The guy from Taken wrote the answer
Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
181–190 of 309 posts
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Led me to this, previously unknown-to-me, pot of gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."
That stood out to me too. > The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation A tradition I really enjoy and deliberately keep alive. For some reason portuguese is incredibly amenable to this no matter the source language.
I like saying "Soy espalda" to my Spanish speaking friend, bugs the hell out of him. It means "I'm back" but uses the Spanish word for the body part instead of someone's presence.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite is this one: A bear falls into a well. The depth of the well is 19.617 meters, and it takes the bear 2.0000 second to reach the bottom of the well. What is the color of the bear? https://qr.ae/pKqzpC
I don't really like that because it's obviously a troll question. Its wording and a large number of significant digits clearly demands the acceleration of gravity to be reverse-engineered, so it can't be a real question even by a chance. One thing to consider if it's indeed real: how much water is in that well?
> Its wording and a large number of significant digits clearly demands the acceleration of gravity to be reverse-engineered
I think if a bear fell into a well, there would be friction between the bear and the side of the well...
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
That stood out to me too. > The humour largely arises from Carolino's indiscriminate use of literal translation A tradition I really enjoy and deliberately keep alive. For some reason portuguese is incredibly amenable to this no matter the source language.
I like saying "Soy espalda" to my Spanish speaking friend, bugs the hell out of him. It means "I'm back" but uses the Spanish word for the body part instead of someone's presence.
That isn't a literal translation. That's a translation of an unrelated word.
There's a Chinese in-joke, though, where they like to say "day day up", translating 天天 "every day" as if it were just 天 "day" twice in sequence.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be sure to read that link with showdead. thedrake’s victorious final comment “ SOLVED!!!!!! I spent several hours looking for an axe or a hatchet or an Ubåt…” is dead. Possibly because of a heuristic aimed at killing spam posts with too many links.
[flagged]
Or they used a link which triggered an automated anti-spam mechanism.
But no, it's definitely a political censorship issue.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#186After reading that lengthy, well-researched answer, I felt a bit deflated when I saw another answer lower down, that seems pretty plausible given that the ball in question a knock-off created by a Chinese company: > 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese. This translates to ax. [0] We'll probably never know if the origin is yxa or 鉞... or even something entirely different, sadly. [0] https://english.stackexcha…
The character '鉞' is not commonly used in modern Chinese. I would seriously doubt that anyone teaching Chinese would use this word to illustrate the letter 'Y' in English or Pinyin, especially to toddlers. There are plenty of child-friendly words starting with 'Y' that could be used instead.
Well, more to the point, someone teaching Chinese would be unlikely to think that illustrating a particular letter was a concept that made any sense. Pinyin is a syllabic system, not an alphabetic system.
For example, the letter Y in the syllable "yue" is notionally silent -- making it an especially terrible choice of something to illustrate! -- and "yue" could appear in the same row of a pinyin table as "wu", since they both start with the same consonant (or, more accurately, neither of them starts with a consonant at all). But Y in "yang" is not silent; it represents the same sound you'd expect if you were familiar with English.
By the same token, "i" represents a very different vowel in "shi" than it does in "ni". And interestingly enough, although "ni" rhymes with "xi" and doesn't rhyme with "shi", the traditional analysis says that "xi" and "shi" use the same vowel (again, it's supposed to be a lack of a vowel, not a vowel that exists) while "ni" is doing something that is somehow different.
Modern analysis would disagree with the traditional claim about vowels, but can support the idea that "yue" and "wu" both begin with a zero onset.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#187> I think the manufacturer of your son's ball mixed in a Swedish word I found this super unconvincing at first. But they just kept goin. And going. And going. And the more I scrolled and the more I read, I started to think that they are right. And by the end I was fully convinced! Well worth reading. Thanks for sharing, OP!
Same! But then I read another answer further down that suggested it might be a Chinese word for axe, romanized in pinyin as yuè (for 鉞). Since the knock-off ball seems to have been made by a Chinese company, that seems more likely to me. That doesn't explain the weird u-boat thing, though.
That is completely unlikely. As ximeng says, it's an archaic word for a special weapon, but also:
* Most of the other letters on the ball work well in English but would not work well for Chinese words with pinyin
* Children do not learn the alphabet by studying pinyin since pinyin only has a subset of letters. The initials in pinyin are: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s, w, and y. As you can see, there is no 'v'. Children in Chinese-speaking countries would still use English to learn their ABCs.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#188First comment on the answer: > This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen. And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.
No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... . BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570 . The highest scored answer is this one: https://stack…
The famous answer is wrong though, since the question is about tokenization of XHTML (not parsing into a tree) which is indeed possible using a regex.
This is why none of the condescending answers suggest a better way. There isn’t one.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be sure to read that link with showdead. thedrake’s victorious final comment “ SOLVED!!!!!! I spent several hours looking for an axe or a hatchet or an Ubåt…” is dead. Possibly because of a heuristic aimed at killing spam posts with too many links.
Thanks! it's https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14673626 and I've unkilled it now. (It was killed because of the lmgtfy link btw)
I still don't get it. That comment just says they searched google images for axe pics. In Chinese, for some reason. They don't even address the letter Y mystery.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#190The handle is yellow. Maybe it was about the color than the object? Amazing response ticked as answer.