Wordy Blog Archive 2014-05
The Game “go”, 碁 vs 棋, Japanese and Chinese
when you see a word that's spell'd wrong but used by others often, you deem it eyesore. like, wtf.
Some Japanese chars are like that to Chinese. The char 碁 (meaning “board game”) in Japanese is like that.
about the char's etymology, i think it was original a Chinese char, but fell out of use. We use the char 棋 instead.
also, many terms in English came from Japan leaves a bad taste for chinese. Because, it was Chinese. The go game, is one example. It's known as “go” because it came from the character 碁 used in Japan, is pronounced “go”. The character in is pronounced “qi2” in Chinese, same as 棋.
it's known by Japanese name because Japanese popularized the game in 1990s. (while chinese is doing sino-jap war and civil war and Mao and cultural revolution)
a proper name in English for the game would be “surround game”, or “surround chess”.
碁棋
writing and publishing: content vs grammar
you have 2 choices.
- (1) write 10 articles, but sloppy in english or grammar.
- (2) write 1 article, perfect in grammar.
if content is more important, then (1) is better. later on you can edit. first you need to get the content out, when you have 10 million things in your head.
but of course, if you are concerned about readership (aka marketing), then (2) is more important. because, when a book doesn't have a attractive cover, it gets no sniffing.
comment at https://plus.google.com/+XahLee/posts/7hrk51biRBy
The Moronicities of Typography: Hyphen, Dash, Quotation Marks, Apostrophe (minor update)
café, décor, déjà vu, résumé, risqué, étude, fiancée, Ingénue, crème de la crème, ménage à trois, coup de grâce, mêlée, my rôle, raison d'être, zoölogy, reënact, naïve, Chloë, façade. Accent Marks: Trema, Umlaut, Macron, Circumflex (repost)
Garden Path Sentence
- “The old man the boat.”
- “The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.”
- “The author wrote the novel was likely to be a best-seller.”
These are called Garden path sentence.
A garden path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end.
[THE ETYMOLOGY OF SHORTY IN HIP HOP: An absurdly nerdy look at how hip hop invented the most important slang of our time. By Matthew Daniels. At http://www.mdaniels.com/shorty/ , accessed on 2014-05-07 ]