This year's Yugo Awards

[Joseph Nebus]

So, who's the Malcolm Bricklin of science fiction? Just curious.


--
http://nebusresearch.wordpress.com/ Joseph Nebus
Current Entry: Reading the Comics, April 28, 2013 http://wp.me/p1RYhY-rU
--------------------------------------------------------+---------------------

[James Nicoll]

In article <kmc7hj$4u1$1...@reader1.panix.com>,

Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
>
> So, who's the Malcolm Bricklin of science fiction? Just curious.

Up in Canada, at least if one is of a certain age, he's better known for
the eponymous car.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Bricklin#Bricklin

The amazing thing about him is the string of "sales slowed to a stop",
" the company went into receivership", "filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy
liquidation", "went bankrupt", and such, despite which he keeps finding
new investors. He must be a very charming man.

In fact a couple of names do come to mind as SF entrepreneurs with
consistent strings of failed companies but I think most of them are
rather litigious and probably would not appreciate being named as the
sort person one should invest with if one has too much money.
--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)

[ppint. at pplay]

- hi; in article, <kmci48$der$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
jdni...@panix.com "James Nicoll" contemplated:

> Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
>>So, who's the Malcolm Bricklin of science fiction? Just curious.
>
>Up in Canada, at least if one is of a certain age, he's better known
>for the eponymous car.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Bricklin#Bricklin
>
>The amazing thing about him is the string of "sales slowed to a stop",
>" the company went into receivership", "filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy
>liquidation", "went bankrupt", and such, despite which he keeps finding
>new investors. He must be a very charming man.
>
>In fact a couple of names do come to mind as SF entrepreneurs with
>consistent strings of failed companies but I think most of them are
>rather litigious and probably would not appreciate being named as the
>sort person one should invest with if one has too much money.

- hmm. i've only met a couple of chancers or rip-off mer-
chants i'd say were specifically sf entrepeneurs, but you
should be aware _any_ small-press sf enterprise is quite
liable to lose money, rather than make it; and most small
businesses are under-capitalised, and fail in their first
three years.

- famous failed publishing houses of sf are a rather diff-
erent matter, though. they have tended to harm primarily
people to whom they've owed money, and authors whose books
may have had rights tied up in the companies' bankruptcies,
rather than fans from whom they've raised cash.
(examples include lancer books, where some of the legal ram-
ifications had not completely unwound, thirty or forty years
on - subsidiary rights sales still standing in some cases.)

- love, ppint.
[drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]
--
"never trust a man with shaved buttocks"
- jim darby, 2/9/96 (9/2/96 for merkins)

[Joseph Nebus]

In <kmci48$der$1...@reader1.panix.com> jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:

>In article <kmc7hj$4u1$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
>>
>> So, who's the Malcolm Bricklin of science fiction? Just curious.

>Up in Canada, at least if one is of a certain age, he's better known for
>the eponymous car.

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Bricklin#Bricklin

>The amazing thing about him is the string of "sales slowed to a stop",
>" the company went into receivership", "filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy
>liquidation", "went bankrupt", and such, despite which he keeps finding
>new investors. He must be a very charming man.

>In fact a couple of names do come to mind as SF entrepreneurs with
>consistent strings of failed companies but I think most of them are
>rather litigious and probably would not appreciate being named as the
>sort person one should invest with if one has too much money.

You know, I'd had fictional entrepreneurs in mind --- it can't
all be D D Harriman's moon scam, after all --- but I'm delighted to
have a broader topic in mind even if we can really only safely gossip
about the dead.

Hm. How many magazines or similar-scale projects did Hugo
Gernsback found, now that I think about it, and how many of them
were mainly attempts to get ham radio types to give him money?

[Gene Wirchenko]

On Wed, 8 May 2013 03:51:36 +0000 (UTC), jdni...@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:

[snip]

>In fact a couple of names do come to mind as SF entrepreneurs with
>consistent strings of failed companies but I think most of them are
>rather litigious and probably would not appreciate being named as the
>sort person one should invest with if one has too much money.

I think that they would be nearly ideal if one has too much
money. I do not have that problem myself.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[Kay Shapero]

In article <kmci48$der$1...@reader1.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...

>
> In article <kmc7hj$4u1$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
> >
> > So, who's the Malcolm Bricklin of science fiction? Just curious.
>
> Up in Canada, at least if one is of a certain age, he's better known for
> the eponymous car.

A friend of mine actually owned one for awhile. A gull-winged
monstrosity composed of an outside layer of fiberglass over an impresive
coat of armor. Weighed a ton, dismal mileage, and the insurance cost
was high, not due to the probability of IT taking damage in a
collision... :)

--

Kay Shapero
Address munged, try my first name at kayshapero dot net.

[J. Clarke]

In article <MPG.2bf47bcc2...@news.eternal-september.org>,
k...@invalid.net says...

>
> In article <kmci48$der$1...@reader1.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...
> >
> > In article <kmc7hj$4u1$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
> > Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
> > >
> > > So, who's the Malcolm Bricklin of science fiction? Just curious.
> >
> > Up in Canada, at least if one is of a certain age, he's better known for
> > the eponymous car.
>
> A friend of mine actually owned one for awhile. A gull-winged
> monstrosity composed of an outside layer of fiberglass over an impresive
> coat of armor. Weighed a ton, dismal mileage, and the insurance cost
> was high, not due to the probability of IT taking damage in a
> collision... :)

Did your friend escape with his fingers intact? I understand that a
failure of the door mechanism could have unfortunate consequences.

[Kay Shapero]

In article <MPG.2bf4b7f9b...@news.newsguy.com>,
jclark...@cox.net says...

Yeowch, I'd think so! Naw, he never got his hand caught in it. I rode
in the thing with him a couple of times - I don't know what it used for
shock absorbers, but they must've been industrial grade, or else the
weight just kept it down on the road regardless of what it was doing. :)
I think he sold it to a collector.

[Anthony Nance]

Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
> In <kmci48$der$1...@reader1.panix.com> jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:
>
>>In article <kmc7hj$4u1$1...@reader1.panix.com>,
>>Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> So, who's the Malcolm Bricklin of science fiction? Just curious.
>
>>Up in Canada, at least if one is of a certain age, he's better known for
>>the eponymous car.
>
>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Bricklin#Bricklin
>
>>The amazing thing about him is the string of "sales slowed to a stop",
>>" the company went into receivership", "filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy
>>liquidation", "went bankrupt", and such, despite which he keeps finding
>>new investors. He must be a very charming man.
>
>>In fact a couple of names do come to mind as SF entrepreneurs with
>>consistent strings of failed companies but I think most of them are
>>rather litigious and probably would not appreciate being named as the
>>sort person one should invest with if one has too much money.
>
> You know, I'd had fictional entrepreneurs in mind --- it can't
> all be D D Harriman's moon scam, after all ---

Aha - I was having trouble discerning which aspect(s) of
Malcolm Bricklin-ness you were aiming for. Still, I'm
having trouble thinking of SF entrepreneurs. Here's a
few that don't quite feel right(!):

Basil Argyros (of Turtledove's Byzantium)
Martin Padway (de Camp)
Robert Hedrock (van Vogt)
Dick Seaton

Ummm - maybe Nicholas van Rijn?
Tony

[James Nicoll]

In article <kmqmm2$c8k$1...@dont-email.me>,

Preem Palver, truck farmer to the Milky Way.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Monday, 13 May 2013 13:35:14 UTC+1, Anthony Nance wrote:
> Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
> > In <kmci48$der$1...@reader1.panix.com> jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:
> >> In fact a couple of names do come to mind as
> >> SF entrepreneurs with consistent strings of
> >> failed companies but I think most of them are
> >> rather litigious and probably would not appreciate
> >> being named as the sort person one should invest
> >> with if one has too much money.

For real-life science-fictional business ventures
with somewhat disappointing outcomes - large-scale
civil engineering is one field of endeavour to
look at; novel technology that doesn't catch on
is another. The English Channel rail tunnel has
underperformed and carries huge debt; the last that
I heard (which wasn't recently), people were saying
that it was underwater. And various flying-car
companies are not close to delivering vehicles,
and some investors may wonder if it was ever
reasonably expected. (You can build yourself a
car with wings if you interpret legal airworthiness
flexibly - or drive an aeroplane around on roads,
which amounts to the same thing - but do you want to,
considering the work you'll have to do on your
garage, as well? And it'll /show/.)

> > You know, I'd had fictional entrepreneurs in mind ---
> > it can't all be D D Harriman's moon scam, after all ---
>
> Aha - I was having trouble discerning which aspect(s) of
> Malcolm Bricklin-ness you were aiming for. Still, I'm
> having trouble thinking of SF entrepreneurs. Here's a
> few that don't quite feel right(!):
>
> Basil Argyros (of Turtledove's Byzantium)
> Martin Padway (de Camp)
> Robert Hedrock (van Vogt)
> Dick Seaton
>
> Ummm - maybe Nicholas van Rijn?

Less honourable examples include Zaphod Beeblebrox,
although we don't often see him at work - nevertheless,
a second-hand ballpoint pen business is mentioned -
Planet Express in _Futurama_, and, I seem to recall,
that guy in Stephen Baxter's _Time_, but I didn't
care for the story. And the "Lost Cometary Colony",
a heavily mortgaged space station that escaped
its creditors and the Sun's gravity well in one go,
but lived to regret it.

