I expose the truth about the mass delusion of DST, daylight saving time–before I’m too sleep-deprived. There may be Cajun French involved. And kitchen items. I’ve said too much already.

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

A photo on Leonie Doyle’s blog (Lightlyskipping) shows a sign for tourists in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province in Southern China. “To the boat(s) for ticket-holding fits” is the English translation.

The full Chinese is very different from the English, so I’ll save it for below. Let’s just start with the “fits” part. Usually, these bad translations come from the fact that Chinese words, like English words, can have multiple meanings and the wrong meaning can get translated. (Professor Victor Mair sometimes posts about these on Language Log, such as here, here, and here.) But in the Chinese on this sign (assuming the characters are representing Mandarin Chinese and not potentially differing meanings in the local Wu) nothing seems to also mean “fit.”

This seems instead to be a visual confusion of characters:

• 旅游 (lü3you2, traditional: 旅遊 ), “tour” in “tour group” on the sign and
• 放好 (fang4hao3), “fit” in the sense of “to place/store (something) well.”

Thus, “To the boat(s) for ticket-holding [tourists]” is probably what they meant.

The full Chinese is:

买好船票的游客（非旅游团队）请由此排队乘船。
mai3hao3 chuan2piao4 de5 lü3ke4 (fei1lü3you2tuan2dui4) qing3 you2ci3 pai2dui4 cheng2chuan2
(traditional: 買好船票的旅客（非旅遊團隊）請由此排隊乘船。)
“Travelers who plan to buy boat tickets (non-tour group) please thus line up to ride the boat.”
(more fully: Travelers who get ready to ride the boat by buying the necessary boat tickets (non-tour group) please thus line up.)

Again, the corrected English is:

“To the boat(s) for ticket-holding [tourists]”

So, the sign tells Chinese readers without tickets to line up and implies that English readers with tickets can go right ahead. I don’t think it helps that they added the “international” symbol for line up / queue up: a woman and a man standing behind another man who has one leg raised as if he’s about to start hopping.

Have trouble figuring out the days of the week? You need The Calculendar!

This TV-commercial parody was inspired by the lyrics

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today it is Friday, Friday [. . .]

Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards

from Rebecca Black’s song “Friday” (which was written by adults not by the young singer).

Link to “The Calculendar” video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

You don’t need to watch the original video first, “Rebecca Black – Friday – Official Music Video,” but here it is:

Link to music video

“Happy New Year 兔 you!” (Happy New Year tu you!; tu4, rabbit).

2009 was the year of the ox/bull and used “Happy 牛 Year!” (niu2 [nyo], ox/bull).

2012 will be the dragon ( 龍 long2 [lung]). Perhaps they could sing “Auld 龍 Syne.” Or they could use the dragon zodiac sign ( 辰 chen2 [chuhn]): “Happy 辰ese New Year!”

2017 is rooster ( 雞 ji1, but the zodiac sign is 酉 you3 [yo]), so maybe: “酉, Happy New Year!”

See more about Chinese New Year and zodiac signs with Chinese characters on my old post:
Happy Boar Year 2007!

Steven and Brandon have a misunderstanding. Can you spot the ambiguity?

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

After a short, original light-verse poem, hear about Christmas and Japanese New Year’s and learn some Japanese words related to New Year’s.

Link to video

Closed-captioning (CC) and transcript available.

How to write the next great alien language (io9.com on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish and Marc Okrand’s Klingon)

Linguist Marc Okrand on how he used less common sounds/grammatical forms to make Star Trek’s Klingon language more alien:

Link to video

More resources:

• Mark Rosenfelder’s The Language Construction Kit (LCK)
• expanded book form of The Language Construction Kit (LCK)
• The Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire
• Speculative Grammarian’s satirical look: A Primer in SF Xenolinguistics

The folks at TomTom are selling Star Wars voices for their GPS devices and seemed to have enjoyed the making of behind-the-scenes videos of the recording sessions. The Yoda one has a bunch of funny things in it. The Darth Vader one starts out slow but gets better towards the middle (via The Nerdist and many other vias back to Carscoop).

“Yoda recording for TomTom GPS – behind the scenes”

Link to Yoda video

“Darth Vader recording for TomTom GPS – behind the scenes”

Link to Darth Vader video

As a Dutch company, TomTom is a good choice for at least the Darth Vader voicings, as vader is (I think not coincidentally) the Dutch word for “father.” Any Dutch people out there who predate the prequel trilogy and didn’t get to be surprised by the “I am your father” reveal in The Empire Strikes Back? Now you know the power of the Dark Side. As far as I know, darth is not the Dutch word for “asthmatic” (which is apparently astmatisch, among others).

“Star Wars” is still “Star Wars” in the Netherlands but would translate to the cognate Sterrenoorlogen (ster “star” in the combining form sterren and the plural oorlogen of oorlog “war”).

New Zealand Sign Language Week is this week (May 5-11, 2008). That link has information, video signing samples, and downloadable PDF cards of the two-handed manual alphabet used for fingerspelling names and sometimes English words within the related British Sign Language (BSL), Australian Sign Language (Auslan), and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL). (The unrelated American Sign Language [ASL] uses a one-handed manual alphabet adapted from French Sign Language’s.)

Happy new year to all.