Miscellaneous News

[taxiya]

Well, Tang poems (唐诗) sound better in Cantonese

But Poems written during the Tang dynasty rhyme according to the dialect around Chang'an and Luoyang. Even after more than a thousand years, the dialects in Luoyang and Xi'an (Chang'an) are still far closer to the Tang dynasty pronunciation. Modern Cantonese is never that close.

So I couldn't imagine how the Tang poems sound better in a dialect that isn't even close enough to rhyme. I do realize that this kind of saying comes out only recently, say past 10 years. That makes me wonder if it is newly invented myth.

[Addition]
There are officially published rhyme books from Ming dynasty which was based on Song dynasties. The northern Song is in Kaifeng neighbouring Luoyang, the southern Song moved to Hangzhou (Zhejiang) south of Yangtze river. So all their phonology are from around Luoyang. To this day, people in Hangzhou city, Nanjing city can 90% understand people from Luoyang, Xi'an and Beijing in the north. While it is unintelligible between these regions and Canton. So you can imagine what dialect represent the Tang era more accurately today.

 

[NiuBiDaRen]

Wow Scholz looks like an absolute midget next to the Chinese female ceremonial guards. How tall are the female guards? They're chosen for above average height right? They look about 5ft 10 in to me. It's rare to see German leaders so short.

 

[siegecrossbow]

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“It may be upsetting when people say things we might personally disagree with, but the principle of protected free speech is an important part of who we are as a nation,” the White House said.

Where is free speech now?

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[ficker22]

Wow Scholz looks like an absolute midget next to the Chinese female ceremonial guards. How tall are the female guards? They're chosen for above average height right? They look about 5ft 10 in to me. It's rare to see German leaders so short.

He is a real Miniman with 1.69m

 

[Overbom]

Huge loss for human civilization

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1588591605384372226

 

[sheogorath]

Ooh yeah a more gamified way of learning Chinese is using the app Hello Chinese, its subscription based but i personally think its worth getting 3 months subs as a supplemental learning tool.

I tried Hello Chinese once and it nearly killed my phone with how resource intensive it was. Maybe they'll have optimized it by now.

But learning Chinese is really frustrating, if it isn't part of your native language family, a partial blessing is that the Dutch language shares some sounds with Chinese which the english languages doesn't share like "u" or "ü".

I see. My native language is spanish, which means we don't really have any sounds that resemble chinese at all which makes things complicated.

So i'm glad they are changing the HSK program for future students. HSK 1 will have 300 or so words, HSK 2 will have 1200 or so words. I think once you reached HSK 3 in the new program you should be able to at least watch something else then pepa pig level of bullshit.

I've tried to use a browser extension called Toucan to try to learn more advanced words and context. It will randomly translate words from any website you are visiting into the language you want to learn and when you hover the mouse over the word, it will show you the original meaning and a bit of context.

The only downside is that whenever you hover over a word, it will automatically assume you are actually learning. So, at one point, it will increase the amout of translated text in a website to the point it becomes more an excercise in mouse hovering.

 

[tokenanalyst]

This will be an interesting case to follow
View attachment 100869

Red Scare 101: You are guilty before proven innocent and even if you are innocent we gonna assume you are guilty anyway just to make an example out of you. Ah do not expect any compensation from the goverment for your expenses.

I can bet money that he was teaching regular pilots to flight Cessnas.

 

[In4ser]

Only if rhyme is particularly important.

French has many ejective consonant endings like -c, -st, -x, -p unlike other Latin languages such as Spanish and Italian.

Slightly offtopic but Cantonese is probably closer to Ancient Chinese because of rhyming.

 

[henrik]

At the risk of offending people, the reality is that a language being older doesn't make it better, or cuneiform Sumerian would be the best language and oracle bone script would be the best writing system.

Also at the risk of offending people, a language typically is considered to sound smooth and melodic if it has low number of consonant endings outside N (in particular ejective consonant endings like -k, -g, -p, -t, -d), consistent sounding vowels, and vowel rich sentences.

That is why many people think Germanic languages (German itself in particular) are harsh sounding languages while Japanese and Latin languages like Spanish are considered to sound smooth - they tend to have vowel endings and non ejective consonant endings like -N or -S.

By that standard, standard Chinese is one of the smoothest sounding languages in the world next to Japanese, Spanish and Polynesian, with 0 ejective consonant endings, only vowel, N, NG and R endings.

Cantonese is on the other hand is like German, with multiple ejective -k, -p and -t consonant endings.

Sounding smooth does not make a language better necessarily. Cantonese has more intonations than Mandarin, and that makes Cantonese less confusing than Mandarin. When you have many characters of the same pronunciation you get mixed up their meanings.

 

[horse]

The Five Eyes steal his sub contract and he gets angry for like 3 days and back down. It's this aspect of him that I really dislike.

Marcon is okay.

Remember when the UAE cancelled their F-35 contract, so that they can keep Huawei gear inside their network?

The other part of that story, which no one really talks about, is that instead of buying the F-35, the UAE keeps Huawei in their networks, and goes buy Rafale fighters, from none other than Messieurs Marcon.

They do not talk about this, because this UAE deal with France, happened not too long after that Australian sub deal shenanigans.

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Guess the moral of the story is that in the end everyone is happy so no one talks about it anymore.

Until the Americans get that itch to ban something again.

Bwahahahahahahaaa!