[James Silverton]

Given the usual standards of surface driving, I would not want to be
anywhere near a flying car with an extra element of motion. Perhaps
automatically driven cars might make it possible.

--
Jim Silverton (Potomac, MD)

Extraneous "not." in Reply To.

[William December Starr]

In article <3eee65d3-230d-464e...@googlegroups.com>,

Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> said:

> For real-life science-fictional business ventures
> with somewhat disappointing outcomes - large-scale
> civil engineering is one field of endeavour to
> look at; novel technology that doesn't catch on
> is another. The English Channel rail tunnel has
> underperformed and carries huge debt; the last that
> I heard (which wasn't recently), people were saying
> that it was underwater.

Ho ho ho.

[...]

> Less honourable examples include Zaphod Beeblebrox,
> although we don't often see him at work - nevertheless,
> a second-hand ballpoint pen business is mentioned -
> Planet Express in _Futurama_, and, I seem to recall,
> that guy in Stephen Baxter's _Time_, but I didn't
> care for the story. And the "Lost Cometary Colony",
> a heavily mortgaged space station that escaped
> its creditors and the Sun's gravity well in one go,
> but lived to regret it.

"Lost Cometary Colony"? Title? Author? Clue?

-- wds

[James Nicoll]

In article <kmrg8q$f1p$1...@dont-email.me>,

James Silverton <not.jim....@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>Given the usual standards of surface driving, I would not want to be
>anywhere near a flying car with an extra element of motion.

[snip]

Very sensible.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/05/10/bc-flying-car-crash.html

[J. Clarke]

In article <kmsef1$jhf$1...@reader1.panix.com>, jdni...@panix.com says...

>
> In article <kmrg8q$f1p$1...@dont-email.me>,
> James Silverton <not.jim....@verizon.net> wrote:
> >
> >Given the usual standards of surface driving, I would not want to be
> >anywhere near a flying car with an extra element of motion.
>
> [snip]
>
> Very sensible.
>
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/05/10/bc-flying-car-crash.html

The only thing that is actually on track to come to market as more than
a rich person's hobby-toy that resembles a flying car is going to
function as an autonomous robot most of the time. In fact the first one
to come to market isn't even going to have space for a pilot, it's going
to be an autonomous robot that carries military cargo and occasionally
battlefield casualties. Google "Urban Aeronautics" for more
information. They have an all-up working prototype in flight test now,
and it's not the usual hobby project--they have partners that are major
aerospace manufacturers.

[David DeLaney]

On 2013-05-13, Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
> On Monday, 13 May 2013 13:35:14 UTC+1, Anthony Nance wrote:
>> Joseph Nebus <nebusj-@-rpi-.edu> wrote:
>> > jdni...@panix.com (James Nicoll) writes:
>> >> In fact a couple of names do come to mind as
>> >> SF entrepreneurs with consistent strings of
>> >> failed companies but I think most of them are
>> >> rather litigious and probably would not appreciate
>> >> being named as the sort person one should invest
>> >> with if one has too much money.
>
> For real-life science-fictional business ventures
> with somewhat disappointing outcomes - large-scale
> civil engineering is one field of endeavour to
> look at; novel technology that doesn't catch on
> is another.

And we can get both of those at once from Blish's Cities In Flight tetralogy!

> And the "Lost Cometary Colony",
> a heavily mortgaged space station that escaped
> its creditors and the Sun's gravity well in one go,
> but lived to regret it.

Dave, IMT / made the sky / FALL!
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://panacea.phys.utk.edu/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ/ I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Tuesday, 14 May 2013 03:41:32 UTC+1, William December Starr wrote:
> > And the "Lost Cometary Colony",
> > a heavily mortgaged space station that escaped
> > its creditors and the Sun's gravity well in one go,
> > but lived to regret it.
>
> "Lost Cometary Colony"? Title? Author? Clue?

Spoiler. Google...

Really it's a minor point in the story; IIRC the mysterious
object found in deep space remains a mystery because it
isn't designed as a generation ship. But the author has
disguised himself as a data archive expert who isn't a
specialist engineer, and is a browser, and he makes the
identification. And the captain sneers at his spectacles,
so it serves him right to have to wear specs himself
starting in _The Wrath of Khan_.

They also comment that the LCC infodump is way too long...

[ppint. at pplay]

- hi; in article,
<wsydnQR3z5yz1w_M...@earthlink.com>,
davidd...@earthlink.net "David DeLaney" emblishelled:

> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
>> For real-life science-fictional business ventures with somewhat
>> disappointing outcomes - large-scale civil engineering is one
>> field of endeavour to look at; novel technology that doesn't
>> catch on is another.
>
>And we can get both of those at once from Blish's Cities In Flight tetralogy!

- as well as an economic collapse, complete with funny money.

>
>> And the "Lost Cometary Colony", a heavily mortgaged space station
>> that escaped its creditors and the Sun's gravity well in one go,
>> but lived to regret it.
>

>IMT / made the sky / FALL!

- next you're going to tell us the escaped vegan fort is a myth...

- love, ppint.
[drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]
--

"No creature without tentacles had ever developed true intelligence."
- "Hunting Problem" Robert Sheckley

[Brian M. Scott]

On Tue, 14 May 2013 22:48:31 +0100 bst, ""ppint. at pplay""
<v$af$pp...@i-m-t.demon.co.uk> wrote in
<news:20130514.214...@i-m-t.demon.co.uk> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

> - hi; in article,
> <wsydnQR3z5yz1w_M...@earthlink.com>,
> davidd...@earthlink.net "David DeLaney" emblishelled:

>> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:

[...]

>>> And the "Lost Cometary Colony", a heavily mortgaged space station
>>> that escaped its creditors and the Sun's gravity well in one go,
>>> but lived to regret it.

>>IMT / made the sky / FALL!

> - next you're going to tell us the escaped vegan fort is a myth...

Of course it is: orbital forts are carnivorous. Especially
when they're from Lincoln, Nevada.

Brian

[Greg Goss]

v$af$pp...@i-m-t.demon.co.uk ("ppint. at pplay") wrote:

> - next you're going to tell us the escaped vegan fort is a myth...

A google search for the fort gave me Fort Worth Vegan restaurants. A
more detailed search gave me the Vegetarian Orbital Fort of the VGA
Planets game.

I'm trying to remember the name of the city that they claimed to be.
When I read it, the POV character said "They would!" after being told
what city had the armoured roof. That comment meant that I was
missing some joke, and continued to miss it for decades. But now I
can't even remember the city name to ask coherently.
--
We are geeks. Resistance is voltage over current.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.



--
Now available on Amazon or B&N: One-Eyed Jack.
Greg Kraft could see ghosts. That didn't mean he could stop them...
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1466291532/

[Greg Goss]

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:

>The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.

Thanks. Google Maps shows a Lincoln, NV, but there's nothing there on
either the map view or the satellite view. I don't know if it's a gag
of some kind or a copyright trap.

[Greg Goss]

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:

>The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.

That's a reasonable distinction. But I'm not an American, and have
always been fairly weak on Geography. Those books are about the only
place where I've ever heard of Scranton, for example.

And then there's the case where my late wife's SUV was built in the
wrong Kansas City.

Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
million people and I'd never heard of either city.

[ppint. at pplay]

- hi; in article, <kn1rbg$ks4$2...@dont-email.me>,
l...@sff.net "Lawrence Watt-Evans" elaborated:

> Greg Goss said:
>> "ppint. at pplay") wrote:
>>> - next you're going to tell us the escaped vegan fort is a myth...
>>
>> A google search for the fort gave me Fort Worth Vegan restaurants. A
>> more detailed search gave me the Vegetarian Orbital Fort of the VGA
>> Planets game.
>>
>> I'm trying to remember the name of the city that they claimed to be.
>> When I read it, the POV character said "They would!" after being told
>> what city had the armoured roof. That comment meant that I was
>> missing some joke, and continued to miss it for decades. But now I
>> can't even remember the city name to ask coherently.
>
>The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.

- ah. there are so many multiply-cloned copies of english
(and other) original towns & cities in merkia, the signifi-
cance of this exclusivity was lost on this side of the pond.
i'd wondered whether it wasn't some obscure historical
reference, perhaps to the violent suppression of industrial
action and unionisation between the wars - and forgotten it.
thanks for clearing-up a long-lost mystery.

- love, a ppint. for whom nevada was a semi-mythical place,
referred to once before in my science-fictional
reading, iirc in angus macvicar's _Lost Planet_

[drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]
--

"The English country gentleman galloping after a fox -
the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable."
_A Woman of No Importance_ - oscar wilde, 1893

[ppint. at pplay]

- hi; in article, <sxy4tmquuw11$.fg9x5j8zlted$.d...@40tude.net>,
b.s...@csuohio.edu "Brian M. Scott" scornfully rejoined:
> ppint. at pplay wrote

>> davidd...@earthlink.net "David DeLaney" emblishelled:
>>> Robert Carnegie <rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:
>[...]
>>>> And the "Lost Cometary Colony", a heavily mortgaged space station
>>>> that escaped its creditors and the Sun's gravity well in one go,
>>>> but lived to regret it.
>>>IMT / made the sky / FALL!

>> next you're going to tell us the escaped vegan fort is a myth...
>
>Of course it is: orbital forts are carnivorous. Especially when they're
>from Lincoln, Nevada.

