Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

english.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 309 posts

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#271

Post by flybarrel »

hedora wrote: post #260
kortilla wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused to how you made the assumption that the designer would be searching for “axe” in Chinese. That still assumes axe but then they decided to color it yellow afterwards?

Later, there's a comment pointing out a transliteration of battle axe into english yields a word that starts with y. Combining that: > 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese. and another comment shows that using Chinese to search for Axe on Google Images returns the original clip art: > Me getting into the shoes of the designer: Assumptions: 1. The designer is in a hurry. 2. They would search in their language…

you don't learn about this character normally in China. So I would say it is impossible this is the explanation.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#272

Post by random_ind_dude »

hedora wrote: post #260
kortilla wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused to how you made the assumption that the designer would be searching for “axe” in Chinese. That still assumes axe but then they decided to color it yellow afterwards?

Later, there's a comment pointing out a transliteration of battle axe into english yields a word that starts with y. Combining that: > 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese. and another comment shows that using Chinese to search for Axe on Google Images returns the original clip art: > Me getting into the shoes of the designer: Assumptions: 1. The designer is in a hurry. 2. They would search in their language…

I started reading the accepted answer on Stack Exchange, found it unconvincing and went to Wikipedia to look at the entry for axe. There I found that Yue is a type of Chinese battle axe.

The ball is probably Chinese-made. So I believe the answer that talks about Yué as the Chinese word for battle axe is the right one.

Wikipedia has an image of this rather odd-looking, but beautiful Shang dynasty Yue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_axe#/media/File%3ACMO...

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#273

Post by ximeng »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #247
porphyra wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

In Cantonese pronunciation ru often becomes jyu (in Jyutping), ri becomes jat, similarly for rang, rong, ran. I guess this same shift is likely reflected in mandarin pronunciations in some areas. This suggests that this is a general change.

I think the relevant wikipedia article might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology, which should reflect the shift from the earlier Cantonese-like pronunciation (yu style) to modern Mandarin-like (ru style), but it's a bit beyond me. Maybe this "The class of EMC palatals is lost, with palatal sibilants becoming retroflex sibilants and the palatal nasal becoming a new phoneme /ɻ/." is relevant?

More discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/orf800/questio... and at https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?16,126118 which suggests "If a word is pronounced "y-" in Cantonese but "r-" in Mandarin, it's reconstructed as "gn", after Hokkien".

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#276

Post by omgmajk »

nullhole wrote: post #83
lolinder wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best part about that RegEx answer is the moderator's note at the bottom. > Moderator's Note > This post is locked to prevent inappropriate edits to its content. The post looks exactly as it is supposed to look - there are no problems with its content. Please do not flag it for our attention. From back in the day when Stack Overflow was fun.

Hi lolinder, welcome to HackerNews. Your comment implies that Stack Overflow isn't currently fun. You are of course well within your rights to make that assertion. However, I find that your comment may be improved by removing any implication that Stack Overflow isn't fun. So I invite you to explain your reasons and maybe consider future improving edits to your post.

Locked. Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39034160#39035348

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#277

Post by evilduck »

berkes wrote: post #267
rob74 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "weird u-boat thing" further supports the Swedish hypothesis - "ubåt" or "undervattensbåt" are the standard terms for a submarine in Swedish ( https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t ). The word "U-boat" is also used in English, however with the meaning "German submarine during WW1/2" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat ) - but I don't think it's widespread enough (or appropriate) to be eligible for a toy.

Why English doesn't just call them "under-sea-boat" or "underwater-boat" has been a mistery to me for a long time. (as a Dutch, we call 'em Onderzeeboot or Onderzeeër - underseaboat, undersea-er). It's so much simpler than combining latin/scientific terms.

Submarine basically transliterates to “undersea-er”. In a hodge podge language like English it doesn’t seem strange.

Re: Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

#278

Post by dang »

slim wrote: post #220
dang wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

is there a way to show [flagged] and [delayed] ?

[flagged] shows on comments when flags significantly outweigh downvotes.

[delayed] shows when a comment isn't being displayed yet because it's still less than N minutes old, where N is the 'delay' setting in the commenter's profile (about which, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

Does that answer your question?

Post reply on HN