Let me know how you found me, where you're from, why you're here, a little about yourself, recommend a book, recommend a movie, tell me a secret, tell me something, ask me a question, etc. =)

Ad Astra,

The Bride of the First House.
bride (at) livejournal (dot) com

weather	:		sunny
outside	:		7.9°C
mood	:		...

UBC in Verona, Italy: Language, Opera and Cuisine

Experience the famous city of Romeo and Juliette. Morning language classes at a renowned school are complemented by historical excursions in the afternoons. The program also includes tickets for four opera performances in the incredible setting of the Roman Arena.

June 17 - July 1. CAD$3,250
Airfare not included.

An Operatic Tour of Salzburg and Munich with Diane King

Join UBC instructor and opera expert Diane King for this adventure in Bavaria and Austria, renowned for their rich musical history and dramatic countryside. Experience the operas of Mozart and Wagner, and travel to the locations where they were composed. Opera performances at the Salzburg Summer Festival and Munich Opera House are included.

July 2007. Price TBA.
Airfare not included.

The very idea of going on programs like these makes me meltie. Most likely not this year, but maybe in the 2010 timeframe, give or take.

I may not go on these exact programs, but I would like some kind of educational, structured activity vacation. Italy takes precedence over Germany for me, so if there were an Operatic Tour of Italy that includes Teatro alla Scala, I'm all there.

weather	:		partially sunny
outside	:		9.1°C
mood	:		...

Software user interface buttons should not contain more than one single word (two in extenuating circumstances) and, as a rule of thumb, it should be a verb unless it's an OK button. Make an exception if the situation warrants it, but be sure it actually is an exception.

Aside from being tidier, we have to translate the button text into French and Italian. French always takes up 1.5 to double the amount of space that English does... sometimes more. French words are longer and French grammar takes more words to cover the same thing. Italian is not quite as verbose, but it does tend to run a little longer than English in general.

An example of this is a button that says Save Bank Information which is technically inaccurate because it's actually the Bank Account Information which includes the Bank's Information. This ends up being Sauvegarder l'Information de Compte Bancaire in French and Salva l'Informazione di Conto Bancario in Italian.

There's just no way. XD

And for the nerdy linguaphiles (okay, just me):

The verb for button text should be in the present imperative second person singular form in English; infinitive form in French; and the present imperative, formal second person singular form in Italian. If you want to be ultra-formal, use the infinitive in Italian... but that tends to be very very impersonal as well.

Warning or error messages that ask the user to "please [do something]" should be in the present imperative, formal second person singular form in French ("veuillez [faire quelque chose]"), and the present imperative, formal second person singular form in Italian ("[faccia qualcosa]"). And the word please (s'il vous plait; per favore) is generally omitted because the sentiment is included in the formal form of the verb conjugation.

Status names in English, French and Italian should to be the past participle of a verb and should grammatically fit into the phrase "it has been ____".

weather	:		cloudy/foggy
outside	:		3.3°C
mood	:		...

Tomorrow I have to do a two minute presentation in front of the class to introduce myself in Italian using the things we've learned in the first two classes. I have it written, I just have to keep practicing now.

It's pretty amazing how far you can get with just the present tense of a few verbs, a smattering of vocabulary, the alphabet, numbers and some common expressions. I'm amazed that I have four full paragraphs — IN ITALIAN — describing various aspects of myself.

I've started an Italian journal, posted my intro presentation and various notes I've been collecting. I've been spending most of my time with that in the last little while. I want that journal to be all Italian and as little English as possible. And what is in English will be boring grammer or linguaphile stuff. It's nothing more than my atrociously broken Italian gabbing. The further along I get, I will hopefully be veering in the direction of Business Italian. So, it'll get even more zonky and boring.

We'll see how that works out though. =)

weather	:		cloudy
outside	:		16.3°C
mood	:		...

A year or two after we arrived in Canada, my father began taking driving lessons. Shortly after he had gotten his license, we bought our first car. It was a 1978 or 79, sky blue, 4-door Chevette... which was marketed in some regions as GM Acadians. Dad's best friend, Uncle Kevin, came over to gawk at it the first weekend after we got it. They were chatting about driving and cars and mileage and stuff.

I was feeling a bit left out, so I blurted, "我也會開車!" ["I can drive too!"]

They both looked at me with that amused and incredulous look that adults get when kids say dumb things.

"OK, show me." challenged Uncle Kevin.

Dad checked his back pocket for his keys. Heh. =)

I smugly walked over to the car and wrestled the front passenger door open clumsily.

"開車!" ["Driving/opening!"]

weather	:		blazing sunny
outside	:		20.2°C
mood	:		...

I am an IT professional and the software that I'm responsible for, is being internationalized. We are localizing our system to French and Italian and eventually other languages as well. I'm not supposed to be learning these languages; I'm supposed to be just blindly taking what the translator is giving me and sticking it in.

From a functional perspective, that's the most efficient way of setting up a software project so that you don't have unnecessary dependencies. But, as a linguaphile, I can't help but want to learn bits and pieces along the way, as the situations arise.

So, if you were wondering why my questions seem to be all over the place, at different levels, and following no sane order of how someone would normally learn a language through classes... that would be why =)

weather	:		mostly sunny
outside	:		17.6°C
mood	:		...

