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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 28, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The Master and his Emissary, slow progress. This book has a way of making one reflect on things he's heard or seen in the past.

The right temporal region appears to be essential for the integration of two seemingly unrelated concepts into a meaningful metaphoric expression. Fascinatingly, however, cliched metaphorical or non-literal expressions are dealt with in the left hemisphere...

I recall George Orwell's (I think?) quip that people were forgetting how to make their own metaphors, and were just using ones that don't have any relation in themselves to the topic at hand or to each other.

Edit: There's a good book thread in the Fun Thread.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms in English. Sixty pages in, it’s a royal pain to keep track of the names. I wonder if something like Game of Thrones is equally daunting in Mandarin. Would the names be represented by some approximation of meaning or phonetically?

Phonetically, such that we get "Daenerys Targaryen 丹妮莉丝·坦格利安 (Dān nī lì sī·tǎn gé lì’ān)"
https://ltl-school.com/game-of-thrones-in-chinese/
But the article talks about how the translation uses some classical and literary Chinese for flavor.

You could try watching 3 Kingdoms from 2010 or other adaptations? Putting a unique face, costume and demeanor to a character helped me a lot.

You could try watching 3 Kingdoms from 2010 or other adaptations? Putting a unique face, costume and demeanor to a character helped me a lot.

A Chinese friend of mine recommended the graphic novels she read in Singapore in the 90s as the best english adaptation.