Category Archives: CJK

??, (goon in Japanese, two syllables) or if you’re reading this without the correct fonts installed,???, is usually glossed on the web as “Wu dynasty reading”. The background here is that there isn’t just a difference in written Japanese between … Continue reading →

This is written ???, not ?????. Literary, not ornithological. And certainly not usually a goose. Except them as bring letters.

That looks as if it should mean ?BIRD, but really it means dabchick, or grebe. In Japanese the dabchick is the species from which the entire order of grebes, ?????? (kaitsuburika), takes its name. This is odd, because it’s not … Continue reading →

? looks as if it should mean a sort of urban district that sounds like ch?, at least in Japanese. But it’s really kamome, a seagull. In Chinese, a ?? is, as you would expect, a tern.

Octopuses, being able to see the future, are keenly aware of the transience of things. I think natsu no tsuki on the last line is a reference to a football.

I’ve been pasting Classical Chinese poetry into Google Translate to get the Pinyin out. The translation is sometimes OK in parts, if it’s of a chengyu, which is to say a four-character classical tag, but often it’s gibberish. ?, which … Continue reading →

Read as michigo in Japanese where it means “osprey”. But do ospreys ever go ?? (guan1guan1)? They have a high-pitched peeping quite inappropriate to a bird of prey. Matt No-Sword translates ?? as “robot waterfowl”, which you can imagine saying … Continue reading →

I’d missed this. Michael Gove says […] I?d like us to implement a cultural revolution just like the one they?ve had in China. (via Sinoglot)

php “question marks” utf-8 utf8 mysql Hopefully that’s the search terms and the answer a good way round for search engines to find.