The dark curly-haired, spoiled rotten, territorial, snorty little bag of mostly coffee and Red Bull wrapped in fur, Shih Tzu-Poodle cross is 소기 (So-ki; I'm told it means "quickly" in Korean). He doesn't stop charging around. It's like he was born permanently jammed in fast forward. 소기 pretty much named himself, in that regard. =)

You'd think he'd knock himself unconscious once in a while from banging his head so many times on walls and furniture corners and things. But the little dude is still alive. We've even stopped wincing anymore. XD

The Red Sesame Shiba Inu is 跳跳 (Tiào-Tiào; Jump-Jump). He is quiet, shy, observant and just altogether an incredible dog.

跳跳 is so very very perceptive of voice inflections and the tonality of human speech. This creates the effect that he understands human speech. But if you think about it, that can't be true. Uncle R. and Aunt J. speak Mandarin. My Mother-in-Law speaks Mandarin to him. The cousins all speak English to him. He "understands" everyone just fine. It can't be the language that he's understanding, per se. He's perceiving something that's common to the way language is spoken.

跳跳 has been through a few owners before finding his way to Uncle R. and Aunt J. from their In-Law family who got him from a friend moving back to Asia who adopted him through some animal rescue organization. He might have been abused as a puppy. If he thinks you're mad at him, he lays down as flat as he can against the ground, presumably because it's less uncomfortable than being knocked off his feet. If you speak sharply to him or make a rattling sound with metal (like jingle your keys), he reflexively squints, blinks and shirks his head as if he's expecting to get pummelled in the head at any moment.

Sad, but he's very much loved and well taken care of now. And he's well-behaved enough that I think we could even take him if he needed another home.

weather	:		clear
outside	:		3.1°C
mood	:		...

But I think I got it. Here it is, because it's just so damned cool. =)

Some verbs take être instead of avoir (French) or essere instead of avere (Italian) to form the past tense. Nutty little mnemonics like "Mrs. D. R. Vandertramp" may or may not be effective, but for me, there's really no substitute for understanding the true reasons as to why things are the way they are.

First:

• The agent of a verb is the person/place/thing/idea that is performing the action that the verb is expressing.

• The theme of a verb is the person/place/thing/idea that is undergoing change related to the verb. It could be a physical change or some kind of state change.

• The recipient of a verb is the person/place/thing/idea that is receiving the action that the verb is describing.

These are not the same as the subject, direct/indirect objects and verb complements. Those can be different depending on how you craft your sentence. For example, these two sentences:

subject	verb	d.object	i.object
Mary	gave	the gift	to Bob.

subject	verb	i.object	complement
The gift	was given	to Bob	by Mary.

But in both of those examples, the verb is "to give", the agent is "Mary", the theme is "the gift", the recipient is "Bob". No matter how you rephrase it and rearrange the different components, the agent, theme and recipient will always be the same. The syntactic roles are different from the semantic roles. We have the ability to express things any which way.

Now, then:

If the agent, theme and recipient of a verb are either unclear or two of them are the same, then the past tense is formed by using the verb "to be" as the auxiliary plus the past participle.

That's it. That's all there is to it. This is true for French and Italian. I'm betting it's true for many Romance languages.

This is why verbs that express movement are in this category (leaving, coming, going, dying, etc.); the agent and the theme are the same. This is why intransitive and reflexive verbs will always take "to be" to form the past tense.

I'm not sure why this is not formally taught... maybe it was just my luck of the draw with the teachers I had. I would have had an infinitely easier time remembering if I knew WHY those verbs always took être/essere to form the past tenses. It's much harder to forget and harder to get it wrong when you derive it from the original principles like that.

weather	:		raining
outside	:		11.2°C
mood	:		cheerful

Had a wonderful Sunday brunch with cloganese and cavin who came up from Seattle for a weekend getaway to see the Vancouver Opera production of Turandot*. Vancouver also had a home hockey game and a home football game on that Saturday night, all in that same area of downtown, so it was totally bananas, I hear =P And they say we're the No Fun City...

But, I'm glad the guys had a good time despite that.

I suggested The Elixir again, a French restaurant at the Opus Hotel in Yaletown. I'd been here for lunch before and it's very nice.

Lots of laughter, chatting, geeking, eating, way lots of fun =) I forgot to tell them about the washrooms though, but that's okay, I don't think anyone noticed. XD XD

We did get a group pic of the four of us, but the cables and camera software are on Husband Guy's machine =P

I'll get that uploaded as soon as I can... PROMISE! =) Or I could hold it ransom for the .mov of cloganese's rendition of Nessun Dorma (he's a Tenor, see) =D

... sheesh, how am I supposed to tag this entry?!?! XD

weather	:		partially sunny
outside	:		17.3°C
mood	:		amused

Unless you're a mute, everyone speaks with an accent whether they realize it or not. If you don't think you speak with an accent, answer this question by describing:

• where you're from
• where you grew up
• what language your parents/guardians spoke
• where you lived that you think influenced you the most

That will help pinpoint your regional accent.

Because you're my friends, I love you all, I don't want any of you to sound like the uneducated clods I came across who were totally unaware that they were not the centre of the universe and shat something out their keyboards that looked vaguely like "I have no accent".

That's why.

weather	:		sunny
outside	:		26.0°C
mood	:		cheerful
music	:	Forest Cello - Nature's Path (Darius Gottlieb)

The first 'l' sound is a "light l". The tip of your tongue is touching the roof of your mouth and your tongue is relaxed.

