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I'll save everyone the trip to their favourite search engine. It's part of a larger quote: "宰予晝寢。子曰：「朽木不可雕也, 糞土之牆不可朽也。於予與何誅 」子曰：「始吾於人也, 聽其言而信其行; 今吾於人也, 聽其言而觀其行
by ordinary 14y ago
I'll save everyone the trip to their favourite search engine. It's part of a larger quote:
"宰予晝寢。子曰：「朽木不可雕也, 糞土之牆不可朽也。於予與何誅 」子曰：「始吾於人也, 聽其言而信其行; 今吾於人也, 聽其言而觀其行。於予與改是。」"
"Tsai Yu slept during the daytime. The master said, "Rotten wood cannot be carved; dirty earth cannot be used for cement: why bother scolding him? At first I used to listen to what people said and expect them to act accordingly. Now I listen to what people say and watch what they do. I learned this from Yu."[0]
(I hope Chinese uses quote signs too.)
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[0] http://www.lrsolution.com/konkar/SF_LunYu.html http://www.lrsolution.com/konkar/SF_LunYu.html
- mkr-hn 14y ago「 and 」 are quotation marks.
- jlgreco 14y agoThe directionality of those is pretty cool. Of course with latin style quotation marks you can always do the 'smart quote' style quotation marks, but those really depend on handwriting a lot more. I suppose adopting those style quotation marks in English is probably a lost cause though.
- eru 14y agoIn German we use ,,this style'' of quotes. Which is discernible even with bad handwriting.
- tibbon 14y agoThanks! I really like those visually. While non-standard, I just might have to start using those in my English typesetting/formatting of documents. As a complete tangent, I think that over the next 50 years, various Chinese phrases, language quirks and usage will start bleeding into English, much as Spanish has if not moreso.
- compay 14y ago> I think that over the next 50 years, various Chinese phrases, language quirks and usage will start bleeding into English Right on. That was one of my favorite elements of the Firefly TV series.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoOne of the criticisms of Firefly was that for a future that was supposed to have a large Chinese population / integration of Chinese culture, you never really saw any Chinese characters (aka whitewashing). That said, I always thought it was an elegant work-around to broadcast TV's limitations on cusswords.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoMaybe they could start picking up a phonetic alphabet in the meantime, so it doesn't take me that long to become competent with their written language.
- mkr-hn 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
- WiseWeasel 14y agoThat doesn't appear to be used for internal communication, but rather for communicating with foreigners. I'm sure many millions of young Chinese schoolchildren would love it if Pinyin was adopted as a native written language, so they wouldn't have to spend quite so much mental effort memorizing the tens of thousands of characters needed to qualify for a diploma. Same goes for Japanese schoolchildren, since they're plagued with a non-phonetic alphabet as well. The widely-used phonetic [hiragana] alphabet is ready to replace their daunting kanji alphabet imported from China.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]