Comment by dejj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dejj | Hacker News Reader

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Brevity is key for words that aid thinking.

Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism

These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration:

- 柴米油盐（Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life - 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere

I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out.

It's also very important that others know the concept. I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo

So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?

Cap Gets The Reference. (talking about Steve Rogers, but trying to stay in the 4 word format, like "Big Hat No Cattle")

in a different vein, "Tony and Manny, at the pool" might refer to:

  这个国家：
  先拿到钱，
  得到力量，
  然后淫乐。

[at least in "Antonio Montana's Journey to the West" (1983)]

You recognized it. Tamarian does exactly that.

There's a subclass of 成语 the sense of which you can't even guess at unless you know the story:

- 塞翁失马 (Sai Weng Shi Ma) - Old man loses horse; a 5-fold story of riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches = life is unpredictable

- 自相矛盾 (Zi Xiang Mao Dun) - Resemble spear and shield = unstoppable force meets indestructible object

The latter is so common that 矛盾 (Mao Dun) is the dictionary entry for "contradiction" in Chinese and Japanese.

Because 矛盾 is so common, the story 自相矛盾 (=etymology) gets taught only later to native speakers. Similarly, consider the surprising etymology of word "rob", deriving from "robe" [1].

Consider also: - "Seven at One Blow" [2] = bamboozle

This proverb everyone knows, yet nobody uses it. It only cumbersomely embeds in a sentence; "bamboozle" is briefer. But 成语 do easily embed in Chinese or any phrase does in Tamarian.

1: https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Tailor

"Seven at One Blow" is certainly not a proverb that everyone knows in English; it's the name of the fairytale in English, but not something that people use to mean "bamboozle".

It's simply the case that Chinese relies far more on literary/historical allusions (chengyu) than English does. We might talk about someone's "Achilles heel" or a "Trojan horse", but these literary/historical allusions are simply nowhere near as common as chengyu in Chinese.

Chengyu are very common in Chinese, more common than analogous English phrases, but the entirety of Chinese isn't composed of chengyu. I haven't seen much Star Trek so I read the wiki description and watched a couple of clips + explainer YouTube videos to understand what you're talking about. From what I understand, Tamarian seems to be a language that is entirely chengyu/成语.

These are fascinating. Anyone know a book our other source for a list of such Chinese shorthand figures of speech and the tales/aphorisms behind them about human nature? Kinda like “sour grapes” in English, or Aesop’s fables.

The book I have at hand is called "成语故事 Geschichten von chinesischen Sprichwörtern". It's parallel German and Chinese. ISBN 978-7-119-06018-7 Published by CBT China Book Trading GmbH www.cbt-chinabook.de

I happen to be German. So thanks for that! Will get it right away.

You are missing that to drive one-self home is a metaphor, possibly a visual metaphor in this case, for DIY self-service in the private domain, as it were.

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