The 'l' at the end is a "dark l". Further back along your tongue, it's raised.

We don't distinguish these two 'l' sounds in English, so native speakers usually have to be told there's a difference to begin with and even then, a lot of people still can't hear it. We definitely don't consciously understand when to use which one, we just do. I think the dark 'l' usually follows mid-open to open central and back vowels (see vowel chart), although there are regional differences.

I think this is neat enough in itself. But what was even neater was the realization that the dark 'l' is one of the things that contributes to a recognizable Chinese accent in English.

Part of what makes a Chinese accent, both Mandarin and Cantonese, is the absence of the dark 'l'. And it makes sense, it doesn't exist in Chinese. Native Chinese speakers may not understand how to pronounce a dark 'l' when they speak English. And even if they do, because Chinese is a very frontal language - most of the sounds we make in Chinese use the teeth, tip of the tongue and no further back than the middle of the tongue - the muscle movements involved in English will tire them out quickly. It takes more effort to be making a perfect dark 'l' every time.

They'll try to simulate it with just an open vowel.

That's why Cantonese speakers will say "aw" for "all", "caw" for "call", "litto" for "little", etc. Mandarin speakers say something like "ore" for "all" and "core" for "call".

weather	:		mostly cloudy
outside	:		20.9°C
mood	:		happy

zoethe*'s username is pronounced "ZOH-eth"... long 'o', short 'e', soft 'th'.

It is NOT pronounced like the German poet, novelist, playwright and scientist who got a few things dead wrong, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — ['gø tə] which is something like "GER-tuh".

It is a sight rhyme only.

I asked. =)

* Gini, law student, "increasingly radical pagan chyk" and quite an interesting read.

weather	:		clear
outside	:		21.6°C
mood	:		happy

linguaphiles

Chinese people don't just use tones - they use intonation as well in much the same way we do...so in the class room, the phrase "Ming bai?" (are you clear?) can be answered with "Ming Bai." as a statement because you use different intonation patterens [sic].

I think I should try to explain a few things before I start...

A phoneme is the basic unit of human speech. It very roughly corresponds to a letter in the English alphabet, although there are cases where one letter is actually multiple phonemes (a long 'a') and a phoneme is represented by multiple letters ('ts', 'ch').

You can have voiced phonemes ('v'; vocal chords vibrate) and unvoiced phonemes ('f'; vocal chords do not vibrate, unless you're saying it wrong, like "fuh" or something).

The voiced phonemes have attributes associated with them: voice onset, voice segment and voice offset, among many others. The voice onset is the point in time where the vocal chords begin to vibrate (I have a little piece of useless trivia about Voice Onset Time, see below). The voice segment is the middle part, where you're holding the sound. It can be long, short, medium, just right, etc. And the voice offset is the trailing end.

Now.

We know that Chinese is a tonal language. We also know that there is a "second tone" which is a rising tone. To make this tone quality, you would make your voice rise, much like you would when you're asking a yes-no question in English.

How, then, do the Chinese differentiate between a second tone that is asking a question versus a second tone that is making a statement? That would be the 64 Million Dollar Question of the day... well, of this post, anyway =)

For example, the phrase 明白 (míng bái), ends with a second tone. As a question, it's "明白﹖" As an answer (which, in this case, is a statement), it's "明白。"

It's very very subtle, but there is an intonation portion at the voice offset of "bái".

In the question, the quality of the second tone is tending toward a continued rise as if your voice were going to follow through with the implied interrogative particle "嗎" (which is a high neutral tone that sounds very similar to the first tone). Example: 明白嗎﹖ (míng bái mā?).

In the answer, the second tone quality is as if your voice were going to follow through with the implied perfect/completive/modal particle "了" (which is a mid, steady neutral tone if it follows a second tone). Example: 明白了。 (míng bái le).

If you wanted to get technical about it, this alternate second tone is a separate tone. It is distinct and it has meaning assigned to it.

When people say that Mandarin is easier because it only has four tones and Cantonese has seven, that's not true. Cantonese only has seven because they've decided to differentiate seven of them. If we differentiated all the different tones in Mandarin, it's on par.

Mandarin has many many more tones than just the four. There are (linguistically speaking) at least 8: the four that you're taught, I count at least three different flavours of the neutral tone and this alternate second tone. I'm positive there are more of these subtle ones that come up in different contexts and circumstances that are lumped into one of the regular four. In fact, I know there are ones that waver in intonation, we purposely fluctuate the tone a little.

Native speakers will tell you that's not true and that there are only four tones. Some will deny that even one neutral tone exists. Many certified Mandarin teachers don't understand stuff like this. My mother has been teaching adult and children's Mandarin and Cantonese classes for over 40 years and she is still finding out in dribs and drabs that I was right about a lot of these things.

Little Piece of Useless Trivia

The consonant 'b' sound does not actually exist in English. Neither does the 'd', for the same reason.

Because the voice onset time is so late, what we're really saying is an unaspirated 'p' for 'b' and an unaspirated 't' for 'd'. The English 'p' and 't' are aspirated 'p' and 't' which means we put an extra puff of air into it. An English 'b' is a 'p' without the extra puff of air, likewise for the 'd'.

