三国演义

An LJ friend posted a picture in a friends-only post asking for help with the words on the cover of a book. The characters above were among those shown. I immediately recognized the characters for three (三) and kingdom (国) and figured I was halfway there, so...

The third character (演) gave me a lot of trouble, as apparently modern Chinese dictionaries are cued to the pronunciation of a character, which is really rough, because generally speaking characters do not lend themselves to being "sounded out," as is the case for words made up of letters. Alternate methods of dictionary lookup involve knowing the radical (a compressed form of "water" if I'm not mistaken, but that's as far as I got; I didn't recognize the rest of the character, nor did I have an example to paste into an online dictionary), so I was stymied there as my skills are still at the uber-beginner stage.

The last character (义) was easy enough to find, but its meaning can be any of "justice; righteousness; human relationship; meaning; significance; adopted; adoptive."

Looking up "three kingdoms" on Google turned up a web site apparently dedicated to a book called Romance of Three Kingdoms, by one Luo Guanzhong, which broke the back of the problem, but didn't quite offer a neat linguistic solution to how one gets "romance" out of 演义.

The third character (yan3, in pinyin) has the meaning of "develop; evolve; elaborate; drill; practice; perform; play; act; put on," which, when combined with the fourth character (yi4), doesn't immediately conjure up an image of "romance," which is a fairly slippery word in English, dontchaknow.

For the moment, it does not matter, as the puzzle has been solved, I think. Time to bask a little, to the sound of space-to-ground chatter in the background.

Cheers...

I feel mah-velous!

What woke me up yesterday at 2:30 pm was a call from my client, informing me that my 10 am appointment this morning to follow up on my physical last week had been pushed up by half an hour so that my breathing could be re-tested. Apparently, this was a reference to my spirometry test, which I felt I hadn't done too well on, in retrospect, because I was trying to throttle the air I was expelling so as to have something left to exhale for the rest of the cycle.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Spirometry measures the quality of your breathing and the method is pretty straightforward, if a bit uncomfortable. Your nostrils are pinched off with a clip and you breath through your mouth into a tube connected to the measurement apparatus. You're supposed to breathe three times normally, with the last breath taken deeply and exhaled slowly, followed by as rapid an intake as possible of a full breath and a just as rapid exhalation for as long as you can continue to exhale. This mild form of torture is repeated two more times, and I would suppose the results are averaged somehow.

In any event, during the post-examination session, the doc said I'd done well on the spirometry, checked my reflexes and pulse, gave me a new certificate stating that I'd passed the flight controller's physical (technically, an air traffic controller's physical, but that'd be getting picky), and told me to come back next year.

I think I'm going to go grab some lunch and celebrate.

Cheers...

A source of inspiration...

One might reasonably ask: why is a fellow on the teeter-point of the half-century mark interested in learning Chinese?

Well, part of it has to do with my own perception of the future emergence of China on the world stage, a phenomenon hinted at in our daily news reports and supported in our collective consciousness in various movies ranging from Blade Runner to Serenity.

Part of it has to do with my efforts to keep the neural pathways in my brain lubricated, and to create and maintain as many new such pathways as possible in the course of my daily life.

Part of it is satisfying my curiosity as to how one thinks in Chinese (an extension of my general linguistic curiosity).

And part of it has to do with my late brother Carlos' fascination with China and his stories of the time he worked there as a trainer for Honeywell.

One might also reasonably ask: what makes a fellow on the teeter-point of the half-century mark think he can learn Chinese?

Well, perhaps the prime factor is my natural optimism towards subjects both academic and linguistic. But it also helps to know it can be done.

One of the fellows whose job it is to drive a van for my old employer, as part of the company's logistics services to pick up and deliver visitors from and to various locations, is a fellow named Carl who, I suspect, is long past the half-century mark. (There is nothing magical about the number 50, by the way, except that it seems to me that many in the younger crowd deem it to be solidly on the "over the hill" end of the age scale.)

At any rate, back when I still worked for the company, Carl began - on his own - to pick up some Russian phrases, mostly to help himself out when picking up newly arrived visitors at the airport. In the spare time between van runs, he could be seen with his nose buried in a Russian phrase book. Today, while his skills are not of a professional caliber, he seems pretty capable of holding his own in a casual conversation.

Including the rest of tonight's shift, I've got two nights left on this assignment. Time to get cracking.

Cheers...