacred ; Saint ; Possibly Confucius, may his inept name be forever cursed in the Hells he inhabits.
- 賢 Virtuous ; Clever, vise ; Worthy ; Able, capable
- 不 Negative
- 憤 Anger ; Fury
- 則 Then ; Rule, standard, regulation, criterion ; To follow
- 不 Negative
- 作 To do, perform ; To work ; To write ; To act, or perform
- 矣 Apparently this is a spelling out of the sentence period.
- 不
- 憤
- 而
- 作
- 譬
- 如
- 不
- 寒
- 而
- 顫
- 不
- 病
- 而
- 呻
- 吟
- 也
- 雖
- 作
- 何
- 觀
- 乎
That'll have to do, at least for now, I tire of this nonsense. Let's admire our work product so far :
Big Story of Warlord Sayings : "Unpleasant theories", "Solitary resentment", Worthy sacred product of resentment from the place wherein it was produced. By these observances of old stories your sanctification may proceed without anger in a regulated manner and not end up hollow performance artistry.
The sad moral of this half hour's effort being that not only is reading Chinese more effort than I'm willing to give it - nobody else can be trusted to do it. Because you know for a fucking fact they'll lie.
———- I'll read the illiterate before I read fucking "activists" of that ilk. And remember kids : if you work for, by or with the state, you're the nigger.
Don't be a nigger ; there's nothing worse in this world. [↩]
- I briefly considered busting the text out of the ridiculously spurious "copyright" claims just for the hell of it. Conflict of principles : yes the pederasts should be raped ; however no, the derp doesn't deserve further airings.
Would you break a guilty woman out of an injust prison ? Apparently, I won't, at least not this time. [↩]
- Or at least, so I think. Hard enough to pick your place playing the cat in the calendar. [↩]
- You know - the female notion of warlordry, because clearly "to be human" is "to be female" which is to say not powerful but castrated. How cool is that!
I'm already starting to suspect Chinese is even more fucked up than English. [↩]
- Isn't this language fucking useless already ? [↩]
Saturday, 4 June 2016
This approach fails. They have multi-character words that don't break cleanly. And idioms, even.
Saturday, 4 June 2016
/me supposes the return of MP to the dark world of OkCupid for language learning purposes.
Saturday, 4 June 2016
@Stanislav Datskovskiy Yeah, well...
@BingoBoingo Neah.
Sunday, 5 June 2016
@Stanislav Datskovskiy Let's go into detail. With an actual language (English not included), function is obvious from usage - you have verbs and nouns, conjugation and declension, you can extract case or number through sufficiently patient survey of used forms and eventually arrive at meaning through this process - which is how human beings even acquire the faculty. There is a strict relation between what's being said and how it's to be said, which is part of language NOT part of culture (even if this later tends to parasitize the former, and even if you can't have clean categories and etc).
Consequently "cum e peste tot ? la fel ca peste tot." means something directly, and incontrovertibly. Should it also suggest other things ; reference other things, or even come to mean secondary things - nevertheless it still is what it is, first and foremost. I teach my slaves to do grammatical analysis, and this allows them a sure, if slow and oft painful nevertheless a sure, certain avenue to extract entire the sense of any sentence.
Meanwhile in Chinese, there's strictly no possibility of "correct" decoding supported by the language. If I say text T translates to meaning M1, and rando says it transaltes to meaning M2, there's absolutely nothing you can do to pick among the M's outside of falling back on your WoT. Does "the brown fox jumped over the green bush" mean "do not cross until green light" or "shooting season started" ?
This is a serious fucking problem, and I have no idea how European fictions such as "law" or "contracts" are even supposed to work in Chinese ; or for that matter what "programming" could conceivably even mean to the native speaker.
Monday, 6 June 2016
What about a mixed girl? She doesn't seem all that moonfaced: http://www.cinemagia.ro/actori/xing-elena-ling-30443/
Monday, 6 June 2016
Yeah, Bucharest girls are ok o.O
Friday, 10 June 2016
中國的語言是容易當你谷歌翻譯
Friday, 10 June 2016
Tulai Mari tu stii chineza ?!
Tuesday, 10 October 2017
mircea_popescu: of course by now we don't know whether this isn't an impostor :)
mircea_popescu: make a pgp wouldja.
spandrell_: if somebody actually bothers to supplant me i'll feel very flattered
mircea_popescu: i don't think you've experienced paranoia of quite this strength and vintage in all your born days.
LOL
Tuesday, 10 October 2017
trufs.