In many European languages (and you Europeans on my list, correct me if I'm wrong), a 'b' is actually a 'b'; the voice onset is much earlier than the English 'b'. At least, I think it's different in French. "quatre bières" versus "four beers" sounds different to me.

My highschool Physics teacher, Evan J., spoke Afrikaans which is very similar to Dutch. He would always say 'b' and 'd' on words that begin with 'p' and 't'. It was fun talking about "backets of energy", "photon dorbedos" and "Desla goils". =)

weather	:		mainly clear
outside	:		13.4°C
mood	:		chipper

But that, and a recent post in zhongwen asking for a Chinese dialogue companion with a certain accent, made me think of what kind of Chinese I speak.

Mandarin

I went to a Taiwanese-run Mandarin school for a year when I was five. The school was one of the first in a long string of education ventures of Dr. Cary Chien who is a family friend. I'm sure my teacher, Mrs. Gin, had a big influence over my accent whether I remember it or not.

I didn't speak again until highschool when I took Mandarin classes for credit. The teacher was from Beijing, I hated her and I hated the way she sounded. I tried very hard to not speak the way she did. I used to think her "tongue curl" was clowny and dumb.

Instead, I modelled my pronunciations after a girl in my class from Taiwan. I never did talk to her before we graduated, but I heard her when we got picked on to answer questions out loud in class. I thought she sounded very down-to-earth. Nothing was slurred, nothing was ambiguous, all the initials and finals were very definitive, clean and crisp. So I took to speaking like she did.

I would describe my Mandarin accent as Taiwan Academic or Southern China Coastal... like XiaMen, Fujian Province. Shanghai is about as far north as I've heard it. My parents have much more of a Beijing accent than I do.

I enunciate the difference between the z/zh, c/ch, s/sh as clearly as I can. Many in Taiwan don't make the distinction. I only mutter and blur it when I don't know which one it's supposed to be. But I don't roll my tongue nearly as much as Northern Mainlanders. I say "zhè lǐ" and not "zhèr" for "here". It's "hái zi" and not "hái'r" for "child". I say "bǐ jiào" and not "bí jiǎo" to express the comparative.

I also clearly distinguish in/ing, en/eng, an/ang. My Husband doesn't. He keeps mixing up 心 (xīn) and 星 (xīng). I think it's because my Mother-in-Law pronounces both approximately as "hseen", so the guys can't tell what's what. I don't know how much of that is her Hai-Lu KeJia background.

Cantonese

My Cantonese is between a Mainland/Guangzhou and Hong Kong Cantonese. My maternal grandfather spoke MeiXian KeJia (so I'm 1/8th Hakka), but my mother doesn't speak much Hakka. Some of the things I say are more Mainland, but even there, many terms that begin with the 'n' initial in formal pronunciation have become an 'l' initial colloquially.

I was taught to never compromise the 'ng'. "Bank" is "ngun hong" and not "un hon" (eew...); "beef" is "ngau yuk" and not "au yuk". But in my teens, I found myself sliding out of "ngo" for "I/me" and into just "o" sometimes. But I still insist it's a retracted 't∫' ("tsoi" for "vegetable") and not an aspirated 'ch' (more like "choy").

My mother has always been 媽媽 (ma-ma; which sounds like "Maman" in French) and my father, 爸爸 (ba-ba). They were never "Mommy" or "Daddy" in a Cantonese accent. My parents are not the Mommy and Daddy types. They are the Mother and Father types.

Sometime around age ten, my mother became "Mom" or "Maaaaaaaaaaaaa" when I was being loud, but never "Mum". My father became "Dad" only when I was speaking about him in the third person. 爸爸 encompasses "Daddy", "Dad" and "Father" to me.

I was, and still am, 嘉嘉 to them.

My brother was 弟弟 (which we pronounced "dee-dee") and he called me 家姊 ("ga-je") until his early teens, then we were on a first name basis in English.

French

I took French in all five years of Secondary school, from Grade 8 to 12. DO YOU KNOW HOW INCREDIBLY BLOODY DIFFICULT IT IS TO FIND SOMEONE TO TEACH FRENCH ON THE WEST COAST, EVEN WHEN IT'S ONE OF THE OFFICIAL BLOODY LANGUAGES OF YOUR BLOODY COUNTRY? For some retarded reason, they took French out of the public Elementary school curriculum. And my grade seemed to be something of a cut-off grade. The grade above me had to take French. I was all excited that maybe next year, I would finally start learning French. But they pulled it when we got there. >KO

I was talking to a co-worker way back when he was looking at enrolling his kids in Kindergarten. Apparently, it's the same kind of stupidness to try to get into a bilingual French/English school here. There is only ONE bilingual public Elementary school in Vancouver... in GREATER Vancouver... that I know of. Many of the English-only schools have a French Immersion program, but you have to happen to live in the school's catchment area. It's insane.

There is a large French cultural organization (Alliance Française) in Vancouver that offers Saturday morning French classes for children and adults, but my Saturdays were already taken up by Chinese school. =P

Anyway, I owe my French all to Jane Z. (French 8), Walter H. (French 9) and Fiorella H. (French 11 and 12). I loved learning with Walter H. He demanded accuracy to a very fine fine granularity, which is something I appreciate very much. He would bring the class to a screeching halt to correct things and wouldn't let it go until he was confident that it would stick. That, ladies and gentlemen, is teaching.

