Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%
https://electrek.co/2026/01/16/canada-breaks-with-us-slashes-100-tariffs-chinese-evs/
#HackerNews #Canada #EVs #tariffs #Chinese #tariffs #electricvehicles #news
alcinnz
boosted
Does anyone who knows traditional #chinese feel like translating something for no money and no reason except my curiosity?
It's these three images. They are from a book called Literary Works of the Tsengs (Tseng Ke Tuan, 1963). I have had this for many years, for very random reasons. There are only a few large images like this in the book, I think; the rest is fairly dense Chinese text. Maybe they are title pages or maybe fancy family mottoes... my knowledge of Chinese is zero.
If you know what these are, I'd be grateful for your knowledge.
2 media
Does anyone who knows traditional #chinese feel like translating something for no money and no reason except my curiosity?
It's these three images. They are from a book called Literary Works of the Tsengs (Tseng Ke Tuan, 1963). I have had this for many years, for very random reasons. There are only a few large images like this in the book, I think; the rest is fairly dense Chinese text. Maybe they are title pages or maybe fancy family mottoes... my knowledge of Chinese is zero.
If you know what these are, I'd be grateful for your knowledge.
2 media
Dario Castañé 🏴☠️⁂
boosted
🇺🇸🇻🇪🇦🇿🇦🇲 I guess we now know that military operations are acceptable and nobody really cares, as long as they’re quick (the #US in #Venezuela, #Azerbaijan in #Nagorno-Karabakh...).
🇺🇦 Seems #Russia would have just had to take #Ukraine faster...
🇹🇼 Meanwhile, the #Chinese military is probably holding a #Taiwan planning party right now - bet.
#Military #Politics #War #China #USA #Unitedstates #america #news #southamerica #europe #world #government #crime #trump #putin #maduro #donaldtrump
🇺🇸🇻🇪🇦🇿🇦🇲 I guess we now know that military operations are acceptable and nobody really cares, as long as they’re quick (the #US in #Venezuela, #Azerbaijan in #Nagorno-Karabakh...).
🇺🇦 Seems #Russia would have just had to take #Ukraine faster...
🇹🇼 Meanwhile, the #Chinese military is probably holding a #Taiwan planning party right now - bet.
#Military #Politics #War #China #USA #Unitedstates #america #news #southamerica #europe #world #government #crime #trump #putin #maduro #donaldtrump
What basic course would you suggest for self learning #Chinese?
OliverUv
boosted
also as a little mini-explainer, since this is a major misconception about Chinese: the writing system actually encodes quite a bit of information about pronunciation! just, like, pronunciation 2000 years ago, which may or may not align with how it's pronounced now in any daughter language.
Chinese characters can be broadly broken down into:
- A straight-up picture of what the word indicates, albeit after thousands of years of simplification and regularization to make it easy to write quickly. 人 “person" ; 女 "woman"; 子 "child"; 口 "mouth"
- A semantic compound: 女 woman + 子 child = 好 “good, desirable"; 田 field + 力 plow->strength = 男 "man"; 日 sun (this was a circle before regularization) + 月 moon (this was a crescent) = 明 "bright". The spoken words indicated by the characters are NOT compounds in this way, only the visual symbol for them. (A spoken compound will be represented by multiple characters.)
- Occasionally, a very abstract word was represented by something non-abstract which had a similar pronunciation. This led to an obvious ambiguity problem, which led to adding extra details to the pictogram when the literal thingie was meant to indicate "no, I mean the literal thingie." For example, 且 an altar was stolen for the abstract "just, even, moreover..." and the literal altar came to be written 俎.
- This apparently inspired the solution for indefinitely expanding the written vocabulary without indefinitely expanding how many unique symbols you have to memorize: while many core words are included in the directly representative categories above, the majority of the dictionary consists of characters that are a compound of a semantic category word (such as "people", "water", "metal", "plants"...) and a phonetic category word, which on its own has a literal meaning but in the compound stands for its *pronunciation*, not its meaning.
