Posts by Chris Waugh
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Capture: A Foray into Portraiture, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
And that pretty bird can’t be a magpie. It’s too pretty and non threatening looking. { :)
Well, exactly, it's a 喜鹊, but, here, see - still, at least that dictionary gives the option of pure romanisation as 'xique', even if it has all of zero examples.
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Hard News: The Base, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
And his playing the patriotic knight saving Our Land from The Foreigners, given his record, is just a bit too rich for my tastes.
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I could hear a few of them in the more mature trees, and glimpsed some flitting around, so I went hunting, and this fine fellow happened to strike a pose. The dictionary insists it's a magpie, but it's call and behaviour are completely different from the magpies I knew back in NZ, and you can see that patch of blue on his wing.
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My father in law. He was up at 4:15, off to the orchard by 4:30am.
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Irrigation day. It's done old school up here, but the dogs find that quite convenient.
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Capture: A Foray into Portraiture, in reply to Gudrun Gisela,
Well, yes, but these are too North American looking and far too far out of context with traditional gateways at the entrances to surrounding villages. I'm picking the Daying Village leadership saw the gateways other villages were putting up and decided they wanted something a bit different and cooler. Anyway, whether this particular cultural exchange is ancient or very modern, I don't care, it's another example of the weird, random, and cool stuff you can find in the middle of 'nowhere' in rural China.
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Hard News: Killing Volume, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
- the only people who buy/read print magazines are those to old and/or stupid to work the internets
I object most strongly to that. I spend a lot of time online, but I also buy lots of print. For one thing it's nice to sit in a restaurant on one of my quiet days (or in a classroom when my 2nd year students are all late again) and read the old fashioned way. There's a simple aesthetic pleasure about the tactile and olfactory experience of dead trees in hand that no amount or gadgetry can ever match. Secondly, gadgets break, power goes out, batteries go flat. Those who are now dependent on all the fancy new technology are setting themselves up for a hell of a shock. High tech is good, but sometimes old tech and low tech are best tech.
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Well, if days and domains count...
We're in the in laws village for the May Day break. This morning while the wee one was around at a friend's place I ducked into the county town for a bit of shopping. Turned a corner onto a road rather spectacularly lined with bright yellow and soft purple flowers, then about 500 metres down - is this rural northern China or North America?!
And, considering how many villages put up cool, traditional Chinese-style gateways at the village entrances and Daying (literally 'big camp') Village has three totem poles, why is our village so content with ghastly, cheap wrought iron monstrosities?
Yes, I am experiencing village entrance envy.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Islander,
there isnt a distinction between she/he/his/hers/her/him
Chinese almost gets there with all 3rd person pronouns being [ETA: standard Mandarin pronunciations] tā, tāmen when it is desirable or necessary to note the plural (not compulsory), and tāde for possessive, and there’s no masculine/feminine forms for classes of people like in say, French, German, Russian, and to a slightly lesser extent English (no actor/actress, étudiant/étudiante, fiancé/fiancée), and although some names can be seen as more masculine/feminine, there’s no class of nouns used specifically as names, divided into masculine/feminine/androgynous (my wife’s name is seen as more masculine, a former landlord’s name translated as ‘Orchid Phoenix Water’, and when I met him I was surprised to see a burly bloke rather than a dainty, parasol-carrying lady (in my defence, the phoenix is seen as female and a symbol of the empress in Chinese tradition), but otherwise naming is a total free for all so long as the authorities are able to type the name into their computer), but…
…gender is far too often built into the writing system. ‘He’ is 他, ‘she’ is 她. See the difference? The left-hand component of ‘he’ is the radical for ‘person’, whereas the left-hand component of ‘she’ is the radical for ‘female/woman’. And I could think of quite a few more instances that seem to be long-standing cultural biases ‘gendering’ what could otherwise be neutral language (yes, Confucius, I’m looking at you).
Language is so much joy!
To put it very mildly, yes. Even when it’s infuriating, it is endlessly fascinating.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Lilith __,
Well, yes, and that's where the boundaries can get a bit confusing. Grammatical gender is no more guilty of gendered language, exclusionary language, or sexism than the conjugation of verbs or declension of nouns. It's just grammar. But it is a part of the system used to create gendered, exclusionary, and otherwise prejudicial language. Still, it's about as guilty as a getaway car is guilty of aiding armed robbery - i.e. the problem is the people, not the tools they use.
But a perusal of Stephen Judd's wikipedia article above is interesting, in that it shows the wildly different approaches different languages take to removing sexist language, some having to invent more gendered terms in order to include, rather than exclude, because of how grammatical gender functions in different languages.