I had Walter C. for French 10. He taught Spanish as well, so his accent was very southern and sometimes, his pronunciation was plain wrong. I tended to stay away from some of the pronunciations he made. Sometime during French 11 (or 12?), there was a new girl in the class who had moved to Vancouver from Ontario or somewhere with a very Quebec French influence. She sounded different and I could hear it. Not bad-different, more like interesting-different.

We're taught Parisian French on the West Coast of Canada, which is the accent from the northern region of France. I pronounce "toute de suite" as a Frenchified "toot sweet" and not "toot-de swee-de" as they would in southern France, near Spain. And "oui" is "wee" and not "way", like they would say in Quebec.

I tried very hard to shake off my English accent and focus on what sounds and feels French when I was speaking. I did my best to make "nuit" ("nwee", meaning "night") different from "nouille" ("noo-wee" meaning "noodle"). I hated hearing classmates making them the same and I was near aghast when I heard it from a teacher. =P

"Car" is "la voiture" and not "le car". There were a pile of these differences between French French and Quebec French that were mentioned in class, but that I don't remember now.

So, if you've made it this far =D describe the accent and regionalisms of some non-English languages that you speak. =)

weather	:		gloriously sunny
outside	:		16.0°C
mood	:		amused

Increasingly, I'm seeing a lot of insanity with the question mark.

"Could you please do this."

Sometimes, sentences that are commands are phrased as questions without a question mark. People want to be polite and ask others to do things rather than demand that it be done. And "to ask" intuitively means using the interrogative. I understand. But there exists a standard English grammatical structure to accomplish this correctly: "Please do this. Thank you."

"What is the estimated timeframe for delivery."

Sometimes, it's a clue as to the person's tone when they're writing things exactly as they're saying it in their head. They're requesting an answer to an open-ended question and they forget that just because their voices drop, instead of rise, at the end of the question, it's still the interrogative form which still needs to end with a question mark.

I also find it amusing that people will put question marks in where they don't belong, just because their intonation rises.

"I wonder if something is true?"

This is not a question. To wonder whether something is true is a statement, even though you're pondering something you don't know and would very likely ask it as a question.

"When you have a moment? Could you take a look at that other problem."

*ROFLcopter* =D The question mark has now become less of an indicator of a question and more of a voice intonation marker.

It's sloppiness, very simply. Even with all the excuses in the book, the legitimate ones and the illegitimate ones, it's still sloppiness. I have a whole train of thought on my theories as to why people are so damned sloppy, but that's another post.

In any case, please don't punctuate questions with a period and please use a comma to punctuate various auxiliary phrases that belong in the same sentence. Thank you. =)

weather	:		cloudy
outside	:		8°C
mood	:		feh

And copying stuff from the whiteboard in Chinese... half the time I can, half the time I can't. I don't always know what the character is with whiteboard penmanship (read: little balls of scribbles). So, I hope that my little scribble balls are enough to jog my memory later.

I'm finding that I'm grasping for vocabulary and grammar in Cantonese lately. I'm resorting to thinking in Mandarin, then literally translating instead. I actually forgot that "pineapple" was 菠蘿 in Cantonese and said 鳳梨. That's not a good sign.

weather	:		partially cloudy
outside	:		19°C
mood	:		fascinated

linguaphiles

The note is entirely in kanji which made some think it was Chinese. I'm fairly certain it's Japanese, for a number of reasons:

• The note was picked up at Iwo Jima, Japan.
• As someone pointed out in the comments, all kanji and no kana was typical of Japanese formal documents.
• I can't imagine a Chinese military organization using a name like that.
• The penmanship is very square, rigid and stiff. I only see Chinese children print that way... and people who are learning Chinese as an adult.
• The way it's referring to "Name" and "Date".
• The name that is in the "Name" slot.
• As a Chinese person, when I read this note, there's that surreal "dream interpretation" feeling that I get whenever I'm asked to read Japanese. =D Japanese kanji usually mean similar things to the equivalent character in Chinese. It's usually a bit off, a different connotation or an obscure definition that's very loosely connected with the Chinese definition. It's like trying to read Kafka in Chinese. And I thought Kafka was totally bananas in English. =D

From right to left:

1. 入籍番號: 番號 means "Number" but definitely not in Chinese. We say 號碼.

   入 means "to enter".

   I couldn't see it clearly, so I thought the second character was 簼. I couldn't find it, but I thought it could be the Japanese version of 構 as in 結構 which means "building" or "structure". My first guess was that it was the address or location for delivery.

   But I was wrong. It's 籍 which is "book" or "record". 入籍 is "to import". So, it's the Merchandise Import Registration Number. I can't make out what the number actually is. I see a five in it, but that's about it.

2. 氏名 is "Name" (more specifically, "Surname"), but in Chinese it would be 姓名. The fact that it's only asking for the surname tips me off that it's Japanese because in Japanese culture, you'd never ask someone for their given name unless you know them well or have some other official need to know. The name on it is [?][?]田五生. That's definitely not a Han Chinese name. It's not likely that it's even Manchu Chinese which is typically three or four characters long.

