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Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
241–250 of 309 posts
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#242Most of the images are hard to figure out. For example, if the picture of the cat was not next to a C, I would have thought it to be a monkey. I would have assumed the dog to be actually a pet cow. The blade of the so called axe does look like a beaker or an old fashioned fountain pen ink bottle pouring out yellow ink or paint.
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#243[deleted]
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#244I was the one who solved this. It was an exciting time
That was the most thorough stackexchange answer i've ever read. Thanks for the entertainment
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#245Wow, that Dan Bron sure put in some legwork. Impressive level of investigation. Same goes for many of the other commenters. It’s pretty impressive when people ban together to use their collective talents and minds this way. Are there any groups/subreddits or other places online where people get together to do this kind of stuff?
r/rbi
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#246Earlier 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)
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Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 y…
> As you can see, there is no 'v'.
V also doesn't occur in any pinyin finals, but Chinese people commonly use it in their own pinyin spelling anyway because it is used in pinyin input methods as a substitute for ü, which is harder to type.
Your list of initials left out the zero initial, which is important for words like 饿 or 安. As I've commented elsewhere, though "y" is a pinyin initial, "yue" does not feature it - "yue" is just the spelling of the final -üe when no initial is present.
This leads into a question I've had for a while - I know that some Chinese people do not distinguish between y- initials and r- initials. I'd like to know whether that lack of distinction somehow extends to every pinyin syllable that might be spelled with a "y", even if the "y" is normally not viewed as being part of an initial, as in "yu" / "yin" / "yue". Do you know the answer?
(I know that the lack of distinction occurs for 人 even though it does not rhyme with any syllable that might theoretically begin with y- in Mandarin. But that's not quite the same as what I'm asking about; 人 is definitely not a syllable with a zero initial. I would be interested in how the lack of distinction plays out for a syllable like "ri", where it's not obvious to me how the vowel would accommodate changing the initial to y-.)
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#248Y for yellow, given that's the color of the handle and that you need something to be representative of the color. Even having a yellow square could confuse it with S for square, or having a banana can confuse it with B for banana. Similar problems exist with S for Sun, C for (a yellow) crayon etc. Also the handle is what has been drawn superimposed over the letter. Still, confusion with A for axe isnt any better than…
I'm liking the yellow theory as the "axe head" looks a log like the top of a paint tube like the one in this poster: https://www.kingandmcgaw.com/prints/david-booth-malcolm-and-...
Good observation, it could conceivably be a slightly distorted image of paint coming out of a tube! The waviness of the axe handle does look quite strange.
However it'd be a really counter intuitive choice to use a green Y for "yellow"...
Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)
#249I was the one who solved this. It was an exciting time
Is it solved? My reading was we still don't understand why a Chinese manufacturer took some random words from Swedish.
I've bought my fair share of cheap do-dads from Ali Express over the years. All I can say is good luck trying to understand Chinese pirates.