Thursday, February 28, 2019

Mutual intelligibility in writing only

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Mutual intelligibility is one important way to differentiate a language from a dialect, in spite of some complications . One such complica...
Saturday, August 4, 2018

"below" is not an adjective

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In a technical discussion forum about databases, someone posted an off-topic message: "to all Oracle staff, this phrase is not Englis...
Friday, July 6, 2018

Basic Chinese Characters

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I finally finished my little book Basic Chinese Characters . It contains 2500 commonly used Chinese characters selected by the Ministry of ...
Monday, April 30, 2018

Ludwig Feuerbach and the End/Outcome of Classical German Philosophy

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The 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx (May 5, 1818 - March 14, 1883) is coming soon. This great thinker is one of the very few th...
Sunday, March 11, 2018

A few word-play jokes

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First, a translation of a poem ( ci-poem to be exact) by Ms. Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084 – ca 1155/1156), a poet at the turn of the Northern-t...
Sunday, February 4, 2018

The Multilingual Idioms List

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Linguaholic created a crowdsourcing project, The Multilingual Idioms List . I think two things are new in this project. As far as I k...
2 comments:
Saturday, November 11, 2017

Chinese translation of a poem by Kahlil Gibran

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Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was an accomplished Lebanese poet. His well-known poem On Children Your children are not your children. They...
Thursday, September 14, 2017

Language difficulty

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Chinese has been widely considered to be one of the most difficult languages in the world. What constitutes the difficulty of a language? C...
Monday, July 10, 2017

Tian Ji's horse racing and the electoral vote system

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[The following was written on November 11, 2016.] The author of the famous military strategy book The Art of War , Sun Wu , commonly kno...
Sunday, April 16, 2017

自由: "freedom" or "liberty"?

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A Chinese reader asked me about the difference between "freedom" and "liberty" when translating Chinese "自由" i...