4/23/2006: Carved gourd
 

http://cellar.org/2006/carvedgourd.jpg

Are you out of your gourd? What does that mean, anyway?

A mini gourd engraved with tiny Chinese characters is pictured in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province. The common gourd, with the actual size of a table tennis ball, has changed its appearance after 240 ancient Chinese poems with around 5,000 characters are engraved on it by Ruan Wenhui, a master in Chinese handicrafts industry, through three-month-long elaboration, Xinhua news agency said.

How do you do something like that without wite out? And if you do screw up, do you not tell anyone because you're pretty sure no one will notice?

Damn fool, he could have done it with a laser in minutes. :haha:

I love gourds. You can't have too many gourds.

:lol: Ancient Chinese secret...:lol: :lol:

I love goulds.

Howevel, I have nevel lead one.

thats lacists

It would be worth buying if those were 240 limericks.

i met a man once he was a dental technician and could write that small he could write up to 16 characters on a piece of rice (uncooked mind you) i thought that was impressive but nothing compared to this picture.

The microchip before the microchip =D

Characters as in chinese/japanese/korean or characters as in A/B/C?

Oriental languages are idogrammatic. Each character means something, as opposed to the characters simply referring to a sound.

Oh, OK. I was waiting for you to say he could write on your molar with a drill...

That's true for Chinese and a certain Japanese writing, Kanji.
It's wrong for Thai, Korean, Hiragana Japanese, Katakana Japanese... - actually it's wrong for ANY language but Kanji and Chinese.

Welcome to the Cellar, sordid. :D
So those oriental characters are sounds or syllables?

Yeah Bruce, always waiting for fresh meat, aren't you? :eek:

Well, Hiragana and Katakana are syllables. There's the exception of the "n" which is a single consonant, but usually you'll either have a single vocal or exactly one consonant followed by a vocal. That's why oral Japanese is so extremely easy to understand for computers. Consonant, vocal, consonant, vocal - so much easier for tincans than my mothertongue German.

Hiragana and Katakana are even easy to learn - unluckily nobody uses them in Japan except to mark endings of words written in Kanji. And Kanji is a pain in the ass, since it's derived from Chinese.

In Korean you'll find two writings as well. The older one, Wenyan, is also derived from Chinese and works the same, yet the other one, Hangeul, is pretty similar to our system.

Thai on the other hand is completely like our system - except for the fact that these wavy letters they use are supposed to be pronounced completely different depending on how they're written.
That means that a vowel like "ma" could be pronounced in like five different ways, depending on how you'd rape the vocal. :D

Sorry I have such a hard time explaining it, that's actually since English is not my native language.

Khmer, the language spoken in Cambodia, is the complete opposite, although Cambodia is so heavily influenced culturally by Thailand.
Khmer consists of syllables and most words are hardly longer than two syllables.

Fresh meat? Hmmm :yum:
Actually fresh ideas, information, people that can explain things so I can get them through my thick head. Thanks for the 'splaining. There was a previous IOtD about Korean wood block printing, where we could have used you.:D

Uryoces, my question was to Dee, about the rice. I speak chinese, I know that chinese and kanji are idiogrammatic, one character per syllable (well, thats a little flexable in japanese), etc. I also knew that Thai, some japanese, tibetian, etc are phonetic like english. Korean, though, I think is idiogrammatic... Anyway, I was asking if Dee's dentist buddy could write characters as in idiogrammatic chinese characters or as in letters/symbols in english.

EDIT: oops, just saw Sordid's post, I guess I was half-right about korean.

Bruce,
there's so many different reasons why the whole world actually has a use for me... :lol:

If you're interested in the Japanese language, here's a pretty good FAQ: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/afaq/afaq.html

For Chinese: http://www.zhongwen.com/faq.htm

EDIT: Btw, curious... @sordid: Where are you from? Or how did you learn Chinese?

He said his mother tongue is German, and he never said he knew Chinese. He barely mentioned Chinese.

I'm Viennese. Well, actually I'm from Hamburg, Germany, but I moved to Vienna, Austria some 15 years ago.
I have a little theoretical approach towards Chinese and I do speak some extremely tiny little Mandarin - which wouldn't even be enough to order some rice in a restaurant without ending up badly bruised because I really insulted the waiter. :lol:

But I'm extremely into most of Asia.
I had Japanese courses during school and I also tried to learn some Thai. Actually I love everything Thai.
(This is supposed to be read as "This guy is just too handsome to make use of cheap prostitutes in Thailand, it's more the landscapes and cuisine!")
Thai cuisine, Thai music (yeah, I know...), I even started Muay Thai some years ago because it's so, well, Thai.

Ah cool. I always heard that Vienna's a beautiful place. Yay, I quite like Thai language... Nice to listen although I don't know what they're saying ^^;;;

<a href="http://langintro.com/kintro/first.htm">Korean alphabet tutorial</a>. Hangeul isn't that hard to learn, so you can amaze your friends.

The Blog view of this thread has a Goggle ad that links to a gourd art show in CA. Incredible! :eek:

Yup. That was a pretty broad brush.