Random Thoughts

[number8]

Pray none of you have to bear the anxiety of bros launching a kickstarter that got everyone to ridicule your favorite piece of clothing.

[Skitch]

[Ezee E]

Pray none of you have to bear the anxiety of bros launching a kickstarter that got everyone to ridicule your favorite piece of clothing.

The romper?

[Wryan]

Had a dream early this morning. Started out as a divorce dream with both my parents gift-competing, and it was obnoxious. Ended with Aretha Franklin and Johnny Cash dueting on "I'm Every Woman," and when Cash began to sing a part solo, Aretha put her fingers to his lips to shush him and continued singing herself. He seemed surprised.

EDIT: This followed a dream yesterday morning where I was competing with the Rock for the attentions of a beautiful woman with long blond hair who was attending an elite military academy. She made it clear to both of us that she only wanted a baby and then she'd bounce. I admit she chose him first...but me ultimately. In true Hollywood fashion, she started liking me more and more and wanting to hang out and developing feelings for me. I went with her to class one day in a cavernous space with extreme sloping seats. We sat at the very top back wall. Everyone else was dressed normally, but I was wearing a "wifebeater" and jeans. I stayed too late and the professor flounced in and started class, which consisted of bouncing around all over the place like Willy Wonka asking random trivia questions. One was vocab-based, which I knew I was good at even within the dream, so I whispered the answer to my special lady friend. She misheard, tried to answer it, and got it wrong. Unfortunately, this partially damaged her grade in the class, so I felt really bad.

[Skitch]

You dream Wes Anderson movies.

[megladon8]

I hate that feeling of being so hungry you could puke.

[bac0n]

Wasn't that a Hank Williams song?


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[Scar]

Grilling up a Santa Maria style Tri Tip tonight, complimented with Santa Maria Salsa and grill garlic bread.

Tomorrow I'm smoking a pork butt, and a couple racks of ribs.

[megladon8]

Fatalities confirmed with explosions occurring at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.

What the hell is going on?

[Irish]

"Look for the helpers"

Within an hour of reports of the incident emerging, people began offering spare rooms and beds to people stranded in the city using the hashtag #RoomForManchester.

Hundreds of tweets offering places to stay are being shared and re-tweeted thousands of times.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-40007886

[megladon8]

That is lovely to read, thanks Irish.

Don't mean to turn around and be a downer, but it looks like ISIS has officially claimed responsibility.

[Dukefrukem]

And Trump calls them "losers".

[number8]

There was a 100% certainty that ISIS will claim responsibility, in that they claim responsibility for everything.

[Ezee E]

There was a 100% certainty that ISIS will claim responsibility, in that they claim responsibility for everything.

I was just going to bring that up. There's no way to really prove if ISIS was involved or not. There's no real consequence for claiming to have a hand in it.

[Dukefrukem]

Pretty crazy experience yesterday. High Speed Chase on the highway blew past me with me in the middle lane. The guy was weaving and passed me in the breakdown lane followed by 9 cruisers.

Held my breath there for a moment.

[Scar]

High pucker factor, eh?


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[megladon8]

Holy crap. Glad you're all right, Duke. Any idea what was happening?


So I have a question for any adept linguists out there in MC land. It's weird and random so suits the thread!

When a non-English language has words or names that are translated to English, why are they not translated phonetically?

Especially in a case where the source language does not even use the same alphabet. It just seems that it would be easier and more logical if these words and names were written in the English alphabet in a way that illicits proper pronunciation.

An example would be the director Tsui Hark. The correct pronunciation is "Choy Hock". Why would it not be written like (or close to) this?

[[ETM]]

Seems to me that it would lead to even wronger pronunciations.

Also - it's weird seeing Puddles Pity Party singing on America's Got Talent after listening to him and Postmodern Jukebox for like three years. The version of Chandelier he sang has 6 million views on YouTube. I even sang his version of Royals at the local karaoke night.

[Dukefrukem]

Here's one of the reports.

Guns and Drugs

http://www.wcvb.com/article/driver-i...te-495/9952141

Funny thing is, I bought a dash-cam last year for things just like this- And of course I didn't have it setup yet because I bought a new car on Saturday.

[number8]

Short answer: he follows a standardization that was developed by the HK government decades ago when they had to write the English pronunciation on street signs and stuff like that. Different Chinese-region governments developed their own different standardizations, so "Tsui Hark" is just the way it's romanized in Hong Kong, and it's the one that's oft-repeated because that's where he first got famous and still mostly works.

