In medias res...

From Jonathan D. Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci:

One can sense a reason for Ricci's emotional language: if Chinese had "as many letters [i.e., ideographs] as there are words or things" and if one could learn quite swiftly to subdivide each ideograph into component parts, each of which also had a separate meaning, then it would be easy for someone well trained in mnemonic art to make each ideograph into a memory image. This process was speeded by the fact that Chinese made an encouraging contrast with Greek grammar, which Ricci had been unhappily trying to teach for some years in India. Unlike Greek sentences, which had to be remembered in all their detailed complexity, a Chinese sentence could be presented in sharp detail as a series of images: as Ricci observed, "What is of help in all this is that their words have no articles, no cases, no number, no gender, no tense, no mood; they just solve their problems with certain adverbial forms which can be explained very easily."

Just so one doesn't get the wrong impression, Spence immediately goes on to say it took Ricci another dozen years of focusing his prodigious mental powers on learning Chinese before he got to the point where he could explain his methods in Chinese.

Still, Spence's is an interesting observation about both mnemonics and the Chinese language.

Cheers...

More wind...

The wind was apparently taking a break last night when I was posting, because shortly after shutting down my machine and going upstairs, the howling began anew and didn't stop until the morning. The sound effects were a little unsettling, as I expected to hear the sound of something ripping off the house.

There was only the slightest sprinkling of snow on the ground when we awoke, which is not all that unusual (it's not unusual to see significant, if short-lived, snowfall in April in these parts). As expected, it all disappeared by mid-afternoon, though it's hard to tell how much melted and how much was blown away by that deucedly persistent wind.

Some small quantity of work came in at the crack of dawn and was dealt with quickly. Afterward, I got reacquainted with the procedure for putting something up for sale on eBay, and marveled at the patience of those who do it—or try to—for a living.

Work finally picked up in the afternoon, with the arrival of a 17,000 source word document.

Now we're cooking with gas!

Cheers...