Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts

Sunday, 31 January 2016

Confuci-us

Prerequisite: none

As a Chinese, the translation of "孔夫子" (kongˇ-foo-zhi˙) to "Confucius" (kon-fyoo-shus) has always been somewhat confusing.. very kon-fyoo-sing indeed! The last syllable has puzzled many a Chinese. Why would "zhi˙" become "shus"?

I thought this quirky translation was unique to Confucius until I found out yesterday that 孟子 (mengˋ-zhi˙) is also known as "Mencius" (men-shus). It finally clicked when I searched "Suncius" (孫子, author of The Art of War) and it showed up in "Vicipaedia".


The "-us" at the end is a masculine suffix. Julius. Marcus. Brutus. Confuci-us. As for pronounciation in Ecclesiastical Latin:

1) C before O is a hard C (as in k)
2) U is pronounced "oo"
3) C before I is a soft C (as in ch)

The last U is probably a short "oo". So instead of "kon-fyoo-shus", it should be:
"kon-foo-chi-us"

And leads me to wonder.. what is my Latinized Archaic name?

First of all, Archaic Chinese. Females more commonly used "氏" (shiˋ), which they attached to their father's or husband's surname. Problem is, my last name is from my mother's side (special case) and I am not married yet. "子" (zhi˙) was used for respected or scholarly people, although the fact that it was more explicitly used for males was due to the lack of female scholars.

There are more choices but they get very specific about status and age, and are not convenient for public use. For my case I better use "子".

My surname is 孫, so 孫子.
I wrote The Art of War, whoopee~

On the Latin part, pick any female Latin suffix of choice. Let me see..

Suncia
Suncilla
Suncilia
Suncilea
Suncina
Suncilina
Suncianna
Suncissa
Suncietta
Sunciella

I would not go for more than three syllables because that just sounds too princess-like.

Suncia
Suncilla
Suncina
Suncissa

Maybe something not so "flowery".

Suncia
Suncissa

Ehh.. I would rather not name myself after some furniture. "Cissa" is actually a genus of magpies, but preferable.

Suncissa

Tuesday, 29 December 2015

Nederlands

Prerequisite: none

Hallo!

The Dutch language is classified under Indo European, Germanic, West Germanic, Low Saxon Low Franconian, Low Franconian. English parts at the West Germanic branch, falling into the English category.

This post is only meant to provide a taste of the Dutch language. The grammar is very general and many exceptions are not noted. If you would like to learn conversational Dutch, Duolingo is a great free site to do so.

Here are some Dutch pronunciations given in IPA:


To aid whole words, Google Translate works pretty well.

The Familiar

Nominative pronoun:


*Sometimes je is an unemphasized jijze for zij, and we for wij. U is formal.

Verb conjugation:



Possessive pronoun:


Question (vraag):


Demonstrative pronoun:


Number (nummer):



Family (familie):


Colour (kleur):

red (rode)
orange (oranje)
yellow (gele)
green (groene)
blue (blauwe)
purple (paarse)
pink (roze)
brown (bruin)
white (witte)
grey (grijse)
black (zwarte)

Example phrases:

What is that?
(What is that?)
Wat is dat?

Thank you too
(Thank you too)
Dank je ook

I will be hungry and thirsty
(I shall have hunger and thirst)
Ik zul heb honger en dorst

My hand hurts
(My hand does hurt)
Mijn hand doet pijn

The pink pig likes to eat red apples
(The pink pig likes red apples to eat)
Het roze varken houdt van rode appels te eten

What would you like?
(What may it be?)
Wat mag het zijn?

Do we need spoons or forks?
(Have we spoons or forks need?)
Hebben wij lepels of vorken nodig?

They come from The Netherlands
(They come out Netherlands)
Zij kommen uit Nederland

The Unfamiliar

De / Het:

De and het are the "the" articles used for gender and neuter nouns. Here is a general guide to when to use which. I like to think of het as "it". The best way is not to memorize, but to accept the Dutch culture of what is considered "the" or "it", gendered or neutral.


The sandwiches (de boterhammen)
The man and woman (de man en de vrouw)
The artist (de kunstenaar)

The writing (het schrijven)
The cup (het kopje)
The book (het boek)

Lig / Zit / Sta:

Use these verbs when describing where something is. Here is a general guide to which verb to use.


The papers lie between the boxes.
De papieren liggen tussen de dozen.
My jacket lies under the bed.
Mijn jas ligt onder de bed.
A (dead) dog lies on the street.
Een hond ligt op de straat.

There sit women in the house.
Er zitten vrouwen in het huis.
The cat sits on the table.
De kat zit op de tafel.
Yuck, raisins sit in my bread.
Yuck, rozijnen zitten in mijn brood.

