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The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

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Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#131

Post by makeitdouble »

gsf_emergency_6 wrote: post #115
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your issue is just that your grammar was wrong. 是的(Shide) is the closest thing to yes in Mandarin, but it's as universal. Answering 是的 on the question 你会中文吗 is like answering "yes I am" on the question "do you speak English?". 可以 isn't correct either, unless they asked 你可以说中文吗？, which is more like "Can you switch to English?" And not "are you able to speak English?" if I'm not mistaken. Answering 我会 is perfec…

Almost related: Check out the various translations of the subtext of this manga (to Chinese.. etc) https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%8F%E3%81%9F%E3%81%97%E3...

Wow. The funniest part is the last !? just getting dropped in most title adaptations.

Most titles read like the publisher just giving up and going for anything that doesn't sound crazy. Which is exactly opposite to the original title.

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#132

Post by kruffalon »

pezezin wrote: post #130
kruffalon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but on the other hand they always give themselves away so it's very easy to spot and adjust expectations. I found this article and discussion valuable anyway. I would also encourage you to stop using "Americans" as synonymous to "US:er", there are many countries, cultures and peoples in the American continents that are not from the USA and quite a few that geographically exist within it too. By pointing out tha…

Fair enough. I am Spanish, so I am very much aware of the situation, I have plenty of friends and acquaintances from LATAM xD. If I am speaking Spanish I would say "estadounidense" or "gringo" depending on my mood, but I have yet to find a satisfying word in English...

Gringo works in en_US too and imo conveys the feeling we seem to share quite well.

I'll try it out for a bit and see how it feels.

US:er is kinda clunky.

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#133

Post by squeefers »

dgoodell wrote: post #52

Every single example given under “In Chinese, affirmation is often compiled through negation:” sounds completely natural to me, as a midwestern American English speaker. However the direct affirmations are also acceptable. Maybe the difference is more that both are pretty acceptable in English, but that is less true for Chinese. Or at least the version he speaks.

when the guy is making sentences like "affirmation is often compiled through negation" you know hes just trying to sound clever. the entire premise of the article is bunk, we DO use these patterns in English. He also treats (in that wide eyed western admiration for the orient) the Chinese like a simple monoculture where everyone has the same speech patterns.

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#134

Post by idiotsecant »

rramadass wrote: post #97
idiotsecant wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. No language is more expressive than another, some are more expressive for particular very specific things , like Inuit languages might be much better at describing the varieties of snow, but no language has a monopoly on describing dualism of ideas . I…

> The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. The author did not say this; this is your unnecessarily negative take. However the author is comparing Chinese with English where this is somewhat true and well studied; eg. A Comparison of Chinese and English Language Processing - https://www.scienc…

It is pretty unanimously agreed by linguists that all language is equally expressive, which makes sense considering they were all made by humans to do the same thing.

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#136

Post by Bjartr »

I found this article pretty interesting to think about. The ideas it discusses are adjacent to a lot of what I sometimes struggle with in communication.

Meta note: my description was accidentally a great example of what I mean

> Adjacent to (not exactly the same as, but the overlap could be nearly complete) > a lot of (not necessarily all of, but also not explicitly excluding all of) > what I sometimes (not necessarily always, but also not explicitly excluding always)

Considering this more, I think my purpose in this intentional ambiguity is slightly different than the purpose of "not revealing one's true position" as described in the article. Rather, the problem I'm trying to pre-empt is responses that latch onto parts of what I say that aren't perfectly precisely true, but also aren't the point of what I'm trying to communicate.

It's frustrating when I'm trying to communicate a very specific idea or message and the discourse that follows ends up not engaging with that idea, so I've come to make the specific idea clear, and keep any contextual information more ambiguous to encourage focusing on the more well-defined thing.

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#137

Post by ericol »

This applies to many different things, depending on the pair of languages you are using.

In Spanish the closes approximation would be "ni mal ni bien" (Not bad not wrong) but I understand the Chinese expression has a strong lean on "not being wrong".

Not so long ago (I'm 50+, Spanish native speaker, and I've spoken English for the past 30 years almost daily) I learnt about "accountability".

Now before I get a barrage of WTFs, the situation is that in Spanish we only have "Responsabilidad" and that accounts for both responsibility and accountability, with a strong lean on responsibility.

So basically we recognise what is it to be responsible of something, but being accountable is seriously diluted.

The implications of this are enormous, and this particular though exercise I'd leave for people that spend more time thinking about these things than I do.

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#138

Post by proctorg76 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #62

Something that occured to me years ago is we have a quirk in English language that gets in the way of accurately emapthizing with each other, especially when trying to design things well (like products and experiences). We don't say "unwant", and we don't clearly differentiate between a lack of want and a repulsion or unwant or negative want. Someone might say "I don't want x" or "I don't need x" and it's unclear if:…

There's a construction I use for this all the time that seems to be in common usage although maybe not picked up by the textbooks yet

The scale goes in order: - I want X - I don't want X - I want not X

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#139

Post by almostgotcaught »

woodruffw wrote: post #100
seszett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's especially American English that doesn't use litotes as much as British English or the other Western European languages. This piece seems to be very much about American English, when I read something like: > In English, this feels bizarre. If something is good, you say: Nice Great Perfect Brilliant

You would absolutely say "not bad" as an idiomatic variant of "good" in American English.

"not bad, not bad at all"

Re: The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

#140

Post by ethbr1 »

gsf_emergency_6 wrote: post #37
mathewsanders wrote: post #27

This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal). At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem…

native Americans or Native Americans? the latter would be more like the Moriori and fit the context better, but somehow native English speakers who arent interlegible are also interesting.

Not foreign Americans
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