NEEDS MOAR SUGAR. Clearly you're ordering the wrong drink.
Granulated sugar in Chinese cooking first appeared during the Tang dynasty, so either malt sugar or honey should be used if that's an issue.
Both Ethiopians and Arabs claim to be the originators of coffee, seems like a pretty bitter dispute whenever I ask about it.
The Tang dynasty granulated the sugar along with the "orange" flavor.
Because this was ordered by high-level bureaucrats, today we have the "Mandarin orange."
Apparently Moby upset me so much I forgot how to spell my name.
You should see a dentist, a profession which was invented during the Manchu dynasty.
I killed the blog with science, if linguistics is a science.
I have an appt tomorrow at 11 am, a time of day which dynastic Chinese passed through daily, although not in the mountain time zone.
The only thing that makes Starbucks coffee even vaguely palatable is using it in a latte. That being said, and on topic for the thread, I remember seeing several Starbucks knockoff stores in Beijing with not-quite-right names and logos. Also what was billed as the world's largest Walmart (not a knockoff).
15
As long as it isn't in Samarra, you are probably okay.
Unless you drink Starbucks first.
14: It is. Don't believe Buttercup when she tries to tell you otherwise.
n another sense, the entire economic history of dynastic China can be understood as the history of struggles to maximize inequality between the reigning family and everyone else.
In other news, China has begun flying bombers right around Taiwan.
That seems a better candidate for starting WWIII than somebody in a nice suit killing an ambassador.
Better, yes, but not as good as this.
It's good to know we have a choice of apocalypses, at least.
Even the flooding option is back on offer after all these years!
I thought Trump won the China confrontation in a landslide.
The city I'm in has knockoffs of Dunkin Donuts and Blockbuster Video. I'm half expecting to find a McDougals with the golden arcs.
Britain is stiff with KFC knockoffs for some reason, but I haven't seen a video store for ten years. Who uses them?
Good question, especially as internet here (as in most of the developed world) is better and cheaper than the US- 330MB for $40/month.
I mean, I think this is a knockoff or maybe it's the official presence in this country? I can't imagine the parent company would allow that if it weren't sanctioned.
Has to be a knockoff, surely. My impression of Spain was that they lagged behind in the early days of the internet, probably due to coverage problems, but jumped ahead with uptake of mobile telephony, which was ubiquitous before it became so in Britain at least.
Hao Jingfang sounds really quite admirable.
Must try her, to restore my faith in Chinese SF. I found "Three Body Problem" deeply disappointing after all the brouhaha, so I should probably read somebody else.
Now I feel I need to argue linguistics isn't a science just to keep my integrity.
You could also argue that trying to make the worst pun you can possibly relate to the conversation isn't linguistics.
I would argue it's "applied linguistics".
Must try her, to restore my faith in Chinese SF. I found "Three Body Problem" deeply disappointing after all the brouhaha, so I should probably read somebody else.
I was meaning to thank the OP, based on the linked story I just ordered a copy of Invisible Planets and am looking forward to it.
[I didn't read Three Body Problem, or any other Chinese SF, so I'm hoping that will be a good place to start]
36: I saw The Arrival a few weeks ago. If it kicks off a trend of female linguists as protagonists in big budget SF movies, maybe you can get yourself a gig in Hollywood as a consultant.
I like Villeneuve but I don't have any hopes that this will be anything but bad. And I've watched the original very many times.
I enjoyed both Three Body Problem and its first sequel--what didn't you like about it? Generally, I think it's great that we're seeing so much good Chinese sci-fi. Admittedly, most of it is translated by Ken Liu, but he's also an amazing writer in his own right; his Grace of Kings is the start to a pastiche of Chinese epics (mainly Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, I think) that's an absolute delight to read. I haven't read it but I've heard very good things about his short story collection. Also haven't read Folding Beijing yet, but my wife said it was amazing and deserved its win.
41: I thought it was great (although it tickled a lot of my interests: sci-fi, linguistics, China). I'm not sure it could have really been improved upon while still being a wide-release movie. (I guess they could've done without Forest Whitaker's weird accent, but I took it as more catnip for linguistics nerds.) Amy Adams was excellent.
43: We enjoyed it. It seems to have done well, which is good. Wide release SF movies that have ambitions beyond blowing things up are rare, and so should be encouraged.
I agree about Amy Adams. It's funny, watching the movie she looked super familiar, but when I look over her filmography, I don't seem to have seen anything else she's in.
