Hacker News Reader

Comment by donquichotte | Hacker News Reader

It is funny, just yesterday I read Victor Mair's reasoning why "n" might have been banned [1]:

"This is probably out of fear on the part of the government that "N" = "n terms in office", where possibly n > 2; as in "liánrèn n jiè 连任n届" ("n successive terms in office"), which would be forbidden anyway because of the liánrèn 连任 ("continue in office") part."

I don't know any Mandarin or Cantonese, but this seems like a very strange explanation to me. Are there any native speakers with more insight on this?

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=36939

View on HN

Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that recognizes "N" as part of phrases or sentences that have a high probability of containing other banned words. It is like query expansion in NLP, but in this case it has accidentally banned a word that is widely used in other context.

Edit: This looks like a more reasonable explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061, N is the 14th letter in the alphabet, referring to the 14th item in the proposed changes [1] (the change that removes term limit).

[1] (Chinese) http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm

This is the only believable explanation I have seen on this bizarre result. I kept looking to see if the article was from the Onion.

I'm pretty sure they're banning the letter N because it was the 14th "proclamation" in the recent posting about constitutional changes by Xinhua news. They tried to bury it under a set of 20~ changes and disguise the wording. First, 14 was banned on weibo. Then, N was banned as people quickly jumped to the 14th letter of the English alphabet.

Weibo also has a history of doing stuff like this, Tiananmen Square is sometimes referred to as May 35th, so they like to play with numbers and their meanings.

This is a very convincing explanation and most likely the correct reason.

The most likely explanation that sprang to mind was that there’s a convention in Chinese for (young) people to say ‘n’ meaning ‘lots’. ie:

A: Have you been to Disney? B: OMG, only like, n times!

(A: 你去过迪斯尼吗？ B: 哎呀我去n次啦)

edit: so i’m confirming Mair’s guess.

This feels like satire. China censored a meme sufficiently obscure that people aren't even sure what it was?

To me this feels way too real. People have to speak in 'codes' and 'memes' because they are already being ultra censored and controlled.... and the next level of it being the code or meme being censored.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com