3. 交付年月 is "Delivery Date", for sure. The month of the date could be May (五月) but I'm suspicious of that because the character before 月 doesn't look the same as the "five" in the name. The year is "something 18". I originally thought it might be 1918, but I couldn't tell what the stuff before the "18" is. When vampireborg confirmed my thought that it's probably the year of the reign of the current Emperor, that made for an interesting exercise.
   • Emperor Meiji's coronation was in 1866. +18 would make it 1884.
   • Emperor Yoshihito's coronation was in 1912. +18 would be 1930, but that's not possible because Yoshihito's reign ended in 1926.
   • Emperor Hirohito 裕仁's coronation was in 1926. +18 is 1944. Ah ha! =)

   The note is some kind of military equipment waybill from 1944. Which makes total sense. Iwo Jima? Grandfather is a veteran? Duh! =)

4. 寸法[?]製作年月 is the "[?] Manufacture Date". In Chinese, we'd say 日期 for date, not 年月. But I wonder if it's not actually specifying the exact date. It only says "Year Month" and that's all the data that's actually written. The date that's written is December of an undiscernable year. It looks like "two one" or "two ten".

   But there's still something not quite right because the manufacture date seems to be after the delivery date.

5. 舞鶴軍需部 is "The Dancing Crane Military Requirements/Supplies Unit"... *stifled giggle* ... *ahem* Sorry. =| In all likelihood, the Japanese chose the character 舞 to actually mean 武 as in 武術 (wǔshù, "Chinese martial arts", what White Guys call "kung fu"). The connection is the less common connotations of "wielding" and "brandishing" in 舞. The two characters 舞 and 武 are complete homonyms, same pronunciation, same tone, coincidentally the same pronunciation in both Mandarin and Cantonese. 武 means "military" or some kind of combat. Military → hand-to-hand combat → martial arts → dancing. Get it? =)

   Hmm... so pne says that 舞鶴 (Maizuru) is a location in Japan. That makes more sense then. "Dancing Crane" is funnier though *snick* *snick* =D

weather	:		sunny
outside	:		20°C
mood	:		chipper

It's a Cantonese saying that means, "with a little knowledge, pretend to be an ambassador". It's used to deride someone for masquerading as an expert when in actuality, they know very little on the subject.

*ahem* =) That would be me, in linguaphiles. Occasionally, though, the questions and discussion are such that I can offer feedback. Something that always comes up is "how do you pronounce $THIS in Mandarin/Cantonese?"

Often, accompanying that question is "where is the stress in that term/phrase?" To which, I invariably answer, "the concept of 'stresses' and 'accents' doesn't exist in Chinese, everything is tonal." I've realized that this can be a pretty off-putting reply. It sounds like I'm dodging the question and/or being indignant about something...

And I feel bad every time the person says, "I have no clue about tones, I just didn't want to butcher it too badly."

Here's the deal: I'm enough of a "native speaker" that I don't hear the "stresses" across a few characters in a Chinese term or phrase. To me, the emphasis is dead even. But someone who doesn't hear the tones will tell me "oh, the primary stress is here and the secondary is here." And I go, *blink* *blinketty* *blink*. I have learned that, statistically, the first and fourth tones are more likely to be interpreted as the "stress"... just because. And I'm starting to figure out how to use this to get a more accurate pronunciation out of a non-Chinese speaker.

The Chinese language does not assign meaning to voice volume emphasis like English does. A native speaker likely does not hear the stress. Whenever our native language does not assign meaning to a particular linguistic element, we will have some degree of difficulty with it in a foreign language. Conversely, this would be why an English speaker will have problems with tones — we're listening for the emphasis and mostly ignoring the tonality. We don't completely ignore tonality, but it's a lot more subconscious and it expresses something very different in English.

This is precisely why the Japanese think that the United States has a federal erection every four years. The 'l' and 'r' do not make a semantic difference in Japanese.

We don't hear glottal stops in English. Do you hear the extra consonant in front of the word "apple"? Do you hear that it's missing when you say "an apple"? Very likely not. =)

Without training, native speakers don't naturally make the best teachers of a language for exactly this reason.

* Note 1: "baan3" is supposed to be "baan6"; "baan3" is "to hit or strike". "to pretend" has the same tone as "doi6".

* Note 2: if you save all those WAV files, duplicate the siu2.wav so that you have two of them and pull them into Winamp, it's amusing to hear her actually say the expression. =)

See my Word Collection

weather	:		cloudy
outside	:		13°C
mood	:		amused

Husband

Aunt #3 said that she chose it for me because the style looked cute, young and girlie. I told Mother-In-Law what it meant and we laughed so hard. Then she said, "okay, so you can wear it for W then".

Husband Guy wants me to wear it to work(!!!). He thinks it'll be funny. =O =O =D

weather	:		cloudy
outside	:		12°C
mood	:		confused

"to have got" is used in two ways (that I can tell):

1. as the auxiliary (meaning "must") to another verb — "you've got to do something"

2. as a main verb with a direct object to indicate either
   1. possession — "I've got an apple"
   2. state — "she's got style"

You either have it or you got it. You don't "have got" it.

I've caught myself starting to say it recently... *ptooey* >K{

weather	:		sunny
outside	:		6°C
mood	:		okay

緣份

"yuán fèn" in Mandarin; "jyun4 fun6" in Cantonese (JyutPing); "yuen-fun" in more common Cantonese romanization.

緣份 is a noun that refers to an affinity between two people. It's an attraction of souls. Some say it's a predestined relationship. People who "have it" will "click". They get along better, they say the right things, do the right things, cause positive progress in each others' lives.