I had only seen her in American Hustle, so it was nice contrast for her to be in a leading role that had nothing to do with sex appeal.
I liked Arrival too. It did a very good job with the linguistics in particular.
I liked it as well but I figured you would have balked at the Sapir-Whorfism
I just interpreted that as part of the sci-fi premise.
I figured that was the one free bit of BS it gets to make it interesting, like having an otherwise hard sci-fi book with FTL communication. Their version of Sapir-Whorf is so over-the-top fantastic that it might as well be magic.
I enjoyed both Three Body Problem and its first sequel--what didn't you like about it?
Mostly I found the alien civilisation completely unconvincing. That will continue to be a criticism even if the version of it we're exposed to in Three Body Problem turns out in the next volume to be an extension of the game. I was doubly disappointed because I found the human characters brilliant. Clearly I need to read some Ken Liu.
The internet has no picture of Lt. Worf riding a tapir, so I guess I can't link to one for a joke.
The aliens do seem to have been worked backwards: let's imagine a weird starting scenario, then develop the characters to fit that. In the second book they seem to be more (pardon the words) game theoretic players. It focuses on human characters trying to deal with this newly awful world, while the aliens are mostly just an oppressive background.
Beware that Ken Liu is an infuriatingly successful polymath. Oh, you're a writer, and a translator, and a lawyer, and a software developer, and you're apparently completely gracious, humble, and nicely respond to fans on Twitter? Like, fuck you, dude, be less awesome. My only consolation has been that I thought some of his software dev opinions were silly (which I characteristically take as evidence I have to reevaluate my opinions, but still).
If you can find a picture of Michael Dorn in a wooden chair, it could be Shaker-Worf.
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Yeah, that would be fun. The consultant for Arrival was the friend of a friend/colleague (or at least the acquaintance of a friend/colleague).
But I figure Arrival is the closest I'll ever see to my career in a movie. They gave her enough random ethnic knicknacks in her office to plausibly have her read as a linguistic anthropologist, plus the whole Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is really more our turf.
I almost laughed out loud when they first brought up Sapir-Whorf in the movie, but I enjoy seeing really ridiculous treatment of what I do for a living. I have such envy of physicists and biologists who get ridiculous sci fi treatment of their research on the regular.
I'm very excited about Ted Chiang getting an adaptation. Stories of Your Life and Others is a superlative collection.
Maybe we can finally get that big-screen "Tower of Babylon" adaptation.
I thought they only mentioned Sapir-Whorf descriptively, such that there could have been a deleted follow-up line "but this theory has been essentially rejected by linguists" and it would barely have affected the movie in tone or content. After all, Sapir-Whorf doesn't suggest language would give people the ability to [spoilers] either.
My name is a killing woAARRGH
I took it as: all consciousnesses have the ability to [spoiler], but to do it you have to think the right way. Our puny human languages restrict the necessary thoughts, but if you use a richer language you unlock the potential for those thoughts. So accepting a strong version of Sapir-Whorf is necessary. (Framing it that way, I'm sure that conceit has been used in a fantasy context where the gained ability is traditional D&D-esque magic.)
They only mention it descriptively, but the way learning the language affects her certainly implies that something like it applies to the alien language. In interviews the linguistics consultant has basically said "Sapir-Whorf doesn't apply to human languages, but this is an alien language!" Which seems like a pretty weak excuse to me, but again, eh, science fiction.
59 was good, but lacking an "opinionated".
I unabashedly enjoyed the Star Trek TNG episode with Sapir-Whorf overtones, and I'm not that crazy about the series as a whole.
In fact, I may watch it again before my mom shows up for the holidays and I'll be saturated in romantic comedies and sitcoms of the seventies and eighties. I am looking forward already to Mrs Doubtfire. Both she and my son are ambivalent at best about It's a Wonderful Life, but I plan to urge it on them strongly. I have no idea about food and gifts yet. The guest room is messy as well.
Ohh, I've ghot one:: The nonexistence of a Zhang Yimou christmas movie (or indeed holiday movie of ANY SORT) proves that there's something intrinsic about thinking in Chinese that leads to a different conception of holiday.
Seriously, no halloween movie, well I guess there's a wedding movie that was pretty good, I should rethink, and Red Sorghum did have kind of a 4th of July vibe. Hmmm. Wheels within wheels.
