User Comments - Grambers
Grambers
Posted on: Extreme Weather and Pollution
January 4, 2012 at 5:07 PMOh dear. Just a few minutes after finding a sentence I love, here's one I hate. I couldn't understand the Chinese at all, but felt much about this when I read the English translation and didn't understand a word of that either! - 他那个人性格很极端，他得不到的东西，别人也休想得到。(That guy's personality is really extreme. Things that he can't obtain other people can't even dream of getting.)
Posted on: Extreme Weather and Pollution
January 4, 2012 at 5:00 PMI love this sentence: 多少活生生的例子摆在眼前，就是不能吸取教训。 Think I will learn it by heart!
Posted on: Extreme Weather and Pollution
January 4, 2012 at 4:57 PMI heard "频繁" as "平凡" in this dialogue. It's not often you get a two-character word prounced in precisely the same way (well nearly - it's very hard to hear that final 'g' at full speed) which seems to make perfect sense in the context and has very nearly the same meaning. Or is it? Would 平凡 work as a replacement for 频繁 in this sentence: 极端天气来得越来越频繁了?
Posted on: Giving Gifts in China
January 4, 2012 at 4:38 PMC'mon, you must've known some smart-arse would write something a long these lines when you thought up the topic, right? I'm just surprised that it took four days for that smart-arse to be me!:)
Posted on: Giving Gifts in China
January 4, 2012 at 4:32 PMAh, gift-giving etiquette; truly a mine field. I never know whether to reveal the Maserati Coupe sweetener before or after the brothel binge. And finding the right euphemism for 'authentic African tiger penis' is just sooooo awkward.
Posted on: Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 4, 2012 at 1:39 PMAh. Is that right? Never heard of him. Guess this makes me a Bad Brit. And a bad Bond too!
Posted on: Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 4, 2012 at 1:00 PMNot sure which 托马斯 you are referring to, old boy? But since you ask, mother's side is of Lithuanian extraction, father's appear to have been resident in the southern part of England as far back as they've been able to research. Not that I have much interest in family history or establishing my Anglo-Saxon credentials. What I will say is that I am 99% sure my Lithuanian great-great-great-grandfather did not jump down off his boat and head straight for Saville Row. The folks packing plastic and cash wads these days are largely Chinese kids. And, label me a xenophobe if you will, but I maintain there is reason to be disturbed by such a phenomenon, on spiritual rather than racist grounds. A brat is a brat, whatever language they speak. As it happens, most of them down on Bond Street speak Mandarin Chinese.
Posted on: Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art
January 4, 2012 at 11:17 AMHa - nice lesson concept. Can you do a lesson to help the increasingly few natives who work within the luxury shopping arcades of London's 'Little PRC' (aka. Bond Street). Many Louis Vitton / Burberry / Prada etc. staff in the UK these days are Chinese natives, but you occasionally glimpse a flustered local flapping away at one of the 97.4% of customers who speak fluent Mandarin.
Posted on: Self-Taught Degrees in China
January 3, 2012 at 1:13 PMHaving spent quite a bit of time in Hong Kong over the years, I'd say Kongers are the fondest of using imported/mongrel vocabulary, with the habit spilling out into Shenzhen and beyond (though dying almost completely out by the time you get to the farthest reaches of the Pearl Delta, the area of China I'm most familiar with). Having spent no time at all in India, I can only guess that it may be the same there, at least among the upper-crust. Maybe it's a colonial thing, maybe not?
But in terms of evolving language, no, no, you have my complete agreement. I wouldn't want to fix any language, not my own, nor Mandarin Chinese, in stone and insist it could not change. Language is endlessly mutable: fact. There's a quite brilliant book by a chap called Guy Deutsche ('The Unfolding of Language', I think it's called) which examines language change on evolutionary scale and provides a theory as to why, despite there being evidence that ALL languages undergo a process of reduction and grammatical simplification over time, languages survive in their multifarious and endless complex forms. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Posted on: Extreme Weather and Pollution
January 5, 2012 at 9:11 AMThanks Connie and zhenlijiang: I appreciate that 频繁 and 平凡 do not have exactly the same meaning, but was under the impression 平凡 meant 'commonplace', and so the sentence would read something like: "extreme weather is now more and more commonplace", which - in English, obviously - makes sense. Of course, you can say "extreme weather is becoming more and more frequent" (极端天气来得越来越频繁了) but how to say “extreme weather is becoming more and more normal" (although I can see how this could be a contradiction in terms, as if it's 'normal', it manifestly can't be 'extreme' - but hopefully you get my point!)? Is there definitely no way to use 平凡?