Prickly ash revisited

An elaboration further to my March review of Mitch Cullin's Sherlock Holmes novel A Slight Trick of the Mind: the linguistics weblog Language Log has a very good post and discussion of the "prickly ash" that's central to one of the main threads of the book.

Across Europe and Asia, by John Milne, Esq.

In 1875, the geologist and mining engineer John Milne had to travel to Japan to take up an appointment as an academic foreign adviser at the at the Imperial College of Engineering, Tokyo. Instead of taking the obvious option of going by ship, he decided to travel overland.

Windows 8: inexplicable language

Windows 8: Beautiful and fast

Sorry to be a vector for viral marketing, but I just love these Windows 8 ads for the East Asian market, originally released under the collective title Windows 8 Training Camp (there is a third, Multitask, that's mildly amusing but rather flat compared to these other two, which make perfect use of the "rule of three" construction).


Windows 8: The power of touch

The humour being chiefly visual, they work perfectly well even if you don't know the language - except that it seems no-one does, not even people from East Asia.

Victor Mair analyses the language at Language Log - The enigmatic language of the new Windows 8 ads - and the article and ensuing discussion covers theories including its being some obscure minority dialect of Chinese; some East Asian language mangled by non-native speakers; ditto by illiterate local speakers contracted in cheaply; or some well-constructed Sino-gibberish, with a certain amount of Mandarin embedded, made to sound like an East Asian tonal language. All Microsoft has said of the videos is this ...

We created these online-only social videos for the Asian market, where they were well-received.

... although they work so brilliantly minus language that even this is a trifle suspect; maybe they always were meant for the Western market.

- Ray

The Diamond Age

1996 Penguin edition cover

Another recommendation. Neal Stephenson's 1995 SF novel The Diamond Age is by no means a new book, but for some reason I'd never read it until I borrowed a copy from the hospital bookshelf a few weeks back (it was the only thing not either 'summer reading' or macho bilge -- I promise I'll take it back).

The setting is near-future, but very different both technologically and culturally. Mastery of nanotechnology has enabled atom-scale rod-logic computers, super-strong materials, and matter creation on demand: on the downside, the air, water, and even people's bodies, swarm with a warring ecology of nanoscale devices. Socially, the nation-state has become obsolete in favour of "phyles" - distributed populations with a common ethos, who occupy "claves" of various sizes, some as small as a building - who interact via shared laws.

The book has been billed as "post-cyberpunk", and it starts with a vigorous demolition of cyberpunk tropes. A character called Bud is getting a nanotech "skull gun" implant installed. In a cyberpunk novel this would probably lead to all kinds of shoot-outs and adventures. However, Bud turns out not to be the protagonist, but a dim racist thug who uses the gun to rob an Ashanti businessman; he is rapidly arrested, put in front of a genially draconian Confucian court (Judge Fang tells Bud "Don't be an asshole" when he asks if he gets to offer a defence), and executed. So much for cyberpunk.

We then get to the real story, which begins among the Neo-Victorians, a powerful phyle who have adopted Victorian dress and rules of conduct. John Hackworth, an "artifex" (software engineer) gets commissioned by a Victorian aristocrat to create a book-format device called A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. The aristocrat has realised that, as with the original Victorians, their culture depends on wildcard personalities, and the Primer would be an educational medium designed to foster such a personality in his daughter. Hackworth does the job, but falls into the Victorian vice of hypocrisy and goes into China to make illegal copies. He is, however, mugged, and the original copy stolen, which ultimately places him in obligation to an illicit Chinese technologist Dr X.

The stolen Primer ends up with an unintended recipient, Nell, a young underclass girl in an abusive household - and by coincidence the late Bud's daughter. She gets to keep it because of further peculiarities of the Confucian justice system. Judge Fang, who also coincidentally deals with the case of the Primer's theft, considers that the thief, Nell's brother Harv, has displayed the correct "filial piety" by giving it to her, and that a greater good is served by her keeping it for her education.