Satoshi Kon's Three Godfathers is as good an Xmas movie as they come. The Japanese are obviously crazy mad for holidays and rituals.
The relationship between Chinese and Japanese (and Korean), languages and cultures, bothers me sometimes.
I don't know why I would expect anything tighter than between French and Italian, or English and German. But it appears to be much more distant than those, and distant even a thousand years ago, although Chinese was an active second language.
And my info/guess says a lot of Japan was settled from way south China, possibly even as recent as Warring States period, ~ 400 CE?
Correct my blundering.
Japanese isn't related to Chinese; attempts to show relation to other languages (besides those of the Ryukyus, but possibly even including Korean) is controversial.
Japanese isn't related to Chinese
And well, considering the history, I think that is pretty fuckin interesting.
Japanese genetics
A 2011 SNP consortium study done by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Max Planck Society consisting of 1719 DNA samples determined that Koreans and Japanese clustered together confirming the findings of an earlier study that Koreans and Japanese are closely related. However, the Japanese were found to be genetically closer to South Asian populations as evident by a genetic position that is significantly closer towards South Asian populations on the principal component analysis (PCA) chart. Some Japanese individuals are also genetically closer to Southeast Asian and Melanesian populations when compared to other East Asians such as Koreans and Han Chinese, indicating possible genetic interactions between Japanese and these populations.[82]A 2008 study about genome-wide SNPs of East Asians by Chao Tian et al. reported that Japanese, Koreans and Han Chinese are genetically distinguishable from southeast Asians, and that the Japanese are related to Koreans, who are more closely related to Han Chinese. However, the Japanese are relatively genetically distant from Han Chinese, compared to Koreans.
Yeah, I know Ainu, Jomon, and Yayoi, but we are talking about a population that started growing and developing a significant culture around 500 AD, and we don't seem to have a clue about origins and sources?
I think they are aliens.
PS:Good Asian movies seen this month: Exit - Hsian Chienn; Mountains May Depart = Jia Zhangke;Running Out of Time - Johnny To; Train to Busan - Yeon Sang-ho, the fucking ultimate never to be topped zombie apocalypse movie.
The other three are also ok.
There is also linguistic evidence for Southeast Asian influence on Japanese.
What makes our era so common anyway?
I think "Vulgar Era" would be more applicable.
68: IIRC that was mentioned here before, where the specific influence was Austronesian? I wasn't sure how certain that was. On the other end there are some people who see it as part of a macro-Altaic, but I don't know how fashionable that is.
Just because we don't know what other languages some group's language is connected to doesn't mean they're alien or weird, it just means the historical evidence isn't sufficiently clear to draw conclusions. People have lots of ideas here, but the history of migrations in the area are complicated. There are also language areal affects that could hide or mimic linguistic ones, forcing linguists to be more cautious. I dunno how much this really matters, but the preference to use logographic writing throughout most times and places in East Asian history probably doesn't help; it makes it harder to verify intermediate forms, leaving them more fuzzy (e.g. By trying to recover Middle Chinese syllable structure from poems that should rhyme). I should probably leave this to the actual experts like teo and Buttercup, but it's a fascinating problem where we generally need to be happy with incomplete solutions.
For purposes of trolling I just use BC and AD, myself.
72: That's unnecessarily jeromecentric.
61: Well, yeah, that's where suspension of disbelief comes in - from a dramatic perspective in SF it's better if what we learn from aliens deeply contradicts what we thought was scientifically established, otherwise it's just getting to update our stamp collections.
73.1: Not sure if it's come up here before, but yes, Austronesian, specifically Old Javanese or something very similar.
Barry - have been very sorry to hear of work and possible romance woes, sending sympathetic vibes and hope things look up soon!
Obviously for something neutral and also that makes things easy for everybody, you just use January 1, 1960 as the base date.
77: Thanks! I found this, which was interesting. Man, those guys sailed everywhere.
400 BCE, bob.
Naw, I meant 400 AD, or CE (?). Japanese history, other than archeology, doesn't go BCE. They barely find any inscriptions on pottery before 500. Jomon culture goes back 10k years, and barely reached neolithic.
Considering what was going on just a few hundred miles away in China for millennia, and the very frequent interaction and borrowing after 500, and the rapid development of an advanced and sustained culture, it just feels weird. My theory without evidence whatsoever is an in-migration of southern Chinese from horrors of Warring States.