It's popularly used to describe the relationship between lovers in a time when this special bond is the Holy Grail of singles everywhere. It has lent itself to lyrics, legends and countless literary works, new and classic.

But, it can also describe the connection between teacher and student, mentor and protégé (say "mentee" in front of me and I'll rip your head off), parent and child, siblings, business partners or just regular friends, etc.

See my Word Collection

weather	:		clear
outside	:		11°C
mood	:		amused

八婆

"ba1 po2" in Mandarin; "baat3 po6" in Cantonese; "BAHT-poh" in more common Cantonese romanization.

It's literally, "the eigth Great Aunt" (think, large family = gossiping women). It means "gossiping bitch" and is considered rude/vulgar/offensive. It's more of a Cantonese term than a Mandarin term. I've heard of it referring to both a male or a female, even though it's a female title. It refers to someone who snitches, spreads rumour, doesn't grasp discreetness, otherwise speaks of things that are completely none of his or her business and/or just a jerk in general.

Sometimes, the modifier '死' (M: "si3"; C: "sei2"; common: "say"; literally "dead", but equivalent to the adverb "fucking") is added in front of it to increase the offensiveness.

Example sentence: 隔壁的八婆最近很喜歡跟大姊聊天。

"Recently, the gossiping bitch next door seems to really like chatting with my eldest sister."

See my Word Collection

weather	:		cloudy
outside	:		11°C
mood	:		paying attention

umbo wrote (well, ranted at the end of a very long and incredibly hellish day =):

If you're needing a dash in the middle of the sentence--like here--you do *not* use a space and a hyphen and another space (like - this). You use a dash. A dash is longer than a hyphen, and it does not have spaces before or after it--just the words. When you type such things in Word, it automatically changes the two hyphens put together to a dash, but this doesn't translate properly in HTML--it'll turn into a single hyphen, which is wrong. So if you turn off the autoformatting and use the two hyphens together, that's the correct thing. That's what I was taught when I was taught typing. Go ahead, look in any printed book you have, and you'll see that I'm right. There are no spaces! You don't use hyphens, you use dashes! They're longer than hyphens! Hyphens are for when you split a word in two, either because it's a two-part word (see how I just did that?) or because you don't have enough room for the word on the line before returning to the next paragraph, which almost never happens in these days of word processing--it may happen when your professional manuscript goes to be typeset, but it's not gonna happen in a web-published fanfic.

It's an em dash, it's longer that the '-' and is usually represented in plain text as two dashes... or what we've come to call "a dash". It just looks like one in novels and other traditional media publications. In the world of ASCII and now, Unicode, the hyphen has been prevalent, presumably because Geeks don't see, care or need to know what the difference is. It makes no difference in the ability to get our ideas out. Just like all of us* who have to develop software for the printing and publishing industry think smart quotes — 66s and 99s — are useless and a pain in the ass** =}

It turns out that some manuals of style don't use spaces between the long dash and the surrounding words, but some do. Some say it's an American vs. British thing; some show that American manuals of style will pad it out with spaces as well. I think I'm going to pad it out with spaces. It's less crowded and easier to read that way (especially in italics, now that I'm looking at it). I'm Canadian, I'll do it my own way and you're lucky I didn't add a vowel to it. >KD

Incidentally, most geeks absolutely NEED to disable the hell out of AutoCorrect and AutoFormat in MS Word. When you're writing implementation docs and you paste in snippets of code into it, the last thing you want is MicroSchyte changing the decrement operator ("--") into an em dash which copies back to plain text as a single '-'. And guess what? Some co-op/intern will copy it verbatim into their code. It not only breaks something, but will manifest as some really weird cryptic error message or just nebulously strange software behaviour and it will take hours/days/weeks for the software team to de-fucking-bug.

*HHRRRAAAAAAGGGHHHH* Place your bets now for how many co-ops the bride has drop-kicked out the boardroom window for doing that.

* Okay, just me...

** In fact, George Bernard Shaw (very decidedly A Non-Geek™ and very well respected for his non-geekedness) refused to use apostrophes for contractions, calling them "uncouth bacilli". =)

weather	:		light drizzle
outside	:		4°C
mood	:		dorky

Firstly, it is dangerous to be reading this play in public.

I went to Timmy Ho's for lunch* and started reading the play as I was eating. I am way too compelled to read Eliza's lines out loud to fully appreciate her accent, especially when she's in hysterics =D At first I tried to just hear it in my head. Then I began whispering her lines.

At one point, she howled a mostly unintelligible noise spanning an impressive spectrum of non-frontal vowels ... and I quote: "Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-oo!!!". Bwahahaha!! =D I didn't howl, but I definitely said something out loud. I think a few people wanted to call for security. What can I say? I was visualizing the IPA for it and one of the things that helps immensely is to say it yourself.

