應龍

[ljplicease]

Work has been keeping me pretty busy, and while I still find the regime in control of the network at Company 2 to be on the oppressive side, I am enjoying playing with foreign language input methods. I have been tasked with making software tools usable by native Chinese speakers. I have always been interested in how people interact with computers and technology, and when you take away all of the assumptions (which I have always lived with) which come along with English, things become a little more interesting.

I've also started learning a few Chinese characters here and there. These two characters mean "Chinese written language":

中文

Although to distinguish between whether you are talking about traditional or simplified Chinese requires a two character prefix that I am not yet familiar with. My Chinese zodiac is:

火龍

which is "Fire Dragon" in traditional Chinese. I have taken a liking to the characters for "Winged Dragon" in traditional Chinese:

應龍

Mostly, I think because it is fun to type the pinyin for it which is yinglong.

(If you are using a Mac, you should be able to see those characters without having do anything special. If you are running Windows, then you need to install the language pack. Boo windows!)

My knowledge of Chinese is itty-bitty, but just the fact that I can sort of distinguish different forms of Chinese from each other and from other Asian languages excites me. Maybe someday I will find the time to properly study Chinese. I think it would be a fun and useful thing to know. I almost picked up a Chinese language Sydney paper at the newsagent last night just to study the characters.

Last night I went back to Sydney Uni for "Trivia Night." It was pretty fun, we had pizza and answered trivial questions. The one question I got "wrong" was something that I really should have gotten right. The correct answer was either SGML or HTML, but I was pretty sure that HTML didn't exist in the 1980s (as specified in the question), where as I knew that SGML (on which HTML is based) had been around since the 80s. I just checked on Wikipedia, and sure enough the first specification documents for HTML date back to 1993. The reason I should have known that the "right" answer was HTML is because non-IT people with whom I was playing would be more likely to recognize the term HTML than SGML. I mean, SGML - what's that?

Comments

[hijinks-ensue.livejournal.com]

Pinyin is a system of romanization (phonemic notation and transcription to Roman script) for Standard Mandarin, where pin means "spell(ing)" and yin means "sound(s)").

so, if my chinese accompanist senior year's name was yin, does that mean her name means "sound" or is there another meaning when it's someone's name? it'd be kind of fun if it was sound, since she was a musician and all...

[plicease]

Possibly.

Unfortunately, there are usually many characters which could be represented by the pinyin spelling of a sound when you take away the accents. For example, The Hanzi for Pinyin is "拼音", where 音 is yīn or "sound(s)" (as you noted).

The software which I use to type Chinese characters (called an input method editor or IME) is a bit like typing into a mobile phone. I type in pinyin and the computer uses frequency tables and context to “guess” which character I really mean. When I type "yin" into the input editor (the software which allows me to type Chinese characters), I get lots of characters to choose from, like:

印 (yìn) print, seal, stamp, chop, mark
引 (yǐn) to pull, draw out, attract, to stretch

both of which are actually different sounds. And this one is (I guess) a homonym, because it sounds the same (has the same reading), but it is a different character

因 (yīn) cause, reason, because

and of course has a completely different meaning.