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[rotting bones]

Not in Chinese, because they have different tones and characters. They’re homophones in Korean though.

I wonder if the words have different pitches in Shanghainese. I heard Shanghainese sounds like Korean to speakers of other Chinese dialects. It doesn't have tones, only a pitch-accent system.

[bradrn]

It doesn't have tones, only a pitch-accent system.

I’m going to nitpick this phrasing: pitch-accent systems are forms of tonal systems. Furthermore, ‘pitch-accent’ is not even a well-defined term, having been overgeneralised to such an extent that it is ‘too vague to be useful’ (see Hyman 2009 for details).

Instead, I’d use more specific terms: Shanghainese has a word-tone system, i.e. one in which each word is assigned a single contour.

[malloc]

Today is Boxing Day. That's when everyone punches each other for sport, right?

[alice]

Today is Boxing Day. That's when everyone punches each other for sport, right?

No; it's a commemmoration of the times when the bourgeoisie would pack the proletariat into boxes and transport them to where they'd be working for the next year.

[Raphael]

What, exactly, is the mushy green stuff served to passengers in the old "Yorkshire Airlines" TV comedy sketch?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm6VC5gdaFA

[alice]

What, exactly, is the mushy green stuff served to passengers in the old "Yorkshire Airlines" TV comedy sketch?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm6VC5gdaFA

Those be mushy peas, lad. None of your fancy posh individually-shelled crunchy peas for us decent Northern folk.

[Raphael]

What, exactly, is the mushy green stuff served to passengers in the old "Yorkshire Airlines" TV comedy sketch?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm6VC5gdaFA

Those be mushy peas, lad. None of your fancy posh individually-shelled crunchy peas for us decent Northern folk.

Thank you!

[Linguoboy]

Both Chinese and Korean ethnicities call themselves Han. Did this ever cause confusion?

Not in Chinese, because they have different tones and characters. They’re homophones in Korean though.

In everyday speech, this is true. According to the prescriptive standard, "China" Han has a long vowel and "Korea" Han a short vowel (which equates to different tonal patterns in those dialects which preserve MK tones).

It's one of the cases where you'll (occasionally and only in some publications) see a Sinogram used to represent it. For instance, from a recent edition of Chosun Ilbo:

전 세계 10위 오른 올해 韓 경제 성적
Korea economic performance this year rises to 10th place worldwide

However, I don't know how much of this is due to actual ambiguity and how much is just convention, since other country names (such as China, Russia, the USA, and Japan) are also abbreviated in this way.

[Travis B.]

Both Chinese and Korean ethnicities call themselves Han. Did this ever cause confusion?

Not in Chinese, because they have different tones and characters. They’re homophones in Korean though.

In everyday speech, this is true. According to the prescriptive standard, "China" Han has a long vowel and "Korea" Han a short vowel (which equates to different tonal patterns in those dialects which preserve MK tones).

Apparently vowel length has been lost in Seoul Korean except amongst the very old, but there are other varieties of Korean which preserve vowel length derived from MK tonality.

[Raphael]

This is fascinating:

"How the lore of New Year defeated the law of New Year"

https://davidallengreen.com/2025/01/how ... -25-march/

[Raphael]

I tried to find this through search engines, but couldn't, so perhaps someone here recognizes this:

I vaguely remember a parody version of The Major General's Song where a part of the lyrics was

My learning is extensive but consists of mindless trivia
Designed to boost my ego, which is larger than Bolivia

Does anyone know from which parody version of The Major General's Song that is?

[TomHChappell]

… a parody version of The Major General's Song where a part of the lyrics was

My learning is extensive but consists of mindless trivia
Designed to boost my ego, which is larger than Bolivia

Does anyone know from which parody version of The Major General's Song that is?

No.
But maybe I should adopt it as my personal anthem!

[Darren]

I tried to find this through search engines, but couldn't, so perhaps someone here recognizes this:

I vaguely remember a parody version of The Major General's Song where a part of the lyrics was

My learning is extensive but consists of mindless trivia
Designed to boost my ego, which is larger than Bolivia

Does anyone know from which parody version of The Major General's Song that is?

There's nothing like good old quotation marks in a google search – "which is larger than Bolivia" immediately led me to this:

I am the very model of a usenet personality.

I intersperse obscenity with tedious banality.
Addresses I have plenty of, both genuine and ghosted too,
On all the countless newgroups that my drivel is cross-posted to.
Your bandwidth I will fritter with my whining and my snivelling,
And you're the one who pays the bill, downloading all my drivelling.
My enemies are numerous, and no-one would be blaming you
For cracking my head open after I've been rudely flaming you.