Anyway, one gentleman laughed and I laughed with him, held up the book and said, "there's a character with an interesting accent". He smiled and nodded (I heard him thinking "freak..." =). I went back to reading. Quietly. In my head. =} =} =}

Secondly, I've discovered that the retarded internet teenybopper spellings and punctuation is completely, entirely George Bernard Shaw's doing. In the April 1902 edition of The Author, he wrote:

The apostrophes in ain't, don't, haven't, etc. look so ugly that the most careful printing cannot make a page of colloquial dialogue as handsome as a page of classical dialogue. Besides, shan't should be sha''n't, if the wretched pedantry of indicating the elision is to be carried out. I have written aint, dont, havnt [sic], shant, shouldnt, and wont for twenty years with perfect impunity, using the apostrophe only where its omission would suggest another word: for example, hell for he'll. There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli. I also write thats, whats, lets, for the colloquial forms of that is, what is, let us; and I have not yet been prosecuted.

I'm keeping my eye out for what Mr. No Uncouth Bacilli does with "it's" and "its".

* - Turkey & Wild Rice soup (4 points); 1 multigrain bagel (6 points); ½ tbsp. creamcheese on the bagel (0.5 points). Lunch total: 10.5 points.

weather	:		sunny
outside	:		19°C
mood	:		amused

I first saw this about 6-7 years ago and I thought it was the neatest thing I had ever seen. Due to lack of disk space, I couldn't keep it. For a while, I couldn't find it anywhere. Google didn't even have it indexed for the longest time. I was collecting large text exerpts this morning and thought I would give it another try. And lo!

Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

Wan moaning, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder inset.

"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groinmurder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!"

"Hoe-cake, murder," resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, an tickle ladle basking an stuttered oft. Honor wrote tutor cordage offer groin-murder, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut mitten anomalous woof.

"Wail, wail, wail! " set disk wicket woof, "Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut! Wares are putty ladle gull goring wizard ladle basking?"

"Armor goring tumor groin-murder's," reprisal ladle gull.

"Grammar's seeking bet. Armor ticking arson burden barter an shirker cockles."

"O hoe! Heifer gnats woke," setter wicket woof, butter taught tomb shelf, "Oil tickle shirt court tutor cordage offer groin-murder. Oil ketchup wetter letter, an den - O bore!"

Soda wicket woof tucker shirt court, an whinney retched a cordage offer groin-murder, picked inner windrow, an sore debtor pore oil worming worse lion inner bet. En inner flesh, disk abdominal woof lipped honor bet, paunched honor pore oil worming, an garbled erupt. Den disk ratchet ammonol pot honor groin-murder's nut cup an gnat-gun, any curdled ope inner bet.

Inner ladle wile, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut a raft attar cordage, an ranker dough ball.

"Comb ink, sweat hard," setter wicket woof, disgracing is verse. Ladle Rat Rotten Hut entity betrum an stud buyer groin~murder's bet.

"O Grammar!" crater ladle gull historically, "Water bag icer gut! A nervous sausage bag ice!"

"Battered lucky chew whiff, sweat hard," setter bloat-Thursday woof, wetter wicket small honors phase.

"O Grammar, water bag noise! A nervous sore suture anomolous prognosis!"

"Battered small your whiff, doling," whiskered dole woof, ants mouse worse waddling.

"O Grammar, water bag mouser gut! A nervous sore suture bag mouse!"

Daze worry on-forger-nut ladle gull's lest warts. Oil offer sodden, caking offer carvers an sprinkling otter bet, disk hoard hoarded woof lipped own pore Ladle Rat Rotten Hut an garbled erupt.

Mural: Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls stopper torque wet strainers.

This is actually the story of "Little Red Riding Hood". Read it again, but this time, read it out loud. A Redneck accent helps immensely =)

It was written in 1940 by H. L. Chace to show his students that intonation in the English Language ("Anguish Languish" as he dubbed it) is an integral part of its meaning. The words here are all common English words (well, some not so common).

I have to put our Guest List into some sane order for the guest registration table. The names in English are no problem... highlight all the cells and hit the "Sort Ascending" button in Excel.

The Chinese ones will have to be done manually in traditional Chinese dictionary order. In a traditional Chinese dictionary, characters are listed by number of strokes under their radical[*]. It's like Elementary School all over again figuring out what the radical is, figuring out where it is in the dictionary, figuring out the stroke count of the harmonic.

I don't like transcribing the Chinese names into English because there are too many romanization systems depending on where people are from and what dialect they speak (Chang, Cheung and Zhang are the same surname). It will take three times as long to look for someone in the list.

[*]No, not as in "chemical species which has one unpaired electron and undergoes rapid reactions".

A radical, defined in Chinese linguistic terms is a character or partial character that contributes to the meaning of the whole character. As opposed to a harmonic which is a character or multiple characters that contribute to the pronunciation.

There are 114 radicals in the Chinese language and they form what you could call an "alphabet". Radicals are sometimes listed in an index table in the front of the dictionary. However, this is a big waste of time - it's like listing the letters of the alphabet as a table of contents at the beginning of an English dictionary. No one would ever look at it and most [reputable] dictionaries omit it.

To use a traditional Chinese dictionary, you need to memorize the order of all 114 radicals. This is actually easier than it sounds. It's only difficult to me because I don't use Chinese much in my life. If you do everything in Chinese, breathed, ate, slept and sneezed in Chinese, this wouldn't be a problem. As well, knowing the most common ones will suffice.

I'd have to figure out all the radicals (which could also be in their variant forms):

• Is this character a radical on its own?
• Is there only one radical?
• Does any radical enclose the character on both sides?
• Choose the left side radical over the right side radical.
• Choose the top radical over the bottom radical.
• Choose the single over the dual or multiple elements.