The story then moves into multiple threads, including the life of Nell as she grows up to her teens, educated to higher class and a higher destiny by the Primer; Hackworth's fate, forced by admission of his crime to become a double agent and infiltrate a bizarre and orgiastic hive-community; the life of Miranda, an interactive actor who effectively becomes Nell's mother by providing the characters displayed by the Primer; the growing political unrest in China (much of the action takes place around Shanghai); and, centrally, the interactive story Nell is told by the Primer. Starting with simple stories involving her four animal toys as characters, it's designed to guide her through increasingly sophisticated archetypal adventures, puzzles and challenges that mirror her encounters in the real world.

It's taken me three weeks to read it, as it's quite long at 500 pages, and not always the easiest of novels for stylistic reasons, in places imitating the detailed descriptive digression of Victorian novels. It also has its longeurs; while they're thoroughly pertinent to the theme and I like computing, I found Nell's Primer adventures involving understanding various Turing machines repetitive and uninteresting.

I can see, however, why The Diamond Age won both the Hugo and Locus awards in 1996. It's a detailed and brilliantly-imagined exploration of culture, technology and personality, and worth the effort. And I learned a deal about Confucianism.

SPOILER: The Diamond Age at Wikipedia.

- Ray

Faux Chinese sighting

Felix Grant and I have discussed from time to time the often ingenious calligraphic device of imitating letterforms from other scripts (see Double delight / Faux Cyrillic sighting / This mesto in Salisbury).

MetaFilter just had a post - Square Word Calligraphy: English that Looks Like Chinese - that drew attention to a very nice example: the Chinese artist Xu Bing's 1994 installation Square Calligraphy Classroom. This showcased an attractive style of writing, invented by the artist, that goes beyond merely imitating letters, but also arranges them into words in a manner closely imitating the internal organisation of Chinese characters.

detail

Essentially, New English Calligraphy is a fusion of written English and written Chinese. The letters of an English word are slightly altered and arranged in a square word format so that the word takes on the ostensible form of a Chinese character, yet remains legible to the English reader. As people attempt to recognize and write these words, some of the thinking patterns that have been ingrained in them since they learned to read are challenged. It is the artists' belief that people must have their routine thinking attacked in this way. While undergoing this process of estrangement and re-familiarization with one's written language, the audience is reminded that the sensation of distance between other systems of language and one's own is largely self-induced.

See Square Calligraphy Classroom; and also the Omniglot page Square Word Calligraphy, concerning Dr David B. Kelley's development of it modified for a more consistent Chinese-like appearance to the words.

Addendum: a little experimentation with this system finds that although it's simple in concept, it requires considerable calligraphic flair (more than I have) to use characters flexibly to make the most aesthetic packing within the square. Here's my effort on my name, using GIMP, which clearly fails to achieve the uniformity of stroke thickness.

- Ray

Chinese lunch at St Thomas

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This rather striking Italianate frontage belongs to the St Thomas Building, built as an upgrade in 1861 to the station offices of Exeter St Thomas Station (see Exeter Memories, St Thomas Station, for background). Now no longer part of the station, it's been through a couple of recent incarnations as offices and a Chinese restaurant.

Today: just a recommendation, on the assumption that some readers of JSBlog will be local. We were passing through St Thomas on the way to buy paint at B&Q, and were sidetracked by the Winmede Chinese supermarket underneath the railway arch to the right of the building. It was rather unavoidable to be drawn to have lunch in the Wok Cafe, which opened just two days ago in the adjacent St Thomas Building.

"Authentic" is an overused word, but this Hong Kong style fast-food cafe definitely qualifies. Its style is genuinely Chinese, unlike that of highly Westernised Chinese takeaways; the daily specials included carp head, and the menu has many unusual items such as Red Bean and Sago Delight, Grass Jelly, and Bubble Tea; I noticed that most of the other lunch customers were Chinese. Nevertheless, there's plenty on the menu that won't frighten the horses; Clare had satay chicken with fried noodles, and I had won ton soup with vermicelli noodles (from the fixed-price noodle menu where you can pick-and-mix from half a dozen daily special toppings; several noodle styles, from ho fan to ramen; and a choice of sauce). It's all very affordable, freshly cooked in the open kitchen, and the place has a clean bright cafeteria decor and friendly counter service. If you need lunch while at the St Thomas shopping complex, check it out: wokcafe.co.uk.

- Ray