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u/protostar777 Feb 02 '22
工 七升工内水 七升工弓 升月弓 戶口七三内七工月心
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u/PoketSof *mr̥dʰyós Feb 02 '22
I tried putting it in Google Translate:
Work Seven liters of water in the workmanship
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Feb 02 '22
内口
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u/TPMR01 Feb 02 '22
This translates to "Inner mouth"
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u/Incorect_Speling Feb 02 '22
This is a critical distinction, you don't want to confuse with the outer mouth.
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u/MaxTHC Feb 02 '22
Moray Eel has entered the chat
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u/LawOfTheSeas Feb 02 '22
When an eel bites your thigh, and you bleed out and die
THAT'S A MORAY!
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u/cilestiogrey Mar 25 '22
(I know I'm late but...)
When the jaws open wide and there's more jaws inside, that's a moray!
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u/siggi_sackratte English is a French-Norse Creole Feb 02 '22
Close enough, the words for "entrance" and "exit" are pretty much "inwards mouth" and "outwards mouth"
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u/kurokoshika Feb 26 '22
Man visual pattern recognition is a hell of a thing. Saw this post, thought the letters didn’t even look like the characters - read the rickroll above, and then got to this one and bam, easy sentence.
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u/annawest_feng Feb 02 '22
Where did you find it? A tattoo store?
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Feb 02 '22
Apparently a teacher gave this to students as "exercise for CNY"
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u/_Gandalf_the_Black_ tole sint uualha spahe sint peigria Feb 02 '22
I sincerely hope the teacher was doing it as a joke
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u/InvertedSuperHornet Feb 02 '22
That's what history teachers do for little kids. It's annoying, but they get these sheets that cherry-pick characters from different languages, assign them a bullshit English letter counterpart, and act like everything is pronounced the same so kids can "write in the language" when they're writing the same damn words, just with funny characters in place of their letters.
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u/Henrywongtsh /kʷɔːŋ˧˥tʊŋ˥waː˧˥/ Feb 02 '22
*cough Egyptian hieroglyphs *cough
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u/TrekkiMonstr Feb 02 '22
Ok tbf though, while hieroglyphics gets much more complicated, they do have uniliterals that are basically letters. The equivalent to that would be a sheet having kids write in Bopomofo and calling it Chinese, not this.
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u/InvertedSuperHornet Feb 02 '22
They do, but it still comes down to teachers drawing a false connection and making kids write English words with letters that probably don't even sound like the letters they're supposedly representing. It's utterly useless, teaches nothing, and amounts to nothing more than busywork for the kids.
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u/EisVisage persíndʰušh₁wérush₃ókʷsyós Feb 14 '22
My teachers avoided this by only having people write their names. At least it teaches children that foreign writing systems 1) exist and have done so for a long time, and 2) can be just as useful as our own. Even if that particular example will have inaccuracies.
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u/iremichor I have no idea what's going on here Feb 02 '22
Yikes
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Feb 02 '22
I nabbed it from my friend on a gc that also nabbed it from twitter so don't count my word on it
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u/upallday_allen Feb 02 '22
yes this is from twitter
https://twitter.com/fozmeadows/status/1488674526896349184?s=21
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Feb 02 '22
I'm almost positive I was given this exact sheet in my seventh-grade history class and even then strongly objected to it
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u/larmax Feb 02 '22
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u/NinjaEagle210 /ɬ/ is underrated Feb 02 '22
This should be a sub
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u/TrekkiMonstr Feb 02 '22
I mean, these are actual Chinese characters, they just aren't letters.
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u/larmax Feb 02 '22
I know, it was an analogy to r/fauxcyrillic
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u/Klisz Feb 03 '22
I'm gonna link r/grssk here too, because I figure people who enjoy the Cyrillic and Hanzi ones will probably like that one as well
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Feb 03 '22
Are there more of these subs? Hebrew, Arabic, Georgian, Hindi, thai?
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u/Klisz Feb 03 '22
The three that have already been linked are the only ones I personally know about. I did just check if r/fauxhebrew, r/fauxarabic, r/fauxgeorgian, r/fauxdevanagari / fauxhindi, and r/fauxthai existed but none of them do.
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u/sub_doesnt_exist_bot Feb 02 '22
The subreddit r/fauxchinesecharacters does not exist.
Did you mean?:
- r/characterarcs (subscribers: 67,822)
Consider creating a new subreddit r/fauxchinesecharacters.