Slightly longer answer: it actually is phonetic. You're just perceiving it as not because it's not how you pronounce the "ts" sound in your language. There's a tonal difference in the way Cantonese speakers pronounce "ts" (like in Tsui Hark) and "ch" (like in Chow Yun-fat) that gets mashed together for English speakers. "Tsui Hark" is very specifically the HK romanization of the way his name is pronounced in cantonese. In Mainland China his English name is officially spelled "Xu Ke," because that's the standardized Chinese government romanization of the mandarin pronunciation. Because of all these differences in dialect and standardization, trying to spell Chinese characters in the alphabet is just an inherently unnatural thing to do. Language translation isn't a 1 = 1 thing, as Arrival tried to hurriedly explain.

[Sycophant]

Short long answer is that different romanization systems (at least that's the term used for Japanese and Chinese words rendered in English) developed at different times and responded to specific needs. I'm more familiar with Japanese, which is ultimately simpler and less confusing, but that's largely because systems developed to standardize romanization happened around the same time language standardization was happening in Japan.

Chinese I know less well, but I do know there are multiple systems. And, of course, Chinese is actually composed of multiple languages (or multiple dialects, if you want to keep the folks in Beijing/Peking/Pekin happy). The two we hear most often are Mandarin and Cantonese. Tsui Hark is from Hong Kong and so comes from a Cantonese-speaking environment. His surname (Tsui) is 徐. In Mandarin, this is mostly transliterated as Xu nowadays, since most seem to prefer the pinyin system of transliteration to the once-more-common Wade-Giles system, which gives us Hsu (a name you probably saw more twenty, thirty years ago). Pinyin was developed by Chinese linguists in the 50s and is the official system used by the PRC, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. Wade-Giles was established by some Europeans in the late 19th century. Based on when and where they were developed, you can see there's a certain amount of power relationships being expressed by when what is used and where, and, for example, Chinese diaspora . The names may also sound different from standard Mandarin variations (speakers of another major dialect, Hakkein, might go with Su). Transliteration that occurs before standardization means we have some of the same names transliterated differently.

And then there's Cantonese. Had to look into Wikipedia for this, but since there are no official romanization systems taught in Hong Kong, for example (the main place where we outside China encounter Cantonese-speaking culture, there are three competing systems. Efforts to systematize (which are kinda necessary, because ) have found multiple problems to the same solution. The problem really is that in Cantonese, Tsui Hark's name doesn't sound anything like what is going to be "common sense" pronunciation in English (take into account here), and ad hoc solutions can only cause more problems.

Actually, maybe Tsui Hark is actually an ad hoc solution. Tsui is a common enough rendition under Cantonese Pinyin at what the name which could also be rendered "Chui" or "Cuy." But Hark is another story. In Wikipedia's three main romanization system, I don't see "ark" as a final sound component. But Cantonese does have a rough "r" sound in a lot of its vowels that sounds nothing like the harshness of a North American "r." But "Hawk" really isn't it either. I can't determine from the Internet why he chose/was assigned this pronunciation. But I wonder if he looked at "Haak" or "Hak" and was like "No, that's not my name." The sound is somewhere between "hawk" and "hark" maybe kinda, because it's from a different language. The "a" sound isn't going to correspond 100% to how we'd say "a" in "hawk" either.

tl;dr: Language be complicated!

[Sycophant]

8 beat me to a much more concise, probably more informed response. Cheers!

[number8]

But Hark is another story. In Wikipedia's three main romanization system, I don't see "ark" as a final sound component. But Cantonese does have a rough "r" sound in a lot of its vowels that sounds nothing like the harshness of a North American "r." But "Hawk" really isn't it either. I can't determine from the Internet why he chose/was assigned this pronunciation. But I wonder if he looked at "Haak" or "Hak" and was like "No, that's not my name." The sound is somewhere between "hawk" and "hark" maybe kinda, because it's from a different language. The "a" sound isn't going to correspond 100% to how we'd say "a" in "hawk" either.

My two best guess:

1) "Hark" is the most common romanization of the character's pronunciation. You usually just go with the norm when it comes to English spelling. It is an actual word, after all, so it's likely been romanized already by the time he changed his name to it (it's not his actual name).

2) Tsui Hark is actually very fluent in English (passing brag: I interviewed him in person a few years ago) and maybe he just wants his name to be like "Hark! It is I."

[Skitch]

This is fascinating.

[number8]

Oh.