- *vbg*

- love, ppint.
[drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]
--

"should placenta pie be baked in a baby belling ?"
- yr hmbl srppnt. 2/2/98 (2/2/98 for merkins)

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:

> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:
>
>> The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.
>
> That's a reasonable distinction. But I'm not an American, and have
> always been fairly weak on Geography. Those books are about the only
> place where I've ever heard of Scranton, for example.

Scranton's a grubby little city in the mountains of northeastern
Pennsylvania; there's nothing there of any real importance or interest.
About the only reason anyone would ever go there if they didn't have
work or family there is because the interstate from New York to
Harrisburg runs nearby and they need to stop for gas. There's no
reason anyone but an American would ever have heard of it; Blish was
writing for an American audience.

> And then there's the case where my late wife's SUV was built in the
> wrong Kansas City.

The one in Kansas? Because the one in Missouri is the right one for
pretty much any purpose I can think of.

> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
> million people and I'd never heard of either city.

My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-16 11:24:20 -0400, Greg Goss said:

> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:
>
>> The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.
>
> Thanks. Google Maps shows a Lincoln, NV, but there's nothing there on
> either the map view or the satellite view. I don't know if it's a gag
> of some kind or a copyright trap.

I'm guessing it's a gag, quite possibly by a Blish fan.

[David Goldfarb]

In article <avkdu0...@mid.individual.net>,

Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> wrote:
>And then there's the case where my late wife's SUV was built in the
>wrong Kansas City.

Which one is the "wrong" one? The one that's not in Kansas?
(The one in Missouri is of course about an order of magnitude larger.)

--
David Goldfarb |"Well, my days of not taking you seriously
goldf...@gmail.com | are certainly coming to a middle."
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | -- _Firefly_

[david.sh...@ymail.com]

On May 16, 1:18 pm, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:
> On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:
> > Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
> > women who found me on Yahoo.  Both of them lived in towns of over a
> > million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>
> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year.  Population a little
> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?

I think most Americans have heard of very few Chinese cities that
aren't either seaports or one-time national capitals.

[Brian M. Scott]

On Wed, 15 May 2013 22:01:37 -0600, Greg Goss
<go...@gossg.org> wrote in
<news:avj40r...@mid.individual.net> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

Lincoln, Nevada. Not a joke; the point is simply that their
attempt to pass themselves off as a genuine Okie city is
badly flawed.

Brian

[Howard Brazee]

On Thu, 16 May 2013 09:56:54 -0600, Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> wrote:

>That's a reasonable distinction. But I'm not an American, and have
>always been fairly weak on Geography. Those books are about the only
>place where I've ever heard of Scranton, for example.

Then listen to Harry Chapman's "30,000 pounds of bananas".

--
Anybody who agrees with one side all of the time or disagrees with the
other side all of the time is equally guilty of letting others do
their thinking for them.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-16 14:29:27 -0400, Howard Brazee said:

> On Thu, 16 May 2013 09:56:54 -0600, Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> wrote:
>
>> That's a reasonable distinction. But I'm not an American, and have
>> always been fairly weak on Geography. Those books are about the only
>> place where I've ever heard of Scranton, for example.
>
> Then listen to Harry Chapman's "30,000 pounds of bananas".

Chapin, not Chapman.

[Greg Goss]

Howard Brazee <how...@brazee.net> wrote:

>On Thu, 16 May 2013 09:56:54 -0600, Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> wrote:
>
>>That's a reasonable distinction. But I'm not an American, and have
>>always been fairly weak on Geography. Those books are about the only
>>place where I've ever heard of Scranton, for example.
>
>Then listen to Harry Chapman's "30,000 pounds of bananas".

That's why I said "just about". I was sure that there was something
else out there.

On the other hand, in the days before google and wikipedia, I had
always thought that "downtown Pagosa Springs" (Colorado) was fictional
in the conclusion of a similar song involving chickens.

[Don Bruder]

In article <avkq9c...@mid.individual.net>,

"Now, Earl, I ain't the kind to complain, but the time has come for me
to explain that if you don't apply some brake real soon, they're gonna
hafta pick us up with a stick and a spoon!" :)

--
If the door is baroque don't be Haydn. Come around Bach and jiggle the Handel.

[Kurt Busiek]

On 2013-05-16 15:56:54 +0000, Greg Goss <go...@gossg.org> said:

> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:
>
>> The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.
>
> That's a reasonable distinction. But I'm not an American, and have
> always been fairly weak on Geography. Those books are about the only
> place where I've ever heard of Scranton, for example.

You need to listen to this, then:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGldNpngDws

kdb
--
Visit http://www.busiek.com -- for all your Busiek needs!

[J. Clarke]

In article <kn3467$973$2...@dont-email.me>, l...@sff.net says...

>
> On 2013-05-16 11:24:20 -0400, Greg Goss said:
>
> > Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:
> >
> >> The fort claimed to be Lincoln, Nevada. Lincoln is in Nebraska, not Nevada.
> >
> > Thanks. Google Maps shows a Lincoln, NV, but there's nothing there on
> > either the map view or the satellite view. I don't know if it's a gag
> > of some kind or a copyright trap.
>
> I'm guessing it's a gag, quite possibly by a Blish fan.

Mostly likely it's Lincoln County.

[Greg Goss]

I couldn't remember the title. The search string for it was "Stepping
on a plum."

[Jim G.]

Lawrence Watt-Evans sent the following on 5/16/2013 12:18 PM:

> On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:
>
>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>
> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?

How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
their *own* country, let alone in China? Heck, how many do you think
could even name *three* cities in China?

--
Jim G. | A fan of good reading, good writing, and fellow bookworms
http://www.goodreads.com/jimgysin/
http://www.librarything.com/home/jimgysin

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <kn8i2d$lcm$1...@dont-email.me>,

Jim G. <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:
>Lawrence Watt-Evans sent the following on 5/16/2013 12:18 PM:
>> On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:
>>
>>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>>
>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
>> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>
>How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
>their *own* country, let alone in China? Heck, how many do you think
>could even name *three* cities in China?
>

I'd say most people, if pressed, could come up with Bejing, Shanghi and
Hong Kong.
--
------
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

[James Silverton]

On 5/18/2013 2:46 PM, Jim G. wrote:
> Lawrence Watt-Evans sent the following on 5/16/2013 12:18 PM:
>> On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:
>>
>>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>>
>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
>> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>
> How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
> their *own* country, let alone in China? Heck, how many do you think
> could even name *three* cities in China?
>

Don't you think that most people have heard of Hong Kong, Shanghai and
Beijing? A fourth one might be a struggle :-)

--
Jim Silverton (Potomac, MD)

Extraneous "not." in Reply To.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Saturday, 18 May 2013 19:46:09 UTC+1, Jim G. wrote:
> Lawrence Watt-Evans sent the following on 5/16/2013 12:18 PM:
> > On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:
> >> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations
> >> with Chinese women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them
> >> lived in towns of over a million people and I'd never
> >> heard of either city.
> >
> > My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year.
> > Population a little over two million, 27th largest
> > city in China, provincial capital, major
> > rail center -- and how many people here ever
> > heard of it?

I think Americans call it Chicago?

> How many people do you think have heard of all
> 27 largest cities in their *own* country, let alone
> in China? Heck, how many do you think could even
> name *three* cities in China?

Beijing, Shanghai, Youwin. :-)

I don't think there /are/ 27 cities in Scotland
but I've probably /heard/ of them, and can tell them
from place names that aren't in Scotland. Perth,
for instance, is both.

Isn't China large enough that /any/ combination of
the appropriate sort of sounds is the name of at
least one city?

[David Goldfarb]

In article <kn8i2d$lcm$1...@dont-email.me>,
Jim G. <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:

>How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
>their *own* country, let alone in China?

I just had a look at the top 50 cities in the USA, and the only one
whose name I hadn't seen before was #50.

Heck, how many do you think
>could even name *three* cities in China?

Anyone who can't name Harbin should immediately go look up pictures
of their annual Ice Festival.

--
David Goldfarb |"Federico Fellini brought his own security to
goldf...@gmail.com | tonight's show...and they were six of the
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | toughest clown midgets I've ever seen."
| -- Billy Crystal

[Howard Brazee]

On Sat, 18 May 2013 13:46:09 -0500, "Jim G."
<jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:

>>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>>
>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
>> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>
>How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
>their *own* country, let alone in China?

I would expect a large majority.

>Heck, how many do you think
>could even name *three* cities in China?

I suspect a minority of adults.

I don't know if I know any Chinese cities that aren't in the board
game "China Rails".

[Howard Brazee]

On Sat, 18 May 2013 12:14:31 -0700 (PDT), Robert Carnegie
<rja.ca...@excite.com> wrote:

>I don't think there /are/ 27 cities in Scotland
>but I've probably /heard/ of them, and can tell them
>from place names that aren't in Scotland. Perth,
>for instance, is both.

27 cities in the UK would be easier. I bet the pope can't name 27
cities in the Vatican..

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-18 20:22:37 -0400, Howard Brazee said:

> On Sat, 18 May 2013 13:46:09 -0500, "Jim G."
> <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
>>>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>>>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>>>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>>>
>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
>>> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?

The key point here, at least as I intended it, was "over two million,"
not "27th largest." How many cities of that size elsewhere are so
obscure?

