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complicated thought; perhaps easier to express than i had imagined

Complicated thought which is not easy to express: piled up -- eminent motes in a sunbeam sternly pondering the fact that men were full of faults.

from Mathews 4113 and 4114, glossed respectively as "piles of stones" (example gloss: “piled up -- eminent") and "to look about. order, sequence. Complicated thought which is not easy to express."

Mathews 2691: "Motes in a sunbeam, thus: -- minute, impalpable. Bright. Fibrous."

Mathews 2675 means either "composed; contented; tranquil" or "very not composed; very not contented; very not tranquil."

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 5h

Unfortunately like translating 罏 as “amphora” — it’s a right answer that sounds wrong

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Reposted by Brendan O’Kane

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 5h

They won’t tell you this in school because of woke but this was a vuvuzela.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 5h

also words for “of a mountain, big (but like really)” which is the only way 賦 can work.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 13h

i have unlocked infinity chinese

screenshot of the fun I have been having: crops from the 明清吳語詞典, with glyph candidates. Some of the glyphs here are from fonts; if you look you can also see some kind of blobby, lopsided ones which are SVGs generated based on CDL character descriptions

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 13h

This got me lazy search-by-component (so I can type, say, 驗 by typing 馬臉) and it's the least infuriating way of typing a rare character that I can imagine

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 13h

whispering "本字" was all it took to reliably provoke a ~15-minute outburst from my advisor

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 13h

A couple of things - there are already IDS codes for describing characters by component (⿱宀子), but years ago the developers of Wenlin invented CDL, which allows for much more fine-grained description. I got deepseek to crack the db, and now I can generate SVG replacements for characters not in fonts

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 13h

MC was my secret weapon for fancy Japanese vocabulary; gotta be good for something

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 13h

This was literally my weekend - I'm back to processing dictionaries now that I've got a way of handling rare graphs by components. (Also I have already got a list of errata for Unihan, which fucks up Mathews' numbers all over the place, adds unrelated graphs, and misspells his name.)

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 14h

Makes sense - thanks!

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 14h

I went through a phase where I tried pronouncing France as 'Fàguó' just to feel something, but it just felt dirty. If you ever hear me say Li Bo I have been kidnapped.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 14h

Yeah, 垃圾 is the newer reading and seems to be just people reading the phonophore (like with 膝, which my IME and almost everyone I ever heard read as 'qi') -- but it's a lub-dub word, deep down.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 14h

Is MC useful for Hokkien? I thought Min was too weird for comparison, but I've already said more than I know. Gotta love the old words, though - one of my other current projects is assembling a list of all the different ways of writing the word for "slob" - the 邋遢 family, which includes 垃圾 afaict

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 18h

tbf there are hiragana that I only learned by knowing the approximate medieval reading of the character they came from, but yeah -- finding out about writing from Chinese emissaries is world-historically rough luck.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 20h

(Also points for “Mark Thousand!”))

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 20h

I’ve seen people do really interesting stuff with this, like kanji for 黑人 with furigana indicating it should be pronounced “buraaza”

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 20h

You are of course not wrong, but you’re not going to find a lot of sympathy about homophones from Chinese-speakers. (FWIW, if homophones were actually a problem for understanding, it would be impossible to have a conversation. Phonetic writing systems are absolutely dope.)

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 20h

Should note that this was in the context of Cikoski saying, of Chinese, that it is the worst writing system in the world except one, and that one is derived from it. Feels like letting Tangut off too easy, IMO, but definitely true if we’re sticking to somehow still-extant writing systems

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 29/09/2026

Better that than “sheepish”

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 29/09/2026

Trick question: already Buddhist

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 29/09/2026

reliably the only association anyone in the PRC had for “Philadelphia” my first couple years there

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 29/09/2026

for what it’s worth I earnestly believe that I could get five US Senators to pronounce the pinyin ‘x’ right, but it’s probably for the best that I’ll never find out

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 29/09/2026

I took a little too much enjoyment in telling Wharton undergrads that 法 is a lot more like “best practices” than “law” in this context

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 29/09/2026

its complicated and technical but basically like haley joel osment its love is real but it is not

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 29/09/2026

so does anybody have any stupid opinions about ai

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

this is comprehensively my jam

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

qv William Gibson on the early Internet-era antecedent

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

depends: are you holding any ah pipe-weed at the moment

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

google really cleared the field out about 15 years ago

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

this is why you need a translator with lived experience as a hobbit

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

Oh yeah; I’d been thinking of the version from Jin Ping Mei, but there really isnt any version of that tale complex where the Shuihu heroes are not Oops! All Gender Anxieties

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

dag - will be in class a block north. Enjoy!

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Reposted by Brendan O’Kane

Ian Petrie @icpetrie.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Very belatedly seeing this -- ahoy Philly area folks! Jamelle Bouie "Reconstruction at America 250: History and Future of U.S. Democracy" September 29, 2026 Iron Gate Theatre 3700 Chestnut Street 5:30pm Registration via link: www.history.upenn.edu/node/16208

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 28/09/2026

friendly neighborhood translator here with a preview of how it goes: - the rent-paying work doesn't come back except when they want a human as a liability sponge - the worthwhile and pleasurable work doesn't pay the rent - it is never going to feel better - life continues. cats are nice

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 27/09/2026

I think I’ve got copies somewhere, but never used them - loving the paper, the font, and the typo on “Wangfujing”.

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Reposted by Brendan O’Kane

Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 15/07/2025

in the process of having an idea

An orange cat with white socks and a sweet heart, emerging slowly from croissant mode on the sofa. He appears to be thinking about something, which he is - sorry, little homie - not really equipped to do.

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 27/09/2026

They might be right about the market - we're both posting from a narrow sliver of the Venn diagram here - but the people who get it will absolutely get it!

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 27/09/2026

yeeeeeow; that is…sobering! 歲月不饒人吶！

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 27/09/2026

“Braun” didn’t occur to me, but in retrospect it would’ve been support for my “Palanka = Franke” theory…

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Brendan O’Kane @bokane.org · 27/09/2026

Part of the fun of the English version came from looking at names like "Mister Brown" and concluding that Gubo and Palanka surely *had* to be reflecting something recognizable - but IIRC 布朗先生 was the only clue that any of the characters spoke English.

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