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.
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 Stasse (featured several times on this website) has temporarily withdrawn from society to live at a Buddhist retreat.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
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.
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.
Besides its verbal use, 给, with the reading gei3, is also (roughly speaking) "near-obligatory case marker for indirect object". But 给 has at least one other use, as the example 把什么东西给烧了 demonstrates. The function of 给 here seems similar to the usage of 弄 and 搞 with complements like 对 and 好, e.g. 弄好/搞好 "improve; put right".
I think there may be other nuances related to animate nouns, too -- so what's up? I'll keep an eye out. (While translating "Iron Bull and Sick Duck", I found some examples of this phenomenon to copy into here.)
2020-05-14: Aha! The AllSet Chinese Grammar wiki contends that this is a passive construction. It all makes sense now. (Be warned that AllSet occasionally offers quite poor English translations, like these.)
There are Chinese characters which are structurally simple, but not in common use today.
A perfect example is 屾 shen1, a literary term which means "并列的两座山" ("two mountains side by side".) This is one of relatively few characters that is actually ideographic, i.e. has a shape depicting the real-world concept it represents. This is because 屾 shen1 is made up of two side-by-side copies of the character for mountain, 山 shan1. Two mountains side-by-side in the character; "two mountains side-by-side" for the meaning.
Below are other characters which have piqued my interest.
I once traveled in a touring group guided by an amicable man named Gadi. When the group played Secret Santa and I received his name as my beneficiary, I decided to write him a poem.
Please excuse any awkwardness in the pseudo-literary Chinese. The gift was completed in a hurry, for a non-Chinese-speaking audience, so I judged rhyming more important than phrase construction.
A Gift for Gadi, Original
Gadi Gadi Gadi
我队队长
样子很帅
哥们超爽
人才之峰
留一大胡
教人何为
天天为酷
A Gift for Gadi, Rough English Translation
Gadi Gadi Gadi
Captain of our team.
His style is way fresh,
This Chiller Supreme.
Of eminent talents
And big-bearded too,
He teaches all people
His everyday cool.