>> How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
>> their *own* country, let alone in China?
>
> I would expect a large majority.
>
>> Heck, how many do you think
>> could even name *three* cities in China?
>
> I suspect a minority of adults.

I'd expect lots of people -- possibly a majority -- to get Beijing,
Shanghai, Hong Kong, and maybe with a little coaching Nanjing, Canton,
and/or Xi'an. Or maybe Tianjin, or Tsingtao (and yes, I know it's
properly spelled Qingdao now).

Harbin is apparently a fascinating place, but I admit most Americans
never heard of it.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Sunday, 19 May 2013 05:49:23 UTC+1, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
> The key point here, at least as I intended it, was
> "over two million," not "27th largest." How many
> cities of that size elsewhere are so obscure?

To people speaking a different language - with a
different writing system - on the other side of
the world?

Granted, Chinese businesses now apparently send
e-mails out at random, in quite good English, looking
for business partners - I get plenty, which is
laughable - but, know what? I don't read 'em.

Russia may be comparably obscure. And its population
moved to cities relatively late - as has China's.
Russian Communism helpfully named some cities after
people you'd heard of.

And there's India, where in some cases city names
have been recently changed from those used by the
British Empire.

One other factor to mention is that China was
closed to outsiders for a /very/ long time.
Although there was some trade... I've scraped up
the name "Shantung" from some seldom-used brain
cells; the province where the good silk cloth comes
from is properly called Shandong, apparently.

I think I wasn't taught the history of the Opium Wars
in school because it reflects badly on us, although
I may have just forgotten; the U.S., Britain, etc.,
being on the side of opium, the drug.

Is Xanadu any good...... hmm, it mainly ain't there
any more, so, I suppose not.

[Kip Williams]

Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote, On 5/19/13 12:49 AM:

> I'd expect lots of people -- possibly a majority -- to get Beijing,
> Shanghai, Hong Kong, and maybe with a little coaching Nanjing, Canton,
> and/or Xi'an. Or maybe Tianjin, or Tsingtao (and yes, I know it's
> properly spelled Qingdao now).

Canton is now Guangzhou. The group we were in when we adopted Sarah was
pretty big by the time we left there, because all the US adopters have
to go there to swear their baby won't overthrow the government if given
the chance.

I'd see how many city names I could reel off from China, but having been
there, it feels like cheating. I remember being struck in 2003 with how
large a place could be there without being special in any way. I'm not
belittling, I just mean that two or three million was nothing
outstanding or worthy of comment.


Kip W
rasfw

[Juho Julkunen]

In article <om6gp81bim80mju3t...@4ax.com>,
how...@brazee.net says...

>
> On Sat, 18 May 2013 13:46:09 -0500, "Jim G."
> <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
> >>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
> >>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
> >>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
> >>
> >> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
> >> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
> >> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
> >
> >How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
> >their *own* country, let alone in China?
>
> I would expect a large majority.

Having just checked the list of the largest cities in Finland, I'll
concur. I have heard of them. (27th had a little under 40000 people.)

> >Heck, how many do you think
> >could even name *three* cities in China?
>
> I suspect a minority of adults.

Surely anybody'd get at least Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

>
> I don't know if I know any Chinese cities that aren't in the board
> game "China Rails".

How much overlap is there to Chinese city names featured in
Civilization games?

--
Juho Julkunen

[James Silverton]

I have heard of all of the 30 largest towns in Scotland, where I was
brought up, but I was not sure which seven of them were officially
*cities*. My guess turned out to be good but there was a certain amount
of luck in it: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Perth, Stirling and
Inverness. The last two are recent creations.

[David DeLaney]

On 2013-05-19, Juho Julkunen <giao...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> how...@brazee.net says...

>> I suspect a minority of adults.
>
> Surely anybody'd get at least Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

I don't know about that; I think a lot might think, whether it's actually
true or not, "Hong Kong ... wait, no, that's not actually part of China,
right? It's in that little anti-China on the shore, I can't use it.".

Dave
--
\/David DeLaney posting thru EarthLink - "It's not the pot that grows the flower
It's not the clock that slows the hour The definition's plain for anyone to see
Love is all it takes to make a family" - R&P. VISUALIZE HAPPYNET VRbeable<BLINK>
http://panacea.phys.utk.edu/~dbd/ - net.legends FAQ/ I WUV you in all CAPS! --K.

[Juho Julkunen]

In article <NvOdnemHYdUemATM...@earthlink.com>,
davidd...@earthlink.net says...

>
> On 2013-05-19, Juho Julkunen <giao...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > how...@brazee.net says...
> >> I suspect a minority of adults.
> >
> > Surely anybody'd get at least Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
>
> I don't know about that; I think a lot might think, whether it's actually
> true or not, "Hong Kong ... wait, no, that's not actually part of China,
> right? It's in that little anti-China on the shore, I can't use it.".

That did cross my mind.

--
Juho Julkunen

[James Silverton]

Hong Kong has a special status but I'll bet you'd not be popular in
China if you said it not a part of the country.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:

> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital,
> major rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?

No idea; most of the Chinese cities I've heard of slightly, it's under
the older transliterations, so I can't reliably relate them to what
they're called now.

--
Googleproofaddress(account:dd-b provider:dd-b domain:net)
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-19 05:45:33 -0400, Robert Carnegie said:

> On Sunday, 19 May 2013 05:49:23 UTC+1, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
>> The key point here, at least as I intended it, was
>> "over two million," not "27th largest." How many
>> cities of that size elsewhere are so obscure?
>
> To people speaking a different language - with a
> different writing system - on the other side of
> the world?
>

> Russia may be comparably obscure. And its population
> moved to cities relatively late - as has China's.
> Russian Communism helpfully named some cities after
> people you'd heard of.

Russia doesn't have 27 cities over two million, or anything close. It
has two, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

China has had many large cities for a very long time, even though most
of the population was rural (I'm not sure whether it's still
majority-rural or not; it's close).

> And there's India, where in some cases city names
> have been recently changed from those used by the
> British Empire.
>
> One other factor to mention is that China was
> closed to outsiders for a /very/ long time.

Not really; that was Japan, under the Tokugawa Shogunate. China wasn't
very interested in trade under the Qing or later Ming, but it was never
closed the way Japan was.

> Although there was some trade... I've scraped up
> the name "Shantung" from some seldom-used brain
> cells; the province where the good silk cloth comes
> from is properly called Shandong, apparently.

The spelling changes aren't arbitrary, by the way -- they have three sources.

First, the old transliteration system, Wade-Giles, was less accurate
than the modern Pinyin system, and since Chinese vowels simply don't
correspond to Latin letters, NO transcription system is really exact.

Second, Chinese pronunciation has changed fairly rapidly over time; not
having a phonetic writing system to anchor it probably contributes to
that, as does 100 years (1850-1950) of severe political instability.

Third, most of the old names were based on Cantonese, the language
spoken in southern China, since all the trading ports were in the
south; modern names are based on Mandarin, which the Communists
declared the national language in 1949.

> I think I wasn't taught the history of the Opium Wars
> in school because it reflects badly on us, although
> I may have just forgotten; the U.S., Britain, etc.,
> being on the side of opium, the drug.

The U.S. wasn't involved; it was the British and the French who ran the
opium trade and fought the wars. It doesn't get taught in the U.S.
because NO Chinese history prior to the Boxer Rebellion gets widely
taught here, except for passing mentions of the Silk Road and Marco
Polo. Even accounts of building the railroads that mention the hordes
of Chinese workers who built all the lines west of the Rockies never
mention why those workers left China (i.e., fleeing the Opium Wars and
the Taiping Rebellion).

> Is Xanadu any good...... hmm, it mainly ain't there
> any more, so, I suppose not.

Shangdu is still there. Not exactly thriving, I admit.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-19 13:01:55 -0400, David DeLaney said:

> On 2013-05-19, Juho Julkunen <giao...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> how...@brazee.net says...
>>> I suspect a minority of adults.
>>
>> Surely anybody'd get at least Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
>
> I don't know about that; I think a lot might think, whether it's actually
> true or not, "Hong Kong ... wait, no, that's not actually part of China,
> right? It's in that little anti-China on the shore, I can't use it.".

Hasn't been true for fifteen years. It's a special administrative
district, but China has lots of those -- Shenzhen, Shanghai, Tibet,
etc. -- so that doesn't matter; it's still part of China.

But yeah, a lot of people might not know that.

Mainland Chinese will tell you Taipei is a city in China, too, but I'd
agree with not counting THAT one.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-19 14:42:46 -0400, David Dyer-Bennet said:

> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>
>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital,
>> major rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>
> No idea; most of the Chinese cities I've heard of slightly, it's under
> the older transliterations, so I can't reliably relate them to what
> they're called now.

Shijiazhuang's name hasn't changed, so far as I know. It's just obscure.

(It means "Stone Temple Village," by the way. Beijing means "North
Capital." Shanghai means "Waterfront," or "Seashore.")

[J. Clarke]

In article <knb1if$po$2...@dont-email.me>, not.jim....@verizon.net
says...

However until a few years ago it was one of the last bastions of the
British Empire. Now it's definitely part of China although it has a
special status--the Chinese, unlike many Communist governments, are
smart enough to know a cash cow when they see one and not so caught up
in ideology as to think that the best use of a cash cow is as pot roast.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-19 15:44:26 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans said:

> On 2013-05-19 14:42:46 -0400, David Dyer-Bennet said:
>
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>>
>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital,
>>> major rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>>
>> No idea; most of the Chinese cities I've heard of slightly, it's under
>> the older transliterations, so I can't reliably relate them to what
>> they're called now.
>
> Shijiazhuang's name hasn't changed, so far as I know. It's just obscure.
>
> (It means "Stone Temple Village," by the way. Beijing means "North
> Capital." Shanghai means "Waterfront," or "Seashore.")