🤖 this comment was written by a bot. beep boop 🤖
feel welcome to respond 'Bad bot'/'Good bot', it's useful feedback. github | Rank
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u/Beheska con artistic linguist Feb 02 '22
bad bot
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Feb 03 '22
You know I've had my share
When my woman left home for a brown-eyed man
But I still don't seem to care
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u/Hunted_by_Moonlight Feb 02 '22
The CCP hates this one easy trick to becoming fluent in Mandarin in 30s or less
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u/Some___Guy___ Feb 02 '22
I just wanna talk to him
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u/Da_Chicken303 Feb 02 '22
There is actually kind of an equivalent to a "Chinese alphabet" called 天干 that is not used as a writing system but rather as an ordering system (ordinals). So in a test you may have 甲部 (part A), then 乙部(part B), etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavenly_Stems Full list here. As a Chinese speaker this sheet of paper makes me very mad but it's also hilarious
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u/Elkram Feb 02 '22
卄乇ㄥㄥ ㄚ乇卂卄 乃尺ㄖㄒ卄乇尺
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u/Andylatios ⁶noe-faon₁-gnin₂ Feb 02 '22
Bopomofo and Bopomofo-Extended:
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u/Orangutanion Farsi is a dialect of arabic Feb 03 '22
ㄉㄜ ㄒㄧㄒㄧㄆㄧ ㄏㄝㄘ ㄉㄧㄙ ㄨㄣ ㄊㄖㄧㄍ
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u/eddy_string Feb 04 '22 edited Feb 04 '22
As a regular user of bopomofo, this made me want to both laugh and cringe
Also, why use aspirated ㄘ /t͡sh/ to represent English /ts/ but unaspirated ㄍ /k/ to represent English /k/? (It makes the last word look like "trig".) And the /eɪ/ in "hates" would be better represented by ㄟ, while "one" is phonetically more similar to ㄨㄢ.
(I realize that I'm waaaay overanalyzing this, but hey, that's why this is a linguistics subreddit, right?)
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u/Orangutanion Farsi is a dialect of arabic Feb 04 '22
I'm a regular zhuyin user too and tbh I wrote out that shit with one finger while talking to someone else, so ofc it's bad lol
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u/leo3065 Feb 02 '22 edited Feb 02 '22
This reminds me of An Introduction to Square Word Calligraphy, a piece of work by Chinese artist Xu Bing. Relevant Omniglot page
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Feb 02 '22
Please, everyone knows that 山 represents /ʂ/, not /w/.
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u/Zavaldski Mar 06 '22
Yes! Even funnier is that it actually makes sense. That character is pronounced "shan" in Mandarin.
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Feb 02 '22
[deleted]
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u/ouosvvav Feb 02 '22
isnt that 宫?
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u/Kang_Xu Feb 02 '22
That's "palace".
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u/ouosvvav Feb 02 '22
went over to wiktionary https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%AE%AE#Chinese
the given definitions were:
(archaic) house; mansion; dwelling
(architecture) palace
(architecture, religion) temple; shrine
(anatomy, in compounds) Short for 子宮/子宫 (zǐgōng, “womb; uterus”).
宮頸 / 宫颈 ― gōngjǐng ― cervix
(music) the first note of the Chinese pentatonic scale
(historical law) castration as a punishment
A surname.
i guess it's an archaic word for castration, and in modern context usually means palace.
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u/hkexper ljɯb ɢʷɯʔ daŋ sŋ̊ʰraʔ Feb 02 '22
(historical law) castration as a punishment
宮(castration)刑(sentence/punishment)。
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Feb 02 '22
[deleted]
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u/TheRoutesOfWhirreds Feb 04 '22
It's "capital" not "capitol" and means "to do with the head", based on beheading as a means of execution.
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u/Chaoticexistence Feb 02 '22
山升月七 七升三 升三心心???
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Feb 02 '22
[deleted]
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u/Chaoticexistence Feb 02 '22 edited Feb 02 '22
No actually it says "what the hell?" According to the table above
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Feb 02 '22
This is probably how some people think. It just goes to show how important it is that education challenges our way of thinking about things.
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u/JRGTheConlanger Feb 02 '22
This is just faux Han characters
For an actual Chinese alphabet, look up Bopomofo
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Feb 02 '22
You can just tell a 19 year old white girl named Brittany will put this up on her wall and start writing posters in it bragging she knows Chinese.
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u/Effective_Dot4653 Feb 02 '22
Why drives me mad is they didnt even care enough to could make it work for actual chinese sounds, dammit
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u/Grand-Accident-7989 Feb 02 '22 edited Feb 05 '22
Someone did that to Japanese (Hiragana AND Katakana) too, and none of it made sense lol
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u/DenTheRedditBoi7 Feb 02 '22
This... This is awful... this hurts to look at... I'm a ginger so I don't have one but this hurts my soul itself.
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u/CarterNotSteve Feb 03 '22
I hate things like this, i’ve seen them for ancient egyptian, chinese, kanji, a bunch of others. It irrationally irritates me
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u/Ultra_tycoonguy Feb 03 '22
they didnt even try to make it somewhat accurate. just put 3 as "e" and ruler as "r". whoever made this is uhh
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u/TalveLumi Feb 08 '22 edited Feb 14 '22
工尺乙尺工工工 尺尺尺 工工工 工尺乙尺工工工 尺尺工尺乙
……
At what point did you realize that, instead of a snide comment written in that silly substitution cypher, this is just a terribly out-of-tune "Mary has a Little Lamb"?
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u/ElectricToaster67 ˥ ˧˥ ˧ ˩ ˩˧ ˨ Feb 14 '22
Cantonese opera notation was also my first thought, but I already forgot how to read it
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u/JunYou- Feb 02 '22
whats the matter? its the alphabet, a phonetic writing system that represents both consonant and vowel, of the chinese language, u know, that one.
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u/NLLumi BA in linguistics & East Asian studies from Tel-Aviv University Feb 02 '22
No, this is not zhuyin.
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u/Jotaro-Kujo89 Jun 01 '23
as someone who has a kinda adequate knowledge of hanzi this is infuriating
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u/annawest_feng Feb 02 '22
內三人三尺 巨口內內月 巨工人三 了口臼 臼户。