So our friends 泌 and 密 from the above post are a combination of 必 in a phonetic capacity (not its literal meaning "must, sure to") and the semantic "water" for "secrete, ooze" and the semantic "mountain" for "secret, hidden". (Strictly, 密 is a compound of 宓 as phonetic and 山 as semantic, where 宓 itself is also a word in the same cluster of words-that-mean-some-sort-of-separation-and-pronounced-like-必: "stored at home", under a roof.)
But note, the phonetic component reflects the pronunciation *at the time the character became mainstream* which in general was well over a thousand years ago, often over two thousand. Hence, words written with the same phonetic may have no apparent phonetic relationship in, say, modern Mandarin. Some phonetics were changed during the Simplified reforms in the mainland several decades ago, based on observing how handwritten characters evolved in semi-educated settings such as street markets, but most remain frozen.
Chinese characters are mostly combinations of some several hundred frequently recurring symbols, and not all completely unique and unrelated. That's what makes it a functioning writing system it's possible to teach to a billion people.
... You just tricked me into writing a rough draft of a section in the Classical Chinese guide I'm writing. Yes, you!
Alex, the Hearth Fire
and 2 others
boosted
“secret” and “secrete”are both derived from a word meaning “to separate, set apart.”
A common Mandarin word for “secret” is 密 mì, and there is also a word for “secrete” 泌 mì (note the shared 必 phonetic component in the characters, indicating they were also pronounced very similarly thousands of years ago; the dots on the left side of 泌 mean water whereas in 密, the phonetic component is enclosed between a roof and a mountain).
I find it fascinating when completely unrelated languages converge on the same subtly interwoven concepts. #linguistics #chinese
“secret” and “secrete”are both derived from a word meaning “to separate, set apart.”
A common Mandarin word for “secret” is 密 mì, and there is also a word for “secrete” 泌 mì (note the shared 必 phonetic component in the characters, indicating they were also pronounced very similarly thousands of years ago; the dots on the left side of 泌 mean water whereas in 密, the phonetic component is enclosed between a roof and a mountain).
I find it fascinating when completely unrelated languages converge on the same subtly interwoven concepts. #linguistics #chinese
also as a little mini-explainer, since this is a major misconception about Chinese: the writing system actually encodes quite a bit of information about pronunciation! just, like, pronunciation 2000 years ago, which may or may not align with how it's pronounced now in any daughter language.
Chinese characters can be broadly broken down into:
- A straight-up picture of what the word indicates, albeit after thousands of years of simplification and regularization to make it easy to write quickly. 人 “person" ; 女 "woman"; 子 "child"; 口 "mouth"
- A semantic compound: 女 woman + 子 child = 好 “good, desirable"; 田 field + 力 plow->strength = 男 "man"; 日 sun (this was a circle before regularization) + 月 moon (this was a crescent) = 明 "bright". The spoken words indicated by the characters are NOT compounds in this way, only the visual symbol for them. (A spoken compound will be represented by multiple characters.)
- Occasionally, a very abstract word was represented by something non-abstract which had a similar pronunciation. This led to an obvious ambiguity problem, which led to adding extra details to the pictogram when the literal thingie was meant to indicate "no, I mean the literal thingie." For example, 且 an altar was stolen for the abstract "just, even, moreover..." and the literal altar came to be written 俎.
- This apparently inspired the solution for indefinitely expanding the written vocabulary without indefinitely expanding how many unique symbols you have to memorize: while many core words are included in the directly representative categories above, the majority of the dictionary consists of characters that are a compound of a semantic category word (such as "people", "water", "metal", "plants"...) and a phonetic category word, which on its own has a literal meaning but in the compound stands for its *pronunciation*, not its meaning.
So our friends 泌 and 密 from the above post are a combination of 必 in a phonetic capacity (not its literal meaning "must, sure to") and the semantic "water" for "secrete, ooze" and the semantic "mountain" for "secret, hidden". (Strictly, 密 is a compound of 宓 as phonetic and 山 as semantic, where 宓 itself is also a word in the same cluster of words-that-mean-some-sort-of-separation-and-pronounced-like-必: "stored at home", under a roof.)