Incidentally, until they built the railroads, it really WAS just a
village -- it has no historical significance and almost no history.
When the Qing finally decided railroads were a good idea, they still
didn't entirely TRUST them, so they were often routed AROUND the major
cities, instead of through them, and as a result of this eccentric
routing the village of Shijiazhuang happened to be where some of the
major lines intersected.

Which attracted lots of industry, and the city grew rapidly.

Incidentally, the city of Qufu (Chufou, in Wade-Giles) more or less
dropped out of history because it had enough influence at court to
ensure that none of those nasty railroads got built there at all --
they claimed all that iron would ruin the feng shui of the Confucian
temple there, so... no railroads. No industry. No money. No growth.

A somewhat amusing (at least to me) parallel to this is the Georgetown
section of Washington, DC. When the city decided Washington needed a
subway and started building the Metro in 1975, the wealthy property
owners and businessmen of fashionable Georgetown had the two proposed
Georgetown subway stations removed from the plans -- they were afraid
they'd bring in the Wrong Element.

Those people, or their heirs, have been kicking themselves ever since.

[Robert Carnegie]

On Sunday, 19 May 2013 20:36:22 UTC+1, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
> On 2013-05-19 05:45:33 -0400, Robert Carnegie said:
> > I think I wasn't taught the history of the Opium Wars
> > in school because it reflects badly on us, although
> > I may have just forgotten; the U.S., Britain, etc.,
> > being on the side of opium, the drug.
>
> The U.S. wasn't involved; it was the British and the
> French who ran the opium trade and fought the wars.

Wikipedia says otherwise, although the U.S. apparently
did ban the opium trade - since they didn't have any.
But that's taking a view that the Opium Wars were
about other trade goods as well as opium. (Tobacco?)
I also don't feel informed enough to say that China
was all in the right; but, /opium/. Jeez.

[David DeLaney]

So we have to pick it up in bits and pieces from Barry Hughart and Guy Gavriel
Kay and Liz Williams.

Dave, some distortion may have crept in

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:

> On 2013-05-19 14:42:46 -0400, David Dyer-Bennet said:
>
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>>
>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital,
>>> major rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>>
>> No idea; most of the Chinese cities I've heard of slightly, it's under
>> the older transliterations, so I can't reliably relate them to what
>> they're called now.
>
> Shijiazhuang's name hasn't changed, so far as I know. It's just obscure.

Many of the changed transliterations I do recognize as at least
"probably the same". But not necessarily until they're put in front of
me, either.

> (It means "Stone Temple Village," by the way. Beijing means "North
> Capital." Shanghai means "Waterfront," or "Seashore.")

I even knew that about Beijing (which I still think of as Peking).

Taipei is another one people may have heard of. The question of
"belonging to China" is even more fraught than Hong Kong, seems to me.

I happen to have heard of Chengdu due to my interest in Chinese food.

But yes indeed, China and India and many other countries are full of
million-person cities I've never heard of. I've heard of a lot more
minor towns in France or England or Germany than I have in China or
Japan or Thailand.

And even more in the USA, but knowing something about where I live seems
less unusual.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:

> On 2013-05-19 15:44:26 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans said:
>
>> On 2013-05-19 14:42:46 -0400, David Dyer-Bennet said:
>>
>>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>>>
>>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital,
>>>> major rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>>>
>>> No idea; most of the Chinese cities I've heard of slightly, it's under
>>> the older transliterations, so I can't reliably relate them to what
>>> they're called now.
>>
>> Shijiazhuang's name hasn't changed, so far as I know. It's just obscure.
>>
>> (It means "Stone Temple Village," by the way. Beijing means "North
>> Capital." Shanghai means "Waterfront," or "Seashore.")
>
> Incidentally, until they built the railroads, it really WAS just a
> village -- it has no historical significance and almost no history.
> When the Qing finally decided railroads were a good idea, they still
> didn't entirely TRUST them, so they were often routed AROUND the major
> cities, instead of through them, and as a result of this eccentric
> routing the village of Shijiazhuang happened to be where some of the
> major lines intersected.
>
> Which attracted lots of industry, and the city grew rapidly.
>
> Incidentally, the city of Qufu (Chufou, in Wade-Giles) more or less dropped out of history because it had enough influence at court to ensure that none of those nasty railroads got built there at all --
> they claimed all that iron would ruin the feng shui of the Confucian
> temple there, so... no railroads. No industry. No money. No growth.

Thanks, I like that kind of anecdote. (I'd recognize "Qufu" and
"Chufou" as "maybe related", I think.)

> A somewhat amusing (at least to me) parallel to this is the Georgetown
> section of Washington, DC. When the city decided Washington needed a
> subway and started building the Metro in 1975, the wealthy property
> owners and businessmen of fashionable Georgetown had the two proposed
> Georgetown subway stations removed from the plans -- they were afraid
> they'd bring in the Wrong Element.
>
> Those people, or their heirs, have been kicking themselves ever since.

Heh. Despite the horrid service and unaffordable fares that Keith
complains about regularly. Of course the Georgetown people could afford
the fares.

[James Nicoll]

In article <knb9c6$d05$1...@dont-email.me>,

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:
>
>The U.S. wasn't involved; it was the British and the French who ran the
>opium trade and fought the wars. It doesn't get taught in the U.S.
>because NO Chinese history prior to the Boxer Rebellion gets widely
>taught here, except for passing mentions of the Silk Road and Marco
>Polo. Even accounts of building the railroads that mention the hordes
>of Chinese workers who built all the lines west of the Rockies never
>mention why those workers left China (i.e., fleeing the Opium Wars and
>the Taiping Rebellion).

And the Du Wenxiu Rebellion (1856-1872), the Nien Rebellion (1851 to 1868),
the Dungan revolt (1862 - 1877), the other Dungan revolt (1895 - 1896), and
so on and so forth, plus stuff like the 1887 Yellow River flood killing
nearly a million people and the Third plague pandemic killing maybe 12
million people (on the plus side, it made the outbreak of cholera after
the Yellow River flood look less serious). In general, life in China in the
19th and 20th centuries sometimes fell somewhat short of ideal.

--
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll (For all your "The problem with
defending the English language [...]" T-shirt, cup and tote-bag needs)

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <ylfk4ndy...@dd-b.net>,
David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:

>Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>
>
>> A somewhat amusing (at least to me) parallel to this is the Georgetown
>> section of Washington, DC. When the city decided Washington needed a
>> subway and started building the Metro in 1975, the wealthy property
>> owners and businessmen of fashionable Georgetown had the two proposed
>> Georgetown subway stations removed from the plans -- they were afraid
>> they'd bring in the Wrong Element.
>>
>> Those people, or their heirs, have been kicking themselves ever since.
>
>Heh. Despite the horrid service and unaffordable fares that Keith
>complains about regularly. Of course the Georgetown people could afford
>the fares.
>--

As far as I can tell, Georgetown is doing quite well without any Metro
stations. Perhaps in an alternate timeline where it has metro stations,
it is doing even better, but on the whole it worked out pretty well for
them.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-19 23:47:30 -0400, t...@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan said:

> In article <ylfk4ndy...@dd-b.net>,
> David Dyer-Bennet <dd...@dd-b.net> wrote:
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>>
>>> A somewhat amusing (at least to me) parallel to this is the Georgetown
>>> section of Washington, DC. When the city decided Washington needed a
>>> subway and started building the Metro in 1975, the wealthy property
>>> owners and businessmen of fashionable Georgetown had the two proposed
>>> Georgetown subway stations removed from the plans -- they were afraid
>>> they'd bring in the Wrong Element.
>>>
>>> Those people, or their heirs, have been kicking themselves ever since.
>>
>> Heh. Despite the horrid service and unaffordable fares that Keith
>> complains about regularly. Of course the Georgetown people could afford
>> the fares.
>

> As far as I can tell, Georgetown is doing quite well without any Metro
> stations. Perhaps in an alternate timeline where it has metro stations,
> it is doing even better, but on the whole it worked out pretty well for
> them.

It's doing fine, yes, but one does hear griping about not having a
Metro stop, and the artsy community that used to be in Georgetown
largely moved to Adams-Morgan.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

The guides and guidebooks in Beijing and Chengde never mentioned any
U.S. involvement; everything there says it was the British and French
who burned the various palaces and temples.

I haven't looked at what Wikipedia says, and I don't know how reliable
it is, but I may have been misinformed; the U.S. might have been
involved in some way.

[Brian M. Scott]

On Sun, 19 May 2013 15:36:22 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans
<l...@sff.net> wrote in <news:knb9c6$d05$1...@dont-email.me> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

> On 2013-05-19 05:45:33 -0400, Robert Carnegie said:

[...]

>> Although there was some trade... I've scraped up
>> the name "Shantung" from some seldom-used brain
>> cells; the province where the good silk cloth comes
>> from is properly called Shandong, apparently.

> The spelling changes aren't arbitrary, by the way -- they
> have three sources.

