User Comments - changye

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (2)

鲁迅曾说过一句名言，"其实地上本没有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。" 我想如果鲁迅复活的话会用这句话的变种来批评当代中国人，比方说、"扔的人多了，也便成了垃圾场。"

我住的东北小城市里很少有官方指定的垃圾点，但是一个不讲文明的人随便扔垃圾的地方往往就成为一个事实上的临时垃圾点，接着会有很多人把垃圾扔在这个"非正式"地点。

众所周知，一般中国人很爱历史，而且很善于吸取或继承前人的智慧和经验。我认为这大概是有些中国朋友在日常生活中也不知不觉步前人的后尘，无意中就乱扔垃圾的原因之一。

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (2)

Hi kaohsiung,

Please be careful. Such warnings are invariably followed by the horrifying phrase, "否则，后果自负"！

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (2)

Leaving banknotes is the BEST WAY to communicate.

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (2)

The phrase "心里有鬼" in the dialogue just reminds me of a well known Chinese saying "不做亏心事，不怕鬼敲门。" （A good conscience is a soft pillow）

Posted on: Chinese Characters and the History of Sex in China

Hi mikenotinjubei,

I’m happy to hear that you are learning Japanese with the help of sake, haha. Winter is the best time for drinking hot sake! To be honest, I don’t like Katakana very much. Actually, reading Japanese texts that have a lot of katakana scripts is not an easy job. Of course, it’s a matter of habituation, but I still don’t think katakana goes well visually with Chinese characters.

Furthermore, in modern Japanese, katakana scripts are usually used to transcribe foreign words and names, so reading Japanese texts loaded with katakana automatically means that you have to decipher many transliterated foreign words, which is a rather tough job especially for elderly people, like my parents, who usually don’t have knowledge of English.

Believe it or not, most official documents were written only with Kanji and KATAKANA in Japan from the Meiji Period to the end of the war, because at that time katakana was traditionally/generally considered more “masculine, authentic and intellectual” than hiragana. As you know, stupid bureaucrats tend to think that the more unreadable the more authentic legal texts are!

Posted on: Argument over Garbage (2)

Hi mikeinewshot,

The character "爱" is sometimes translated as "often, tend to, apt to", often followed by words that connote negatively, such as "他爱哭(cry)", "这个机器爱坏(break)" and "他爱发脾气(lose temper)". Of course, you can also say "她很爱笑(smile)" or "我爱开玩笑(joke)".

Posted on: Get in line!

Hi echo2,

That's a nice photo. It's good to see the young guys learning how to wait in line, but I worry a bit that some of them won't make it.....

Posted on: Chinese Characters and the History of Sex in China

Hi christine30550,

Correction : I've just found that "强" is listed in 康熙字典 as a variant of "強". Looks like that the variant was adopted as the "simplified" form of authentic "強" in the PRC perhaps to ensure consistency with "虽" (雖).......? For the record, "雖" also has its variant that has the right part of "強", hehe.

Posted on: Chinese Characters and the History of Sex in China

Hi bababardwan,

I’m sorry for the late reply to your question about the translation of tha text in 甲骨文. Now let me show you how the “trick” was done, hehe. To tell you the truth, I can only read frequently used bone scripts, for example, 辛, 酉, 宾, 卜, 贞, 灾, 弗, 其 in the text, but I didn't know at all the characters 朕, 正, 解, and 化 in the same text.

I have a few dictionaries of oracle bone scripts, but unfortunately they only have indexes by modern Chinese characters, which means, in general, it’s very difficult to read these ancient texts without knowing 甲骨文 beforehand. Dictionaries usually don’t help much in deciphering oracle bone scripts.

Fortunately, I knew the tortoise plastron in your photo is very famous among 甲骨文 lovers, so I looked up it in my book that contains more than one thousand rubbings of 甲骨文, and luckily enough, I found the same one in it. The rubbing is accompanied by the same text written with modern Chinese characters!

The problem is that it doesn’t show you a modern translation. So I had to look up some characters in 甲骨文 dictionaries to know the ancient meaning of them. To be honest, I’m still not sure about the name of a local king in the text. By the way, you can see the cracks that look like the shape of “卜” in the plastron in your photo.

Posted on: Chinese Characters and the History of Sex in China

Hi christine30550,

I almost overlook your interesting question.

“强” is only used in simplified Chinese. In Taiwan, Korea and Japan, only “強” is used, and this IS the authentic character, because you can find “強” in famous ancient dictionaries, such as 说文解字 (circa 100 A.D.), 广韵 (1008 A.C.) and 康熙字典 (1716), but not “强” in them.

My groundless guess is that the shape of the character was intentionally changed from “強” to “强” by the PRC scholars in 1950s just to ensure consistency with “虽” (雖), which is a character frequently used in modern Chinese. Please be noted it’s just a shot in the dark!

As for “德/徳”, actually both have long been used in China. In the early stage of Chinese characters, i.e. oracle bone scripts (甲骨文) and bronze inscriptions (金文), only “徳” was used, and “一” was added to the character in seal scripts (篆书) in the era of Qin dynasty. After that, “一” was dropped in 隶书 scripts, then later “一” was revived again.....wow.

The three ancient dictionaries I mentioned above all list “德”, but not “徳” in them. On the other hand, my 甲骨文/金文/隶书 dictionaries only list “徳”, the one that doesn’t have “一”. In China, Taiwan, and Korea, people usually use the character “德” now, and “徳” has been in use only in Japan since 1950s. Before that, Japanese people also used “德”.