Chipanglish » Language and the Internet

iPhone Chinese Alphabet App

Peter — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 05:09:19 +0000

Good Characters, Inc has come out with a new iPhone application: Chinese Alphabet. Thankfully, the creators realize such a thing does not exist and this is for entertainment value only, to add “mystery” to your writing. Of course, everything from the Orient is mysterious…

To those gullible enough to think this will translate their writing into real Chinese, for just $1.99 you can sound like an idiot!

三內丁口了!

According to the app, it says “Enjoy”, but it actually says:
“Three inside diced meat/vegetables mouth [past tense marker]!”

On second thought, I might actually enjoy three pieces of diced meat/vegetables in my mouth. Mmm… beef stew.

Invented Languages

Peter — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:40:49 +0000

With the popularity of the film, Avatar, linguists around the world have a new invented language to expose their geekiness: Na’vi.

Poised to join the ranks of other invented languages like Esperanto, Quenya (aka High-Elvish), and Klingon, Na’vi is sure to amass a following of nerds and linguists at future nerd conventions like Comic-con.

But philosophically, it calls into a greater question. What makes a language a language? Vocabulary? Native speakers? A grammar filled with syntax, phonology, phonetics, morphology, and semantics?

Having tried to create my own fictional language, I can tell you it is a lot more sophisticated than just making up words.

Anyway, score another one for the linguistic nerds out there!

Thank Goodness for the Internet

Yvonne — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:51:05 +0000

So I’m setting up a new personal blog. I wanted it to have multilingual capabilities for my non-US family which means that I have to translate all the main navigation headings.

It then occurred to me that I have no idea how to say “blog” in Chinese. And it’s not like my mom (aka Queen Luddite) is going to be any help here.

“Blog” is not in my 英漢漢英字典, which is not all that surprising considering this edition was published in 2005.

Google Translate gives 博客 (bo2 ke4) for “blog” and Mandarin Tools concurs and gives 部落格 (bu4 luo4 ge2) and 網絡日記 (wang3 luo4 ri4 ji4)—literally, “internet diary/daily log”—as alternate translations.

What did people do before they had the internet to look up the latest vernacular?

Chipanglish » Language and the Internet

iPhone Chinese Alphabet App

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