Conlangery SHORTS #02: George’s Favorite Chengyu

Conlangery SHORTS #02: George’s Favorite Chengyu

Published: Mon, 26 Nov 2012 05:53:46 +0000 \

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Transcript

utterance-id1 that amount of colin <unk> plain that bad they split <unk> [noise] what computer <unk> pardon cats parkersburg languages and people who [noise] george carlin and people seem to like be ah idea of having to work inspirational bed so i'm thinking i'm just gonna trying to record these good come to me and then whenever i need to stick one hand i owe stick it in so today i was somewhat inspired to uh talk about my favorite <unk> i'm not sure if i've mentioned this on the show but i'm pretty sure i haven't actually explained it all uh but um if you uh if you're not familiar <unk> are a specific um chinese literary idioms that are generally abbreviated too uh almost always just for character and uh usually have some but they usually have some sort of literary or historical reference sometimes it's just the traditional story but the one that i'm going to talk to you i like it mainly because of the particular at least the particular origin that i learned learned for it so here goes the uh the story that i learned and the the ah <unk> i'm talking about is <unk> or um if you sort of uh try to expand it out and tried to translate it literally it's um play with an axe in front of new bands door uh and the <unk> it means ah to display your novice skills in front of an expert but the implication meaning like you're you you think you're much better than you are but you but then or maybe maybe you you didn't realize they were an expert or or something like that but it's just an idea of um uh some of the places that i saw equated to an english teacher fish how to swim so that's that's just the general idea in your um an example would be um you know talking about my uh my <unk> in front of somebody like david peterson sometimes i feel a little bit like i am <unk> so anyway ah let's let's ah go into the story of this and i'm not actually going to talk about lou ban yeah at the moment because this is my favorite part of this it's a historic reference for maybe a literary reference to his mother historical reference as far as the way i learned the story so here goes um when the tongue dynasty poet uh lead by god um ah the the story goes that he um later in his life he went out on a lake and got so drunk but he tried to reach for the mood and that was in the water and what's a reflection on the moon and ground um uh i'm not sure how um accurate i don't know how accurate that story is or how how confident historian are of that story i think it's possibly sort of a folk tale but in any case um he had there was a two on his two men in various places sort of associated with it that uh people would post up poetry and uh i couldn't find the name of the actual <unk> but there was an and another time dynasty <unk> who at the time <unk> saw this trend and he saw that some of the there's these poet that er that were posting up ah on we buy too we're kind of hack [noise] and so he wrote his own poem sort of poking fun at the hem them and he says ah he said um the the relevant lines are <unk> [noise] wait a minute i should <unk> meet by <unk> <unk> <unk> <unk> <unk> <unk> <unk> so um if i can sort of try to translate it's uh uh at the at the bank of the uh the <unk> or or a bunch of scholars uh i don't know the the relevant part to this because i can't try to translate um classical <unk> news on the fly i have no idea what what it saying ah actually okay i'm gonna start recording [noise] okay thanks to uh my friend <unk> <unk> for um helping me with the translation uh i was a little bit wrong ah this was written by a main dynasty put a name uh major fine uh about uh the the poetry uh left on levis too and uh you heard me read the original well obviously not the way he would have [noise] now necessarily but uh but the ah original characters at least uh uh the <unk> uh my best attempt to translation here unfortunately i haven't found anybody anywhere on line where somebody is translated it professionally my best attempt is on the riverbank entice shoes a pile of dirt from which levis name will and drove through the ages to come by and leave a poem is like playing with an axe in front of loop on store so there's the literary reference now there's some some it um now the article that i pulled up on uh by <unk> by <unk> uh <unk> that <unk> this idea of um <unk> that this um the the idea was around before then but i just like the story of of somebody writing a poem <unk> [noise] uh but uh in order to talk about the actual content of the <unk> we have to go much further back to the spring and autumn period um where in um well it's which is when uh loop on lived he was a famous architect of that time uh so basically the point is ah <unk> i can't find his uh no lou buying i think is some kind of style me because i i uh seem to remember that he lived in the state of new um but uh the point is you know and it's taken a long time for me to circle back to the point is um is that to play with an axe in front of this famous architect would be uh would be showing <unk> to ah if you were to you know hack yet things in front of the streamers architect you would be ah sort of showing your novice skills in front of the expert anyway so this has gotten to be a bit longer than i expected i i had a few other things that i was going to a point too but uh the whole the whole point of me talking about this is especially if you have a <unk> culture that has a long literary history a long history of of writing [noise] uh you can pool from or you can well first you have to create it but you can all but then you can sort of pool from history uh historical references and uh um literally references to make some of your idioms and you know to some extent in fact you could even give a your consul sort of misconceptions matter whether the story is true or not people still make [noise] make [noise] uh idioms out of it and i'm still believe it's true [noise] but hopefully that will and fire some <unk> create some uh [noise] interesting idioms especially in the people who have [noise] ah <unk> <unk> which are meant to vote [noise] uh had writing for a long time [noise] but even if you don't instill pulled from traditional stories with us [noise] so [noise] anyway [noise] that is the news the ah [noise] that is it for this short couple of shows and i'm going to say <unk> thank you for listening to <unk> you could find our our cars <unk> dot com you can send questions comments fourth topic for features line with suggestions [noise] to <unk> dot com [noise] to submit a con langhorn that line greedy for the top of a show see or contribute paid for detail [noise] web space <unk> provided by the language creation society and our seen music is by no the vice [noise]

Tags

  1. Conlangery Podcast
  2. Podcast
  3. chengyu
  4. Chinese
  5. conlang
  6. idiom
  7. language
  8. linguistics

Conlangery Podcast/Conlangery SHORTS 02 George’s Favorite Chengyu (last edited 2017-09-08 16:34:24 by TranscriBot)