I hate to lose an argument (by now I should be used to it).
I wouldn't know a valid point if I was introduced to it.
My learning is extensive but consists of mindless trivia,
Designed to fan my ego, which is larger than Bolivia.
The comments that I vomit forth, disguised as jest and drollery,
Are really just an exercise in unremitting trollery.
I say I'm plain and simple, but that's merely lies and vanity,
The gibberings of one who's at the limits of his sanity.

If only I could get a life, as many people tell me to;
If only Mom could find a circus freak-show she could sell me to;
If I go off to Zanzibar to paint the local scenery;
If I lose all my fingers in a mishap with machinery;
If I survive to twenty, which is somewhat problematical;
If what I post was more mature, or slightly more grammatical;
If I could learn to spell a bit, and maybe even punctuate;
Would I still be the loathsome and objectionable punk you hate?

But while I have this tiresome urge to prance around and show my face,
It simply isn't safe for normal people here in cyberspace.
To stick me in Old Sparky and turn on the electricity
Would be a fitting punishment for all my plain simplicity.

The source being a newgroup from 1998. It was originally written by Tom Holt as far as I can tell.

[Man in Space]

There's nothing like good old quotation marks in a google search

This is sadly much less useful than it used to be.

[Raphael]

The source being a newgroup from 1998. It was originally written by Tom Holt as far as I can tell.

Thank you!

[alice]

The horse that won the Lincoln Handicap in 1921 was called Soranus.

[Raphael]

This question might make me look like a complete Philistine, but I've been wondering about the matter for a while, so here it goes:

Why do so many people make such a big deal of owning, or getting to look at, the originals of paintings, in an age in which it is fairly easy to mass-produce very accurate replicas? What quality does an original have that an exact replica doesn't? What do you get from looking at an original that you don't get from looking at a replica?

Let's use a concrete example: on one of the walls in my bedroom, there's a poster version of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks. Now suppose that, as a result of some incredibly unlikely sequence of events, I would suddenly find myself a a multiple billionaire, and the Art Institute of Chicago would suddenly find itself in urgent need of money (cue Linguoboy or zompist telling us that that's the default situation for the Art Institute). Suppose that somehow, we would work out a deal that would end with the original of the painting on the wall of my bedroom.

In that situation, what would the original add to my bedroom that the poster didn't? I mean, aside from the need for much-improved anti-burglary measures, and the need to do everything I do there extremely carefully, lest I accidentally damage a priceless work of art?

Yet every year, a lot of tourists spend fair amounts of time, effort, and money to get to look at famous original paintings. What are they getting out of that?

[WeepingElf]

Walter Benjamin addressed this issue in his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.

[Starbeam]

Frankly, I find it perverse to own original mastercopies unless you are the author or a trusted archivist or loved one. Everything else in Raphael's rant is right

I'm not going to read Benjamin's essay or use its German title, but I feel like i'd agree with it if i did

[zompist]

Why do so many people make such a big deal of owning, or getting to look at, the originals of paintings, in an age in which it is fairly easy to mass-produce very accurate replicas? What quality does an original have that an exact replica doesn't? What do you get from looking at an original that you don't get from looking at a replica?

One answer is that a painting is a three-dimensional object made of paint and canvas (or other media). In person, you see the brushstrokes (which can be quite substantial in some schools of painting); the light works differently on an actual painting from a flat printed copy; you can move smoothly from a close-up view to a medium-distance view from across the room. Something like Seurat's La Grande Jatte particularly repays this sort of double view: reproductions don't capture the close-up details, or that transition from splotches of color to a recognizable scene.

Then there's simple scale. I'm looking at the Wiki page right now, seeing a roughly 7.5 cm by 10 cm image of the painting. Psychologically, it's an illo, and these days, we see illos all day long. Even full-screen, or full-page in an art book, it's a small part of my field of view. The real thing is 207 by 308 cm. Even a poster version wouldn't reproduce the details, much less the psychological effect. And note that really good printed reproductions of paintings didn't exist until the 20th century.

Undoubtedly some of that psychological effect is the subject working up their own enthusiasm— "I'm in the same room at the Mona Lisa! Leonardo worked on this very thing!" On the other hand, if you've been to galleries and been bored, a) that's common, museums can produce sensory overload and sore feet, and b) it doesn't mean the art enthusiast, who knows what to look for, doesn't get more out of the same experience.