That's right, drongos: a new interview awaits your hungry eyes and brains.
The Drongo: Our guest today on The Drongo is Alexi Caracotsios, a man of countless talents. Readers, prepare yourselves: here he comes.
What are you all about, Alexi?
Alexi Caracotsios: I have spent the last eight years of my life trying to obtain the knowledge (un?)inherent to books, experience, and life.
I have delved deep into the linguistic treasure pool of foreign languages, achieving fluency in five, and being able to dabble around in another three or so. I always thought of myself as a rogue scholar on the quest for truth; now, I am in the depths of an existential crisis as to what the hell any of that could possibly mean.
Oh ho ho. No less than the brilliant Tanner Greer tweeted a link to my essay, "The Rarest Mandarin Syllables." I'm humbled -- but not so humbled I'm not gonna blog about it. It's not every day a senpai notices you.
From Drong Beach, California comes another interview with The Drongo.
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The Drongo: Chris Stasse and I have been friends since we met as college sophomores taking Second Year Chinese. Today's interview guest is a supreme shenaniganeer, one who acts with vigor and learns with rigor.
From September 2019 through October 2020, I catalogued the rarest syllables of Modern Standard Mandarin. Occasional notetaking turned into a systematic search, and I believe this list is close to complete. To the best of my knowledge I am the first to compile much of this information -- but perhaps others have done so, somewhere beyond the reach of my search-fu.
During this investigation, I was specifically concerned with syllables which are rare regardless of which tone they are pronounced in. This meant that even certain uncommon tone-syllable pairings were not rare enough for me; for instance, only two characters are pronounced qiong in fourth tone, but qiong was not eligible for my list because there are many other characters pronounced qiong across the other three tones.
I recently readFinding Them Gone, Red Pine's book combining a contemporary Chinese travelogue with an introduction to ancient Chinese poetry. Through this book, I learned about chang2xiao4 长啸, an ancient Daoist spiritual exercise. It is known in English as "transcendental whistling" -- or, in Red Pine's translation, "droning."
pg 47
I discovered that in the mouths of Daoists, changxiao had a very different meaning, and involved breathing out in a way that could be heard for miles. Such droning was done from the top of a hill or a raised platform. None of the Daoists I've spoken with, however, have been able to tell me how to do it. Either the regimen behind such a skill has died out, or such knowledge is transmitted in secret.
At night I lie in the mountains. It's quieter when birds sing
Strangers aren't likely to approach this lonely wilderness
My car is cold. I'm lonely. My thoughts twist around
One day away from home is like ten months
Naturally, I wanted to reply in kind. My goal was to show I had grokked Chris's poem by restating its sentiments in different words.
In addition, I challenged myself to work within the constraints of a line-internal rhyme scheme: the 2nd, 4th, and 7th (final) syllables of each line all share an ending sound.
A certain Mr. Stasse (featured several times on this website) has temporarily withdrawn from society to live at a Buddhist retreat.
Original Title: 《老傻赐新隐士》
2020-10-13: On reflection, I dislike the third line and will probably change it. It's a leftover from the first draft, and out of place.
秋风摇树果不应
愿隐士身旁同赏
人生弯曲预无因
他稳似果拟之值
Rough translation (updated 2020-10-13):
Autumn wind shakes the trees, but the fruits don't go along
I wish the hermit was here to appreciate it, too
Life's twists and turns aren't worth guessing at
He is steady, like the fruits, and that's worth imitating
In September, Chris Stasse sent me a letter which concluded with his calligraphic rendering of "Countryside Pleasures No. 6" 《田园乐——六》, by Tang-era master poet Wang Wei. My reply to Chris included a parody of the same poem.
My version's title swaps out the third character, 乐 le4 "pleasure, happiness", for the rhyming word 恶 e4 "evil, vicious, harmful." Here is "Countryside Nastiness," by Wang Wei's little-renowned cousin, Wrong Wei.
桃红中坏烈焰
柳绿烧成灰柱
花落腾于热气
鸟啼出窝恐离
Translation:
Red peaches suffer from fierce flames
Green willows burn up into pillars of ash
Flowers fall, then rise on heated gusts
Birds cry, leaving their nests in fear
My friend Matt and I just discovered that Android's (default) text-messaging app can now send voice messages.
Voice messaging (on WeChat) was everywhere when I lived in China, and I've missed it as an option for texting in the States. I suppose the demand for voice messaging is filled here by Snapchat, whatever Facebook does, and voice iMessages for the Apple ecosystem. I don't use those, so I have been a text-only plebeian -- until now!
I think I'll be using voice messages a lot, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. My words, in my voice, represent me more closely than writing can. I'm glad to find a way to move some of my normal communication away from pure text.
This page describes Linguary, an application to support two major activities in language analysis: (1) storing source material which has caught the user's interest, and (2) grouping and commenting on source material to attack or defend a hypothesis. This page, like Linguary, is a work in progress.
Linguary was born to serve my own needs in translation, linguistics, and recreational language learning, but I intend to make it useful for others (though there are no plans to make it applicable to non-Chinese languages.) The application was first mentioned on this site under the earlier name "Linguist's Working Environment," in my June letter to h0p3.
I've long had the habit of emailing people I find on the Web to notify them of typos, or dead webpages, but only recently have I realized:
how little time and energy companies typically devote to writing documentation (relative to resources spent on the systems being documented)
how many projects have software docs and similar written resources in public version control repos
how easy it is to fix written documents when they're hosted on version control platforms like GitHub
I hope to continue helping out with FOSS projects' technical-writing needs, especially when there's an opportunity to help Chinese-speaking teams translate material into native English.
Ubasute (姥捨て, "abandoning an old woman", also called obasute and sometimes oyasute 親捨て "abandoning a parent") is the rare, old[1] practice of senicide in Japan, whereby an infirm or elderly relative was carried to a mountain, or some other remote, desolate place, and left there to die.[2] According to the Kodansha Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japan, ubasute "is the subject of legend, but… does not seem ever to have been a common custom".[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubasute
Ha. I notice that "姥捨て" begins with kanji whch, when read in Mandarin, are homophonous to 老舍. The meaning is not similar in the first character ("lao" in the author's name means "forever, always, eternally") but it could be (as "lao" can, in sufficiently compressed contexts, directly indicate an old person). As for the second character, 捨, it's a variant of 舍; they have the same meaning of "giving up, relinquishing".
This is a translation of an image, seen on Twitter, about the current state of the Three Gorges Dam. I've done my best to preserve the news voice, and to ensure the accuracy of all technical terms related to flood control.
Translation
On July 18th, Xinhua News reported that, as a result of heavy rainfall, on the 17th the "second 2020 Yangtze flood" began in the upper reaches of the Yangtze.
I'm attending two events today: one professional, one personal.
In the afternoon is "Digital Sources for Chinese Studies" (or "Chinese History" -- sources conflict), put on by UCI's Long US-China Institute and Yale University's Council on East Asian Studies.