The lamp stands nearby the bookshelf.
De lamp staat nabij de boekenplank.
The buildings stand near the city.
De gebrouwen staan dichtbij de stadt.
There stands food in the kitchen.
Er staan eten in de keuken.

Interesting words of note:

zwembad = swim bath (swimming pool)
tijdschrift = time writing (magazine)
ziekenhuis = sick house (hospital)
dierentuin = animal garden (zoo)
schildpad = shield toad (turtle)
neushoorn = nose horn (rhinoceros)
vliegveld = fly field (airport)
hoofdstad = head city (capital)

This is only a sparse quarter of the Duolingo course. Still trying to get comfortable with some very Dutch words and patterns such as om te and er. Might update if I ever do.

Doei~

Saturday, 7 November 2015

Internet Folk

Prerequisite: none

First note, singing in this very low key because I cannot find my capo. Second note, the b string sounds very off because it is terribly rusty. Thirdly, only vaguely remembered the lyrics. Excuses, excuses, excuses. And bad fret shifting thank you very much.

Should be downright honest with you and say guitar and vocal is not my main (gamer's excuse: my main is a level 99 piano). Whatever. As you can tell I am not a perfectionist, but who cares. We are folks.

Without further ado, this is Please Don't Say You Love Me by Gabrielle Aplin from English Rain:


Been thinking about how music used to be. Before stages and celebrities, and even before concerts and nobilities. Just folks at home. Or in the neighbourhood. Or on the road. Without fangirl shrieks, without serious formalities. Music of amateur quality.

Also, our current folks. Internet folks, with a webcam audience. A blend of folk practices and internet culture. Here is me in my sleepwear from a while back in October. Calculator lying around after some calculus, and my homework reflected in the guitar. Very casual indeed.

I am not going to be snotty and insist that live music is the only way to communicate soul. Rather, it is interesting to observe the effect of "internet folk" practices on performance. The web  has grown a lot as a platform for sharing homemade music.

If Gabrielle Aplin is not folk enough, Lisa Hannigan might be of preferable taste.

Sunday, 1 November 2015

Maqam(at)

Prerequisite: music theory

Most music that we hear today is a descendant of Ionian (do re mi fa so la ti do) and Aeolian mode (la ti do re mi fa so la), which originated in Greece. Those are the most common and familiar modes. Following is possibly the pentatonic system (do re mi so la) or the blues (do re me fa fi so te do).

In the post Harmonic Intervals and Resonance, I emphasized polyphony. It is a strong basis of Western music, which values contrary movement and lush layering. Arabic music on the other hand, has more parallel movement and is relatively sparse in instrumentation. Another thing is its subtlety in pitch. Pitch distinctions go beyond semitones to quartertones, and even microtones.

Enter Maqam World. A maqam is almost a mode, built with trichords, tetrachords, and pentachords. Maqams are not limited to the Arabian world. A lot of Eastern traditional music have similar equivalents to the maqam concept with different structure and microtones that give each its exotic flavour. These pitch subtleties used to be the norm, whereas now we have equal temperament deeply engraved into our brains.

A good place to start is probably oud music~

Saturday, 31 October 2015

Learning Languages

Prerequisite: none

My incentive for learning languages is not for conversation (me conversing with a stranger? What a joke!) but for the linguistics. For the sake of language itself. The way it is and its relation to other languages. As of now I know Chinese and English very well, and minimal Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Irish, Turkish, and maybe some Thai.

And also for curiosity. What is masculine or feminine noun? A gender or neuter noun? What are cases? When to use which cases? What is an agglutinative language? An eclipsis? A lenition? Go find out!

Duolingo

Great site to proceed at your own pace. What I like most about it is the convenience of definitions and audio. The interface design is very simple and there are many languages available. And why not, it is completely free. Completely free of additional purchases.

Readlang

The web browser feature similar to Google Translate but waaaaay better. You can read a page in foreign language and click on words you do not know for its definition. No need to flip the dictionary a billion times.

Invest in a language now~

Wednesday, 21 October 2015

Language Decryption

Followup of Code Decryption

Prerequisite: none

The Code Book by Simon Singh has a nice chapter on cracking ancient languages.


People first assumed that hieroglyphs were semantic pictographs and ideographs, and nothing more. No one bothered to challenge the assumption since the Ancient Egyptians were supposedly too "primitive" to come up with a phonetic system.

Then Rosetta Stone came around which contained hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek on one slab, making a convenient crib, except that the Ancient Egyptian language has not been spoken for centuries. When Thomas Young spotted a cartouche on the Rosetta Stone, he suspected that it signified a pharaoh's name and that hieroglyphs might actually be phonetic.