But note, the phonetic component reflects the pronunciation *at the time the character became mainstream* which in general was well over a thousand years ago, often over two thousand. Hence, words written with the same phonetic may have no apparent phonetic relationship in, say, modern Mandarin. Some phonetics were changed during the Simplified reforms in the mainland several decades ago, based on observing how handwritten characters evolved in semi-educated settings such as street markets, but most remain frozen.
Chinese characters are mostly combinations of some several hundred frequently recurring symbols, and not all completely unique and unrelated. That's what makes it a functioning writing system it's possible to teach to a billion people.
... You just tricked me into writing a rough draft of a section in the Classical Chinese guide I'm writing. Yes, you!
“secret” and “secrete”are both derived from a word meaning “to separate, set apart.”
A common Mandarin word for “secret” is 密 mì, and there is also a word for “secrete” 泌 mì (note the shared 必 phonetic component in the characters, indicating they were also pronounced very similarly thousands of years ago; the dots on the left side of 泌 mean water whereas in 密, the phonetic component is enclosed between a roof and a mountain).
I find it fascinating when completely unrelated languages converge on the same subtly interwoven concepts. #linguistics #chinese
My brother sent this to me 😆
He thinks I would look fantastic as an elderly #Chinese man/sifu 🤣😂
Chip Butty
boosted
🚨 An undercover sting just exposed alarming loopholes in #Westminster’s weak lobbying system: a fake #Chinese company bought meetings with ministers & MPs, & it may not have even broken any rules!😱🤬✍️ Sign & share: 👇 #Petition #Politics https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-foreign-lobbying-in-british-politics?source=twitter&utm_campaign=blast142327&utm_medium=socialshare&utm_source=twitter&share=57d51bf3-25a9-46ad-a9b3-8b133826ca45 via @38degrees
🚨 An undercover sting just exposed alarming loopholes in #Westminster’s weak lobbying system: a fake #Chinese company bought meetings with ministers & MPs, & it may not have even broken any rules!😱🤬✍️ Sign & share: 👇 #Petition #Politics https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/stop-foreign-lobbying-in-british-politics?source=twitter&utm_campaign=blast142327&utm_medium=socialshare&utm_source=twitter&share=57d51bf3-25a9-46ad-a9b3-8b133826ca45 via @38degrees
Dane 🇮🇪🇺🇦🇻🇪🖖⚛️☮️☸️🕉️
boosted
A holiday visit, Chinatown, San Francisco between 1896 and 1942; from a photograph taken between 1896 and 1906.
Genthe, Arnold, 1869-1942
Slide shows Chinese man carrying small boy in Chinatown, San Francisco, California.
#Chinatown #SanFrancisco #Arnold #Chinese #California #Children #City&townlife #Fathers #photography
A holiday visit, Chinatown, San Francisco between 1896 and 1942; from a photograph taken between 1896 and 1906.
Genthe, Arnold, 1869-1942
Slide shows Chinese man carrying small boy in Chinatown, San Francisco, California.
#Chinatown #SanFrancisco #Arnold #Chinese #California #Children #City&townlife #Fathers #photography
My opinion - Foreign media in countries like #Australia, where this piece ran, shouldn't publish #Chinese government op-eds unless #China's state media publishes foreign diplomat op-eds.
#Reciprocity is a basic tenet of #diplomacy and should be enforced in the #digital and #media spaces.
hypebot
boosted
I noticed this ownership seal said "university" so I was like "oh, I wonder which Chinese university this could be, let me look it up"
... Harvard. It says it's from the Harvard University Library. They have an official Chinese seal for stamping their Chinese manuscripts
I noticed this ownership seal said "university" so I was like "oh, I wonder which Chinese university this could be, let me look it up"
... Harvard. It says it's from the Harvard University Library. They have an official Chinese seal for stamping their Chinese manuscripts