Be like Britain with no evidence of Roman or Celtic or other Euro influence until 500 AD. East China Sea is rough, but not that rough.
Is CE right? I don't remember seeing "ACE".
Thanks dq. Romance seems ok for now. As for work we'll see...
Ok, lookin, I'm wrong. Yayoi culture from 300 bce-300 ad. Then kofun, which was ok. Still not impressed, too big a leap, but maybe written language can do that.
Wiki" "DNA tests in 1999 support the theory that the origin of the Yayoi people was an area south of the Yangtze"
But didn't bring written language with them?
I haven't seen Exit or Running Out of Time yet. Mountains May Depart was excellent, one of his finest. I'm dying to see Train to Busan, anyone know how I can stream it?
Denver-- how tricky to get baked with a passel of kids?
86: Southern China was full of non-Han people who might not have been literate in Chinese (the only kind of literacy then and there, AFAIK). Hell, the Han weren't even Han yet. More generally, that a people move doesn't mean they'll bring their language with them (really, "people", "move", "bring", and maybe "their" and "language" should all have scare quotes around them--they're doing a lot of work). For example, Bulgarian is a Slavic language, even though the original Volga Bulgarian language was Turkic.
But Warring States period was 400-200 BC or so, not 400 AD. (I just don't feel comfortable with CE. I blame Judge Dredd. "Judge Dredd in 2000 CE" would have been a very different story. HALT, CITIZEN. THE CRIME IS ROBBERY. SENTENCE, SIX MONTHS MANDATORY ANGER MANAGEMENT CLASSES IN THE THERAPO-CUBES.
Bob, yes, CE is what Dionysius Exiguus called AD. He didn't do BC, because before his AD he counted Ab Urbe Condita (753 BCE), presumably assumed that nobody would be interested in going further back.
91: Not a good night I guess. Coulda sworn I checked that
Replace all my "Warring States" refs with "Three Kingdoms" which was even more an era to run like hell from.
If this is the China thread, important reading from JW Mason:
http://jwmason.org/slackwire/capital-mobility-as-trojan-horse/
Somewhat depressing that he can't think of a single reason, good or bad, why the Chinese government might want the yuan to be traded internationally.
Maybe Trump will convince them to use the NT$.
A real man would make them use the US$.
Somewhat depressing that he can't think of a single reason, good or bad, why the Chinese government might want the yuan to be traded internationally.
Depressing in what way?
I can't say it like a mainstream economist, but having the reserve currency, or a strong internationally or regionally traded currency, makes you a fuckin hegemon. Japan spent roughly 50 years, going through about three deflations, to be able to demand transactions, and demand that loans be accepted in yen in East Asia. Strong currencies leverage into wealth and power.
But you have to be able to support and protect it. Japan destroyed itself trying.
What country does Mason live in? Doesn't matter most of the top ten have tried for it, succeeded for a while, accumulated capital. And of course the failures like Argentine are understood.
Oversimple but defensible, the US of fucking A is the Empire and richest country with an insane sized militarily which gets used every minute because we have the strongest currency.
Of course China would like to take our place.
Being the reserve currency is worth almost nothing. It's one of those pseudo-profound things that people glom onto.
And I also think that we have the strongest currency and the benefits thereof...
...because we can't go leftwing. Because Capitalism is us, and there is no limit to what PtB will do, and workers will endure to secure property and long term returns on investment.
No labour party, or slimmest possibility of one. No chance of workers taking charge. No revolutions, no more nationalizations. Labor done been made max docile beaten into resentful submission. And we blame each other.
Welcome to the Pleasures of the Safe Harbor Nation.
Crikey. Okay.
I happen to think that for instance the 19th Century British pound and British navy and British industry and British trade and British empire and even British literature and art are inexplicably connected around the currency and being able to set the int'l terms of trade with profit to some portion of subject and developing economies and great profit to home capitalists.
Or it's coincidence, in a repeated pattern. Arrighi.
John Bolton's mustache may have just saved us from war with Iran.
Trump doesn't like facial hair and probably didn't pick Bolton as under secretary of State for that reason. Story in Washington Post.
I can't see how there's more I need to know after reading your comment. Unless they hired mustache consultant who rates facial hair on a scale from Tom Selleck to 70s porn.
Joyce Carol Oates says Trump has dementia, but I say why give his supporters one more reason to compare him with Reagan.
It's not just Bolton. Trump appears to be making all of his appointments based on physical appearance.