He considered the historical context of several artifacts and associated names with cartouches. He could then deduce the sound values of each character. But his idea died down when he convinced himself that the alphabet was only applied to foreign names. Even with a collection of sounds, it did not seem to make meaning in regular text. At least, it made no sense to him..


Jean-François Champollion came across a cartouche. He figured that the the repeated letters are probably the repeated "s" in "Ramses". Being fluent in Coptic, he further suspected that the circumpunct reads "ra" as a rebus image.


And it worked. Ramses. After much substitution, it turns out the Egyptian hieroglyphs represented an ancestor of the Coptic language where some characters are phonetic and some are semantic. When Champollion traveled to Egypt he could really read hieroglyphs. Read-read hieroglyphs. Read. Hieroglyphs.


The Linear B tablet was found on Crete so the first speculation was that it is in Greek. But many Greek words end in "s", and the lack of a common last letter refutes that. Since the consensus was that the tablet contained a lost Minoan language, there was not much deciphering effort.


Alice Kober noted that there are around 100 characters, too much to be alphabetic and too few to be logographic, which makes it syllabic. She also noticed commonly occurring root words and suffixes, indicating an inflective language. It allowed her to associate syllables with the same consonants. Take Japanese as an example (except that Linear B had longer root words):

かく --> かきます
kaku      kakimasu
よむ --> よみます
yomu     yomimasu
つくる --> つくります
tsukuru      tsukurimasu
あぶ --> あびます
abu        abimasu
ぬぐ --> ぬぎます
nugu      nugimasu

Kober did the same analysis and grouped the Linear B characters by consonant, although she did not know what the consonants were.

Michael Ventris examined Kober's work and considered the geographical context of the tablet. He associated a regularly appearing word with "Knossos" and used it as a crib to identify other words such as "Pylos". Soon, he had enough cribs to substitute most of the text and fill in the gaps himself. The text was indeed in Greek, although there were some words he could not recognize. John Chadwick further identified the language as a kind of Archaic Greek. The ending "s" was dropped as a convention.

Sunday, 23 August 2015

Neumes

Recommended prerequisite: music theory

For most people Bach is the oldest composer on their repertoire, who lived somewhere between the 1600s into the 1700s. In the mainstream the oldest things out there are probably Vivaldi or Pachelbel. There is nothing wrong with that. It is understandable that fairly modern techniques are not directly transferrable to the Baroque music style.

But this post is not about Baroque music (which is another story to itself). What if I told you that before Bach, even before the Renaissance, their music was written with square notes?


These square notes are neumes. Notice that there are four staff lines instead of five.. and there are no definite measures or tempo. Is this notation outdated, antiquated, primitive, or what? No, this comes to the same issue as Baroque music: the style is simply different.

This notation was often used for plainchant sung in churches. More important to understand is the purpose of plainchant. It was not so much for public performance than for personal prayer. Those European cathedrals had very deep echoes, so sounds delayed, overlapped and bounced back. In that environment there was no need for precise rhythmic notation.

Another quirk about neumes: there is no specified starting pitch. You get to sing with whatever "key" you like. Notice that four staff lines just about spans one octave, which is the average vocal range.

Brilliant. How to sing it?

An Idiot's Guide to Square Notes tells you everything you need to know! In fact it explains better than I can. I like how it explains that you would not notate a symphony with neumes any more than you would a Gregorian chant with modern notation, because the styles require different approaches. The two notations were even invented by the same person. Hur hur.

For a feel of how it sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqDIEjQfdNk

Why are neumes not getting much attention? Perhaps the religious background makes people wary? What I am more interested in is how this style of notation can change our mentalities towards music. Is there some potential we can rediscover from the freedom neumes provide?

Saturday, 22 August 2015

G Flute

Recommended prerequisite: music theory, physics

Four months ago I made a G flute from a flagstick.
This calculator takes care of drilling details: http://11wall-west.com/~ph_kosel/flutomat.html. These are the measurements I used:


The holes I made are ugly.. punctured with a sewing needle then “dug” out with pencil and scissors. There is no mouthpiece. The end is just flat like a straw. It is almost the same way ancient people put six holes into a segment of reed from a riverbank.

The way woodwind works is the stream of air must split in half. The recorder is easiest to play since the design splits the air for you. The modern flute is a little harder since you must aim at the edge (or maybe not, I never played one). As for my straw-like flute, it is quite something else..