> First, the old transliteration system, Wade-Giles, was
> less accurate than the modern Pinyin system,

This is not true; properly used, it conveys at least as much
phonetic information as properly used pinyin. It *is* much
less intuitive for native speakers of English, however.

> and since Chinese vowels simply don't correspond to Latin
> letters, NO transcription system is really exact.

Again, this is not true; what is true is that if one uses
only the usual Latin alphabet and common diacritics, some of
the symbols necessarily will represent sounds different from
those that a native speaker of just about any Western
European language would naturally associate with them;
Pinyin <q> and <e> are good examples.

> Second, Chinese pronunciation has changed fairly rapidly
> over time; not having a phonetic writing system to anchor
> it probably contributes to that, as does 100 years
> (1850-1950) of severe political instability.

The Chinese writing system does have a phonetic component,
albeit a much weaker one than just about any writing system
using an alphabet, an abugida (e.g., Devanāgarī), or even an
abjad (e.g., Arabic).

One can't really talk about Chinese pronunciation without
further qualification: there are too many different Chinese
languages, and dialects within those languages. (As I
suspect you know, the Chinese themselves prefer to speak of
dialects, and it's true that there is no clearcut linguistic
distinction between languages and dialects, but there's no
doubt that as the terms are normally used, there are several
Chinese languages.) As far as the language of officialdom
is concerned, it's not clear to me how much of the change
over time is change within one variety and how much reflects
changing standards. Some is certainly change within one
variety, but it's not clear to me that it's significantly
greater than the change in southern British English over the
same period, which is much greater than most people realize.

[...]

Brian

[Brian M. Scott]

On Sun, 19 May 2013 15:44:26 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans
<l...@sff.net> wrote in <news:knb9ra$ffj$1...@dont-email.me> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

[...]

> Shijiazhuang's name hasn't changed, so far as I know.
> It's just obscure.

According to Wikipedia, the name was changed from <Shim�n>
in 1948. At that time it would most likely have appeared in
Wade-Giles romanization, as <Shih2-chia1-chuang1>.

> (It means "Stone Temple Village," by the way.

Does it? Or does it mean 'Stones' Village', as several
source say (though I suspect that most of them are drawing
on Wikipedia here)?

> Beijing means "North Capital." Shanghai means
> "Waterfront," or "Seashore.")

Literally a compound of 'up, on, above' and 'sea', I
believe, hence 'upon the sea, by the sea'.

Brian

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-20 00:43:23 -0400, Brian M. Scott said:

> On Sun, 19 May 2013 15:36:22 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans
> <l...@sff.net> wrote in <news:knb9c6$d05$1...@dont-email.me> in
> rec.arts.sf.written:
>
>> On 2013-05-19 05:45:33 -0400, Robert Carnegie said:
>
> [...]
>
>>> Although there was some trade... I've scraped up
>>> the name "Shantung" from some seldom-used brain
>>> cells; the province where the good silk cloth comes
>>> from is properly called Shandong, apparently.
>
>> The spelling changes aren't arbitrary, by the way -- they
>> have three sources.
>
>> First, the old transliteration system, Wade-Giles, was
>> less accurate than the modern Pinyin system,
>
> This is not true; properly used, it conveys at least as much
> phonetic information as properly used pinyin. It *is* much
> less intuitive for native speakers of English, however.

Okay, I'll accept "less intuitive" as a better phrase than "less accurate."

>> and since Chinese vowels simply don't correspond to Latin
>> letters, NO transcription system is really exact.
>
> Again, this is not true; what is true is that if one uses
> only the usual Latin alphabet and common diacritics, some of
> the symbols necessarily will represent sounds different from
> those that a native speaker of just about any Western
> European language would naturally associate with them;
> Pinyin <q> and <e> are good examples.

There are vowel sounds in Chinese that I can't match to anything in any
other language I'm familiar with. <e> is indeed the one I was most
thinking of.

>> Second, Chinese pronunciation has changed fairly rapidly
>> over time; not having a phonetic writing system to anchor
>> it probably contributes to that, as does 100 years
>> (1850-1950) of severe political instability.
>
> The Chinese writing system does have a phonetic component,
> albeit a much weaker one than just about any writing system
> using an alphabet, an abugida (e.g., Devanāgarī), or even an
> abjad (e.g., Arabic).

Yes, it does, but it's very weak indeed and mostly on a syllabic,
rather than phonemic, level.

> One can't really talk about Chinese pronunciation without
> further qualification: there are too many different Chinese
> languages, and dialects within those languages. (As I
> suspect you know, the Chinese themselves prefer to speak of
> dialects, and it's true that there is no clearcut linguistic
> distinction between languages and dialects, but there's no
> doubt that as the terms are normally used, there are several
> Chinese languages.) As far as the language of officialdom
> is concerned, it's not clear to me how much of the change
> over time is change within one variety and how much reflects
> changing standards. Some is certainly change within one
> variety, but it's not clear to me that it's significantly
> greater than the change in southern British English over the
> same period, which is much greater than most people realize.

I never said other languages HADN'T changed; of course they have. I
don't know southern British English specifically, but I do know
Brooklyn English from a couple of different time-periods -- my
great-aunt grew up there in the late 19th century, my father between
the world wars, and I've heard the modern version, and they're quite
distinct, thanks to the various waves of immigrants.

I don't know that much about official Chinese pronunciation, but I know
some of my daughter's students in China had trouble understanding their
own grandparents because of how pronunciation had changed over time.

[Robert A. Woodward]

In article <knb9kh$ec6$1...@dont-email.me>,

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:

> On 2013-05-19 13:01:55 -0400, David DeLaney said:
>
> > On 2013-05-19, Juho Julkunen <giao...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> how...@brazee.net says...
> >>> I suspect a minority of adults.
> >>
> >> Surely anybody'd get at least Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
> >
> > I don't know about that; I think a lot might think, whether it's actually
> > true or not, "Hong Kong ... wait, no, that's not actually part of China,
> > right? It's in that little anti-China on the shore, I can't use it.".
>
> Hasn't been true for fifteen years. It's a special administrative
> district, but China has lots of those -- Shenzhen, Shanghai, Tibet,
> etc. -- so that doesn't matter; it's still part of China.

I am inclined to disagree. I suspect that special administrative
district is more special than the others. To begin with, it is my
impression that Hong Kong is outside the PRC firewall.

--
Robert Woodward <robe...@drizzle.com>
<http://www.drizzle.com/~robertaw>

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-20 00:57:41 -0400, Brian M. Scott said:

> On Sun, 19 May 2013 15:44:26 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans
> <l...@sff.net> wrote in <news:knb9ra$ffj$1...@dont-email.me> in
> rec.arts.sf.written:
>
> [...]
>
>> Shijiazhuang's name hasn't changed, so far as I know.
>> It's just obscure.
>
> According to Wikipedia, the name was changed from <Shim�n>
> in 1948. At that time it would most likely have appeared in
> Wade-Giles romanization, as <Shih2-chia1-chuang1>.

Okay.

>> (It means "Stone Temple Village," by the way.
>
> Does it? Or does it mean 'Stones' Village', as several
> source say (though I suspect that most of them are drawing
> on Wikipedia here)?

The people Kiri worked with there translated it as "Stone Temple
Village." I assumed they knew what their home's name was.

>> Beijing means "North Capital." Shanghai means
>> "Waterfront," or "Seashore.")
>
> Literally a compound of 'up, on, above' and 'sea', I
> believe, hence 'upon the sea, by the sea'.

Kiri thought the most applicable translation of "shang" there was
"toward" or "on." "Shang" usually implies forward or upward motion;
Marvel Comics liked to translate it as "rising and advancing" in the
name of their character Shang Chi.

Anyway, "on the sea" looks a lot like "waterfront" or "seashore" to me.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

I believe it has its own top-level domain, so you may be right about
the firewall, but the Chinese certainly consider it part of China.

As anoher data point, when she lived in China in 2005-2007 Kiri's
foreign-expert internal passprt was good for Hong Kong, but not for
Tibet.

[Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)]

On 5/19/13 3:44 PM, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
> On 2013-05-19 14:42:46 -0400, David Dyer-Bennet said:
>
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> writes:
>>
>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital,
>>> major rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>>
>> No idea; most of the Chinese cities I've heard of slightly, it's under
>> the older transliterations, so I can't reliably relate them to what
>> they're called now.
>
> Shijiazhuang's name hasn't changed, so far as I know. It's just obscure.
>

I've heard of it, but then the company I work for is rail-focused and
we've been negotiating to sell them some of our systems.


--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Website: http://www.grandcentralarena.com Blog:
http://seawasp.livejournal.com

[Robert Carnegie]

On Monday, 20 May 2013 05:28:20 UTC+1, Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote:
> [The Opium Wars]

> I haven't looked at what Wikipedia says, and I don't know
> how reliable it is, but I may have been misinformed;
> the U.S. might have been involved in some way.

In what may be standard Wikipedia style in coverage of wars,
there's a summary box near the top of the page with names
of the countries on each side of the wary, and little icons
of their flags. Helpfully visual.

In one sub-page, the U.S. flag is in a separate box by itself,
while still being on this, not that side, of the chart, and,
I suppose, the war. This may be a bad sign.