Excepting himself. He's less attractive than any of the other candidates except Cruz. Maybe Sanders.
And Christie. I forgot he was running.
I've heard, but in my own limited experience having people report to you is a pain in the ass.
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Holy shit. Park Chan-wook's (Oldboy) The Handmaiden
is a very free adaptation of the novel Fingersmith. It kept (AFAICT from the nets) the lesbianism, gender relations, intersecting with themes of art/fiction/storytelling within a crosscultural (rakugo goin on here) context, and the class/capitalist dynamics. It added (cause movie) a slap in the audience face questioning of the male gaze and added a very complicated subtext of colonialism (set in 1930s occupied Korea). Park puts a mirror to the audience and the movie is about itself. Korean male audience? The movie is pre-designed to be mostly spoken Japanese with from first edit Korean subtitles. Hottest hatred of pornography movie ever.
And damn fine fun in a beautiful sexy package. A caper film.
Extreme, hell it's Park, I'm in shock, spinning, like when I first saw Oldboy. So many layers and levels I think this is Park's masterpiece.
Oh plot's a mess in last third, bad enough to lose the fourth star maybe. Not really the holes could be part of the plan! Oldboy only made dreamsense, and this has a late shoutout to Oldboy.
*****spoiler****
It's fucking Bound with a lot more sex and priapic intellectualism.
$13.00 at Amazon
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Good lord, I almost entirely agree with bob in 98.
To 99: yeah, opinion is divided, but Mason didn't even allude to any of the possible advantages. He just glid (yes, glid) right over the issue.
I took it as: all consciousnesses have the ability to [spoiler], but to do it you have to think the right way. Our puny human languages restrict the necessary thoughts, but if you use a richer language you unlock the potential for those thoughts. So accepting a strong version of Sapir-Whorf is necessary.
My main issue with that part wasn't the "a strong version of Sapir-Whorf is necessary" -- as said upthread, that can be the FTL for this movie -- it was the supposition that even if true, a (ridiculously) strong version of Sapir-Whorf would apply after a few weeks of reading alien as a foreign language and not being remotely fluent.
John Bolton looks uncannily like my father, including the mustache, so I get to enjoy his rejection for many reasons.
116: That does involve a bit of a leap, but at the level of movies it's a small one: you have to accept a polyglot linguistics professor can train herself to think in an utterly alien language in a few weeks/months of intense-to-the-point-of-hallucinating overtime. Can you think in a language without being fluent? I guess I'd argue yes, especially if we're only concerned with the structure of the language instead of the details required for communication--don't have to worry about phonetics, stress, etc. (That might be completely irrelevant, since it's only the written language that has this property, if I recall correctly? The aliens' spoken language was something else entirely.)
It felt like a huge leap to me. If strong Sapir-Whorf as presented by the movie is to make any sense, it must surely involve thinking like, or if you prefer developing the same neural pathways as, native speakers of the language. I mean, I wasn't aware even Sapir-Whorf proponents would apply it to second languages, but if it is, then surely it doesn't apply to what was, on the evidence of her facility in translating the script, the equivalent of a second year foreign language student.
That might be completely irrelevant, since it's only the written language that has this property, if I recall correctly? The aliens' spoken language was something else entirely
I think that was left indeterminate. At one point they said something about not being able to find any correlation between what was spoken and what was written, and then they just ignored the speech from then on.
She's just really smart, I guess? I see your point, but I think if this is the level of leap we're talking about with regard to academic theory in a popular movie, we're doing pretty well.
Specifically, transactional lawyers.
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Sorry, Heebie, but fuck your state. Maybe they can do the thing with splitting into 5 states and then the North can invade the one containing Dallas?
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123: yes, because if all the viral police videos have taught us anything, it's that this kind of thing could only happen in Texas.
I blame Santa Ana for being a shitty general.
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My net nanny is blocking me from the "I like these odds" thread, because it promotes gambling.
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123: She committed the unforgivable crime: disrespecting a cop.
124- Same police force that beat up black teenage girls previously. That seems to be their specialty, whereas any police force can handle shooting black men.
This should go in the TNC thread. Everybody replicate all your comments there, in order.
s the argument with the officer gets more heated, Jacqueline Craig's daughter walks towards the pair. At this point, the officer grabs the daughter from behind as people start yelling at him. The camera then cuts and the next thing you see is Jacqueline Craig, pinned on the ground
What on earth is that about???