Although the Kungfu Panda paragraph in the post before last was facetious, it spawned a question that stuck with me: Why do we call the animal “panda,” when the Chinese have an easy-to-transliterate word which could have given us “bearcat” and which doesn’t sound at all like “panda?” (It sounds like “xióngmÄo,” whatever that sounds like.) Merriam-Webster’s blames the French: “Etymology: French, perhaps from a language of the southeast Himalayas; Date: 1835.”
I hate this unreliable free wireless. Now I lose posts *because* I try to save intermediate steps. Boo Cathay Pacific.Â
The loss allows me to restructure and stay on the language theme before switching to greener matters. Which of the following characters would you peg as the character for “turtle?”
a) 龟
b) 亀
c) 龜
And now for something completely different. I just finished reading the latest edition of Newsweek, which contained a large section discussing the Environmental Performance Index, an instrument devised to index national environmental performance much like the GDP indexes economic performance. Switzerland finished first. I immediately (and perhaps typically of a Swiss) worried that we hade been treated to kindly. Aren’t we one of the foremost lovers of big cars? Aren’t we also sprawling around urban centers and building up the landscape? Aren’t we guilty of investing far too little in slow, manpowered transportation, with the result that fewer and fewer (aren’t you proud, Janet) children now bike to school? Might not our ranking be due to our lack of fishing grounds to overfish, oil and coal to burn, and minerals to mine?Â
The reason I had the time to read Newsweek lies in my being early at the Taoyuan Airport in Taiwan, getting on an earlier Cathay flight to Hong Kong on standby (a first for me, and fun to try out without being under pressure), and getting into the lounge here because my next flight is with Star Alliance (Cathay belongs to OneWorld). My other options after a morning that consisted of receiving a gift of tea from our partners, of a demonstration that the customer said he loved and I thought was pretty terrible, and of a quick retrieval of my umbrella at the tailor’s would have been to loaf around Taipei for the unattractive time span of a few hours or sit at the Taoyuan Airport Starbucks for six hours…Â
But back to the turtles: all three options are correct. The first is simplified Chinese, the second Japanese, and the third traditional Chinese. It’s interesting to see how simplification in this case means an increased distance from accurate pictorial representation.Â
Interesting that you can change the weights of the various factors in the environmental index.
Of course you should be proud of Switzerland, but I always take such numbers with a grain of salt, at least ever since I realized how the infant mortality calculations are so different from one country to another that cross-country comparisons are virtually useless. Thus I harbor a suspicion that economic, environmental, educational, and other statistics are similarly manipulable. You know, “There are Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.”
Of course I’m proud of you, dear, though it took me a moment to realize you were speaking of grammar and not children.
I guess I haven’t lost every Japanese influence, because I guessed b).
Oh, I missed the “less vs. fewer” point completely. I thought he was commending you (Janet) for riding your bike to school.
hmm, I wonder how they decided on how to weight the individual environmental impact factors. I was able to adjust them (or rather distort them) in such a way that Switzerland ends up in the 22nd place, while all the Nordic countries stay in the top 5…