[David DeLaney]

On 2013-05-20, Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
> One can't really talk about Chinese pronunciation without
> further qualification: there are too many different Chinese
> languages, and dialects within those languages. (As I
> suspect you know, the Chinese themselves prefer to speak of
> dialects, and it's true that there is no clearcut linguistic
> distinction between languages and dialects, but there's no
> doubt that as the terms are normally used, there are several
> Chinese languages.)

Part of the problem being, I bet, that they blend into each other around
the edges a LOT more than, say, English, Spanish, and French do in their
west-Europe area? (Even discounting the existence of the Acadians or
Quebecois elsewhere for English-French patois...)

Dave, and then there's the interesting bits about _writing_ those various
dialects and languages, some of which become mutually intelligible or even
fluent when this is done? but that gets right away from pronunciation, yeah

[Tim McDaniel]

In article <knbaos$kns$1...@dont-email.me>,

Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net> wrote:
>A somewhat amusing (at least to me) parallel to this is the
>Georgetown section of Washington, DC. When the city decided
>Washington needed a subway and started building the Metro in 1975,
>the wealthy property owners and businessmen of fashionable Georgetown
>had the two proposed Georgetown subway stations removed from the
>plans -- they were afraid they'd bring in the Wrong Element.
>
>Those people, or their heirs, have been kicking themselves ever since.

http://georgetownmetropolitan.com/2011/01/24/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-georgetown-metro-stop/
matches my memory and refutes that urban legend.

"If you take anything away from this article, please let it be this:
the reason there is no Metro station in Georgetown has absolutely
nothing to do with neighborhood opposition. Nothing. No 'rich
Georgetowners wanted to keep out minorities'-conspiracy. No matter
how much it fits with the popular stereotype, it's just not true.

"As rigorously documented in Zachary Schrag's Great Society Subway
[http://www.amazon.com/Great-Society-Subway-Washington-Landscape/dp/080188246X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295836833&sr=8-1],
the planners behind Metro simply never seriously considered putting a
station in Georgetown. The reason: the Potomac. To get under the
river, the Metro tunnel has to start heading down far enough away so
that it's not like a roller-coaster.

"Commercial Georgetown is very close to the river and on a steep hill,
which wouldn't give the tunnel much distance to reemerge from
underneath the river. Thus a Georgetown station would be extremely
deep. It would be physically possible to build, but it would be
extremely expensive.

"And the Metro planners didn't see a reason to spend that sort of
money on Georgetown. In the 1960s when the plans were developed,
Georgetown had little office space and few apartment buildings. It
simply was not a destination of suburban commuters. Since that was
the audience for which the Metro was primary designed to serve,
Georgetown was not considered a worthwhile station location.

"That's it. No matter how affirming of all the stereotypes of
Georgetowners the myth is, it's absolutely false."

For illustration, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosslyn_%28WMATA_station%29
(near the river but not on a hill) says "The escalator to street level
at the Rosslyn Metro station is the third longest continuous span
escalator in the world". That's currently the deepest station on the
Orange and Blue lines.

--
Tim McDaniel, tm...@panix.com

[Ted Nolan <tednolan>]

In article <kndi9i$osm$2...@reader1.panix.com>,

And it will give you vertigo if you look up..

OTOH, it can be inspiring, depending on who you are underneath.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

Huh. Thanks; I got the legend from the Washington Post, so I believed
it; I should have known better.

(Well, I also heard it from a friend who had a shop in Georgetown but
who's much too young to remember anything from 1975, but his account I
wouldn't count as definitive.)

> For illustration, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosslyn_%28WMATA_station%29
> (near the river but not on a hill) says "The escalator to street level
> at the Rosslyn Metro station is the third longest continuous span
> escalator in the world". That's currently the deepest station on the
> Orange and Blue lines.

But not the deepest in the whole system; I believe that's Forest Glen,
on the Red Line, where they didn't use escalators at all, only
elevators.

[Brian M. Scott]

On Mon, 20 May 2013 09:19:39 -0500, David DeLaney
<davidd...@earthlink.net> wrote in
<news:wOSdnUyItLdmrQfM...@earthlink.com> in
rec.arts.sf.written:

> On 2013-05-20, Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:

>> One can't really talk about Chinese pronunciation without
>> further qualification: there are too many different Chinese
>> languages, and dialects within those languages. (As I
>> suspect you know, the Chinese themselves prefer to speak of
>> dialects, and it's true that there is no clearcut linguistic
>> distinction between languages and dialects, but there's no
>> doubt that as the terms are normally used, there are several
>> Chinese languages.)

> Part of the problem being, I bet, that they blend into
> each other around the edges a LOT more than, say,
> English, Spanish, and French do in their west-Europe
> area? (Even discounting the existence of the Acadians or
> Quebecois elsewhere for English-French patois...)

In Europe the development of national boundaries and
standard national varieties tended to sharpen the boundaries
even between spoken varieties. In China the distinction
wasn't so much between local and standard dialects as
between spoken and written languages, so there was, as you
suggest, less sharpening of the boundaries between local
varieties.

> Dave, and then there's the interesting bits about
> _writing_ those various dialects and languages, some of
> which become mutually intelligible or even fluent when
> this is done? but that gets right away from
> pronunciation, yeah

Mutual intelligibility is certainly far greater in writing,
but it's not complete even there, thanks to lexical and even
some syntactic differences.

Brian

[Greg Goss]

David DeLaney <davidd...@earthlink.net> wrote:

>On 2013-05-19, Juho Julkunen <giao...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> how...@brazee.net says...
>>> I suspect a minority of adults.
>>
>> Surely anybody'd get at least Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
>
>I don't know about that; I think a lot might think, whether it's actually
>true or not, "Hong Kong ... wait, no, that's not actually part of China,
>right? It's in that little anti-China on the shore, I can't use it.".

In the middle nineties, it reverted to Chinese control.
--
We are geeks. Resistance is voltage over current.

[Greg Goss]

t...@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) wrote:


>>For illustration, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosslyn_%28WMATA_station%29
>>(near the river but not on a hill) says "The escalator to street level
>>at the Rosslyn Metro station is the third longest continuous span
>>escalator in the world". That's currently the deepest station on the
>>Orange and Blue lines.
>>
>
>And it will give you vertigo if you look up..
>
>OTOH, it can be inspiring, depending on who you are underneath.

I sometimes have to be careful to retain my balance on the
not-quite-as-long Granville station escalator in Vancouver. The
escalator goes from a basement mall to the upper level of a two-level
station, so it could have been longer. I'm not sure where to look up
the span of either Rosslyn or Granville escalators.

[Gene Wirchenko]

On Mon, 20 May 2013 00:59:13 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net>
wrote:

[snip]

>I don't know that much about official Chinese pronunciation, but I know
>some of my daughter's students in China had trouble understanding their
>own grandparents because of how pronunciation had changed over time.

I took a bit of Chinese on my degree. My instructor said that
Beijing Chinese was quite different. They swallowed some of their
sounds, and a Beijing dialect speaking teaching assistant made it hard
for students.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

The working-class Beijing dialect is downright weird -- there's this
really heavy R glide. It's like listening to Scooby Doo trying to
speak Mandarin.

That dialect is so hard for most Chinese to understand that when I was
in the waiting room of the main train station in Beijing and someone
was making announcements in it, someone else took it upon himself to
translate to a more standard form of Mandarin for the travelers from
other places. Many people were grateful.

There's another dialect that's sometimes called a "Beijing dialect"
that the ruling class speaks that isn't like that at all, but it also
isn't what you normally hear on the streets of Beijing. I'm told it's
easily intelligible to most Mandarin speakers -- which makes sense,
since you want the workers to understand your instructions.

But the kids in Shijiazhuang were dealing with grandparents from Hebei
or Xinjiang, not from Beijing, and told Kiri that their Mandarin was
just so old-fashioned it was hard to follow. The languages vary
immensely with both place and time.

It's common in China, if you aren't sure someone understands your
dialect, to use one finger to trace the characters on the palm of your
other hand, since the characters are usually the same even when the
pronunciation is wildly different. (Cantonese is sometimes an
exception; Cantonese speakers use several non-standard characters.)

(One reason Italians gesture so much when they speak is that "Italian"
isn't really a single language, either; it's a bunch of closely-related
dialects. They use gestures to help clarify things when talking to
speakers of other dialects. The official literary language is
Florentine or maybe sometimes Roman, but that's not what most people
outside the central area actually speak. Variation's pretty extensive;
there's an entire TENSE in Neapolitan and other southern dialects that
doesn't exist in Milanese or Venetian. Even street signs aren't
standardized, but are in the various local dialects. So, they gesture.
In China, this evolved into the writing-in-your-palm thing.)

[Juho Julkunen]

In article <b00as2...@mid.individual.net>, go...@gossg.org says...

I believe everybody involved in the conversation knows that, but some
of us entertain some doubt about this being universally true.

--
Juho Julkunen

[Howard Brazee]

On Tue, 21 May 2013 03:18:55 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net>
wrote:

>The working-class Beijing dialect is downright weird -- there's this
>really heavy R glide. It's like listening to Scooby Doo trying to
>speak Mandarin.
>
>That dialect is so hard for most Chinese to understand that when I was
>in the waiting room of the main train station in Beijing and someone
>was making announcements in it, someone else took it upon himself to
>translate to a more standard form of Mandarin for the travelers from
>other places. Many people were grateful.
>
>There's another dialect that's sometimes called a "Beijing dialect"
>that the ruling class speaks that isn't like that at all, but it also
>isn't what you normally hear on the streets of Beijing. I'm told it's
>easily intelligible to most Mandarin speakers -- which makes sense,
>since you want the workers to understand your instructions.