The sounding concept of my flat brim flute is pretty much like a ney, which I learned from here: http://www.neyzen.com/ney_metodu.html. The technique is veeeeery hard. You are somehow supposed to split your airstream on the flat brim. A subtle twitch in lip shape, ney angle, or tongue placement is enough to extinguish the sound. As you can see I only managed three notes (D, E, F#) after trying for three months:


By the way, there is another sounding technique which requires wedging the edge between your two front teeth and hissing like a viper.. This Persian method creates a unique tone, but no thanks. The Arabic/Turkish method I am using is difficult enough.


Really, during the first three months I only produced air and wispy harmonics. As you may or may not have known from A Cringeworthy Process, I a not one to give up so quickly. This is recently, my fourth month trying:


I achieved two extra notes by overblowing the D and E to get their perfect fifths A and B. The fingerings are the same, but the stronger breath makes the second harmonic (perfect fifth) ring. For some insight to how it works, refer to Harmonic Intervals and Resonance and Timbre and Overtones. I can manage overblown octaves as well, but my breath transition needs some attention first. It is generally not recommended that I learn so many notes before mastering the sound quality.. still working on it!

How was the first flute inspired? My guess is an observation of wind flowing through an empty log. But from this flutemaking experience I find that flat brimmed flutes are really hard to play. Even after making the flute, it takes three months' effort to produce a sound (perhaps even longer for the first flutist ever, since there are no preceding flutists to teach the first). Either ancient people had nothing better to do, or they were increeeeedibly smart. I think they actually were smart.

Five notes (D, E, F#, A, B) is enough to play a couple songs but let me work my intonation first. Then I might play you something decent..

Saturday, 15 August 2015

Japanese Pagoda

Prerequisite: none

This is a Japanese pagoda from 700AD:


Japan has intense seismic zones. A couple of its earthquakes made headline news in the past. How come we never hear about fallen pagodas? Ever?

Because they don't. Pagodas don't fall. These buildings remain while modern innovations continue to crumble.

Construction secrets revealed here:
http://web-japan.org/nipponia/nipponia33/en/topic/

To summarize the article:
1) Wood is flexible.
2) Tenon-mortise joints increase flexibility.
3) All levels are independent of other levels,
4) so that each level sways in counter balance
5) on a central pillar.


So there you have it. The pagodas were designed to absorb and shake out the shock. A Chinese idiom describes this very well: 以柔克剛. The literal translation is "to conquer hardness with softness". "To conquer force with yielding" sounds much better with our context.

 Profound eh.

Polynesian Navigation

Prerequisite: none

Many people are impressed that Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1500.

But consider this.

It is 1000 BC and you need a way to sail throughout the Pacific. You know nothing about compasses, massive ships, and telescopes. You do not even know of writing. How are you supposed to navigate the largest ocean on a canoe?

The Polynesians certainly found a way.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/neverlost/

This site gives details on how they construct canoes, read weathers, utilize stars, pinpoint latitudes, harness winds, measure traveling speeds, interpret wave patterns.. and much more! It is all very impressive.

There is even evidence of having sailed all the way to South America. Surely these people must have been somewhat sophisticated to have done such feats. How many people before the birth of Christ had managed to travel such distances in their lifetime? Not a lot!

I refuse to believe that interactions only happen across land. Despite being split on our standard world map, the Pacific is just as full of activity and exchange. There is a widespread something from Taiwan, to New Zealand, to Hawaii, and all the lesser known islands in between. When I think of the relation between Polynesian and Aboriginal Taiwanese sea culture, it opens to me a further curiosity for the forgotten islands on the Pacific.

I ought to find out more about these people..

Friday, 14 August 2015

Omniglot

Prerequisite: none

Wondrous site: http://omniglot.com/

"The online encyclopaedia of writing systems and languages".

So what?

I knew that many minor languages exist, but this collection blew my mind. There are sooooo many languages and scripts within the neighbourhood of one region. It is also interesting to compare between proximally close languages.

Above all, foreign scripts are just so pretty. How many of us are aware that there are writing such as these in northern China? Or even that Manchurians have their own script?


Some pages to get started:

http://omniglot.com/writing/types.htm
Difference between abjad, abugida, alphabet, syllabary, and semanto-phoenetic writing systems.

http://omniglot.com/language/articles/index.htm
Articles, articles, and articles. About anything really.

http://omniglot.com/writing/direction.htm
Writing directions can be so odd you just have to see it to believe it.

The Ancient Berber script (in Morocco) runs from bottom to top.. hurhur!


Language is one of the many aspects of life that we take for granted. It is strange to think of the voices we never get to hear, of the records of past civilizations that are no longer intelligible, or simply legacies that no longer exist.. as well as current cultures that are heading down this path.