Translation of a poem "Snow falling on high branches..."

Somebody asked for a translation of this poem:

雪落高枝映蕾菲
惊洁美
卓然岂摧眉

My translation：

Snow falling on high branches befits blooming flowers
I'm amazed at this clean beauty
So demonstrative as to debase myself?

The last sentence may be a challenge. 摧眉 literally means "make lower eyebrows". But figuratively it means "lose confidence; flatter (in the bad sense)".

This poem, technically ci rather, was probably composed by a person named 啼非 in 2004.

(The image of the fan below is from Mr. Vishal Upadhayay's Facebook posting.)

English words that seem to have opposite meanings, "sanction", "bash", "bashful"

Somebody in a forum mentioned a few English words that seem to have opposite meanings. One is "sanction", which according to Wiktionary means (1) an approval, by an authority, generally one that makes something valid; (2) a penalty, or some coercive measure, intended to ensure compliance; especially one adopted by several nations, or by an international body. A quick response from another guy is "really? somebody should tell Putin that sanction can mean something better!!" That's interesting! Anyway, I've always worried about the seemingly conflicting meanings of this word and sometimes avoid using it in my writing or speech, unless it's very clear, as in "economic sanction (against a country)".

Another example mentioned is "bash". On the one hand, it has the meaning of to strike heavily, to criticize harshly (source), as in "Bashing Hillary? Don't go there, GOP". On the other hand, the word "bashful" means shy, timid (source). How could you justify these two opposite human behaviors with one single word (or word with a suffix)? This word, though, is different from "sanction", in that "bashful" actually has a completely different etymology and is related to the verb "abash", to make ashamed or embarrassed (source). In any dictionary, when two words have the same spelling but are descended from two etymological sources, they're usually listed as two headwords or entries. In case of "bashful", it's not the word "bash" with the suffix "-ful", but was formed by "abashed" + "-ful" and later lost the initial unstressed vowel (a process called aphesis). "bash" does have the same meaning as "abash" except that sense is now obsolete.

Well, some words that look like having different meanings but they don't, such as "flammable" and "inflammable". That's another topic, for now.

Thought experiment: reading speed of a trilingual

I've always wondered about this. Imagine a person perfectly trilingual[note1] in English (or any language using a phonetic writing system hereinafter), Korean, and Chinese. I predict that his reading speed is Chinese > Korean > English. The speed can be measured by reading a culture- and language-neutral passage telling the same simple story. (But see [note2].) I suppose that the information the brain and eyes acquire within a given moment is the most for Chinese, less for Korean and the least for English. Suppose the text font is about the same on three sheets of paper (or computer screens), each written in one of the three languages. The eyes scan from left to the right. Due to the nature of English, the eye movement is completely linear. The amount of information thus gained within, say, one tenth of a second, may be less than in the case of Chinese. A language- and culture- neutral passage about the same content is normally printed shorter in Chinese than in English. But the eye scanning speed is about the same. So the total reading time will be shorter for Chinese. Let's call that advantage of information density for Chinese.

Secondly, I suppose human eyes focus on circular areas, instead of horizontal lines. That is, the very focal point is a round dot, the farther away from it, the less focus; eyes do not focus on one fixed-width line, the farther away above or below or to the left or right to it, the less focus. Chinese characters have the advantage of packing semantic information in a square block, compared to English which spreads the same information out horizontally, whose acquisition requires left-to-right scan by the eyes.

The Korean language is a unique case in that its letters are arranged both in a block and horizontally. It's a perfect compromise between English and Chinese. The eyes can gain some information focusing on one spot but usually must move horizontally to gain enough for a word. So the reading by the same person reading the same content will have the intermediate speed.

On the other hand, a March 24, 2015 article reports the research by Georgetown University scientists, After learning new words, brain sees them as pictures (probably based on this publication). Indeed, our brain does not process English text strictly linearly when our eyes horizontally scan the line into our brain. This means that the distinction between a language with largely block-based information (Chinese) and one with line-based information (English etc.) is not so dramatic. Nevertheless, I would be very delighted if we could find a person perfectly trilingual in English, Korean and Chinese, or at least perfectly bilingual in two of the three, to test his reading speed. Personally I'm not sure if I'm perfectly bilingual in English and Chinese. But I do feel that my reading speed in Chinese slightly better than in English. But I have not done a well-prepared test.[note2]

________________________
[note1] He's said to be a maximal trilingual, in the field of Second Language Acquisition.
[note2] Obviously the test must be given by another person. Since the person taking the test naturally reads the passage faster if he's already read the same content in any language, the passage actually cannot contain the same content translated into different languages in real implementation of this test. How the test can be given in the most appropriate way may be a technical challenge.

My first book

I just self-published my first book, Random Thoughts while Studying English and Chinese. The table of contents are as follows:

1 "主席" (Zhǔxí) was Chairman, is President
2 "Ni Hao Ma" (你好吗) is not a native Chinese greeting
3 Affective meaning of "中国" (China)
4 Chinese Character Usage Frequency
5 2015: The Year of "羊"
6 Why do Chinese choose uncommon English names?
7 Scholarly translation should be literal
8 "We should all be learning Chinese..." thus they say
9 "He" (他) and "she" (她) mix-up for Chinese students
10 "第几" has no English equivalent
11 New Chinese Acronyms
12 "Dragon" for "龙": a mistranslation?
13 Joke due to translation: "Oracle bone script" was registered as a software brand by Americans
14 Chinese religious language
15 "Modern" and "现代" or "近代"
16 Translation: a case study, "feminism" and "女权主义"
17 Translation of "computer", "calculator", and others
18 New Year's Wish: Less new usage of 被 (bei)
19 "谢谢叔叔!" (Thank you Uncle) said not to a family relative
20 "NBA" as an entry in Chinese dictionary
21 ESL methods: bilingual and immersion
22 Linguistic authority
23 Chinese "empty word" 虚词
24 虚词"虽然": empty word "although"
25 虚词"当然": empty word "of course"
26 虚词"很": empty word "very"
27 Interjection (叹词)
28 Why should the Chinese language not adopt a phonetic writing system?
29 Learning ... as a second language
30 Technical document needs literal translation
31 Levels of translation quality proposed by Yan Fu: A small example
32 Proper name translation: semantic or phonetic
33 Proper name translation: standardization
34 What language is popular?
35 Which English letter do Chinese pronounce wrong the most?
36 Language education to solve Chinese ethnic conflict

Any comments and reviews, good or bad, are highly appreciated. In case you ask, the landscape painting featured on the cover of the book is my hand-drawn replication of 山水图 (Picture of Mountains and Water) by 黄鼎 (Huang Ding, 1660-1730), an early Qing dynasty painter.