We see something similar with the queen's English and Cockney.

--
Anybody who agrees with one side all of the time or disagrees with the
other side all of the time is equally guilty of letting others do
their thinking for them.

[Lawrence Watt-Evans]

On 2013-05-21 15:58:19 -0400, Howard Brazee said:

> On Tue, 21 May 2013 03:18:55 -0400, Lawrence Watt-Evans <l...@sff.net>
> wrote:
>
>> The working-class Beijing dialect is downright weird -- there's this
>> really heavy R glide. It's like listening to Scooby Doo trying to
>> speak Mandarin.
>>
>> That dialect is so hard for most Chinese to understand that when I was
>> in the waiting room of the main train station in Beijing and someone
>> was making announcements in it, someone else took it upon himself to
>> translate to a more standard form of Mandarin for the travelers from
>> other places. Many people were grateful.
>>
>> There's another dialect that's sometimes called a "Beijing dialect"
>> that the ruling class speaks that isn't like that at all, but it also
>> isn't what you normally hear on the streets of Beijing. I'm told it's
>> easily intelligible to most Mandarin speakers -- which makes sense,
>> since you want the workers to understand your instructions.
>
> We see something similar with the queen's English and Cockney.

Yeah, it's definitely a similar situation.

[Jim G.]

Ted Nolan <tednolan> sent the following on 5/18/2013 1:58 PM:
> In article <kn8i2d$lcm$1...@dont-email.me>,
> Jim G. <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans sent the following on 5/16/2013 12:18 PM:
>>> On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:
>>>
>>>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>>>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>>>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.

>>>
>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
>>> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>>

>> How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
>> their *own* country, let alone in China? Heck, how many do you think
>> could even name *three* cities in China?
>>
>
> I'd say most people, if pressed, could come up with Bejing, Shanghi and
> Hong Kong.

Maybe, but I get the sense that a lot of people are geography-challenged
to an amazing degree.

--
Jim G. | A fan of good reading, good writing, and fellow bookworms
http://www.goodreads.com/jimgysin/
http://www.librarything.com/home/jimgysin

[Jim G.]

James Silverton sent the following on 5/18/2013 2:07 PM:

> On 5/18/2013 2:46 PM, Jim G. wrote:
>> Lawrence Watt-Evans sent the following on 5/16/2013 12:18 PM:
>>> On 2013-05-16 11:56:54 -0400, Greg Goss said:
>>>
>>>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>>>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>>>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>>>
>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
>>> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>>
>> How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
>> their *own* country, let alone in China? Heck, how many do you think
>> could even name *three* cities in China?
>>

> Don't you think that most people have heard of Hong Kong,

Heard of it? Sure. Know that it's part of China? Not so sure...

> Shanghai

Same thing.

> and
> Beijing? A fourth one might be a struggle :-)

Probably. Or at least the older Peking.

[Jim G.]

Howard Brazee sent the following on 5/18/2013 7:22 PM:

> On Sat, 18 May 2013 13:46:09 -0500, "Jim G."
> <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:
>
>>>> Back when I was single, I had a few flirty conversations with Chinese
>>>> women who found me on Yahoo. Both of them lived in towns of over a
>>>> million people and I'd never heard of either city.
>>>
>>> My daughter worked in Shijiazhuang for a year. Population a little
>>> over two million, 27th largest city in China, provincial capital, major
>>> rail center -- and how many people here ever heard of it?
>>
>> How many people do you think have heard of all 27 largest cities in
>> their *own* country, let alone in China?
>

> I would expect a large majority.

Yeah, I'll agree that this is the easier half of the challenge.

>> Heck, how many do you think
>> could even name *three* cities in China?
>

> I suspect a minority of adults.

Yep. In my neck of the woods, geography gave way to "civics" a few years
before I would have had it in high school back in the late '70s. And I
don't recall any emphasis on it in grade school. As a result, I'm almost
entirely self-taught, having used various atlases and pieces of software
to show me places as I've read about them (both in fiction and
nonfiction) in the subsequent decades. But most of my contemporaries
don't read so much, and those who do don't refer to a map as often, so
I'm often amazed at the amount of geographical ignorance to be found in
people who are otherwise pretty darn bright.

[William December Starr]

In article <kngu8g$i37$1...@dont-email.me>,

"Jim G." <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> said:

> Howard Brazee sent the following on 5/18/2013 7:22 PM:

>> "Jim G." <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> Heck, how many do you think
>>> could even name *three* cities in China?
>>
>> I suspect a minority of adults.
>
> Yep. In my neck of the woods, geography gave way to "civics" a few
> years before I would have had it in high school back in the late
> '70s. And I don't recall any emphasis on it in grade school. As a
> result, I'm almost entirely self-taught, having used various
> atlases and pieces of software to show me places as I've read
> about them (both in fiction and nonfiction) in the subsequent
> decades. But most of my contemporaries don't read so much, and
> those who do don't refer to a map as often, so I'm often amazed at
> the amount of geographical ignorance to be found in people who are
> otherwise pretty darn bright.

I think people pay attention to stuff like this for one or both of
two reasons: "This is interesting to me" or "This significantly
affects my life." Given that, what's so surprising here?

-- wds

[Wayne Throop]

:::: Heck, how many do you think

:::: could even name *three* cities in China?

Well, it did get easier a while back. Now one could say "Bejing,
Shanghai, Hong Kong", what with the lease reverting and all. IIUC.

[Walter Bushell]

In article <13719...@sheol.org>, thr...@sheol.org (Wayne Throop)
wrote:

Taipei, both governments recognize it as part of China.

--
Gambling with Other People's Money is the meth of the fiscal industry.
me -- in the spirit of Karl and Groucho Marx

[Jim G.]

William December Starr sent the following on 6/22/2013 10:17 PM:

Geography (or, more specifically, geopolitics) affects us all to some
degree unless we live in a cave someplace. And even then it can affect a
person in spite of his attempts at ignorance. Most stories with global
impact can be understood better when geography is better understood.

[ppint. at pplay]

- hi; in article, <kqf8g6$qef$1...@dont-email.me>,
jimg...@geemail.com.invalid "Jim G." observed:

> William December Starr sent the following on 6/22/2013 10:17 PM:

>> Jim G." <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> said:
>>> [..] But most of my contemporaries don't read so much, and those

>>> who do don't refer to a map as often, so I'm often amazed at the
>>> amount of geographical ignorance to be found in people who are
>>> otherwise pretty darn bright.
>> I think people pay attention to stuff like this for one or both of
>> two reasons: "This is interesting to me" or "This significantly
>> affects my life." Given that, what's so surprising here?
>
>Geography (or, more specifically, geopolitics) affects us all to some
>degree unless we live in a cave someplace. And even then it can affect a
>person in spite of his attempts at ignorance. Most stories with global
>impact can be understood better when geography is better understood.

- and the supreme exemplar of this is the historical atlas:
not just the positions of towns, cities, kingdoms & empires
long since disappeared in earthquake, destroyed by barbarian
conquerors, abandoned because of the disappearence of rivers
that were their sole source of irrigation, as well as drink-
ing water, buried under hundreds of feet of volcanic ash, or
strangled by the silting up of their access to the sea and
the trade this carried... but movements of peoples, whether
in conquest or as refugees fleeing hordes of warriors as had
devastated their lands, broken millennia-old clay culverted
water distribution systems or driven off their herds... the
expansion of cultures and empires, and their confrontations
and eventual - inevitable? - collapses... the spread of all
the technologies we take for granted - and of those we over-
look, no longer relevant to 98% plus of humanity, but once
crucial to survival...

- and not just understood better: sometimes not intellegible
without the appreciation of their environs, political and
natural, yet making elegant sense, when these are discovered.

- love, a ppint. as's also found fascination in atlases of
the natural distribution of flora and fauna

[drop the "v", and change the "f" to a "g", to email or cc.]
--
"The people all paint themselves red, and eat monkeys,
whereof there is an inexhaustible supply in the hills."
- Histories, Book Four - Herodotus

[William December Starr]

In article <kqf8g6$qef$1...@dont-email.me>,

"Jim G." <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> said:

> William December Starr sent the following on 6/22/2013 10:17 PM:

>> "Jim G." <jimg...@geemail.com.invalid> said:
>>
>>> so I'm often amazed at the amount of geographical ignorance to
>>> be found in people who are otherwise pretty darn bright.
>>
>> I think people pay attention to stuff like this for one or both
>> of two reasons: "This is interesting to me" or "This
>> significantly affects my life." Given that, what's so surprising
>> here?
>
> Geography (or, more specifically, geopolitics) affects us all to
> some degree unless we live in a cave someplace. And even then it
> can affect a person in spite of his attempts at ignorance. Most
> stories with global impact can be understood better when geography
> is better understood.

This is why I said "significantly".

(Also it's just a nice weasel-word in general.)

-- wds

[Jim G.]

William December Starr sent the following on 6/29/2013 7:54 AM:

And I would argue that it significantly affects that person's life
whether s/he realizes it or not. Ignorance of the geo in geopolitics
doesn't alter the importance of geopolitics.

> (Also it's just a nice weasel-word in general.)

Very true. And one person's weasel word is another person's
acknowledgment that there are few absolutes out there.