Thursday, November 9, 2017

Trump related events overnight in China

This post is derived from another post made to Stella's place, here.

She puts up three videos.

1) President Trump Meets with Premier Li Keqiang of the People's Republic of China. Two minute video. Trump delivers a speech, mostly platitudes and ideas about what he intends to discuss and with whom and why.

2) President Trump Participates in an Expanded Bilateral Meeting with President Xi Jinping. Three minute video. Trump reviews the trip events so far. More platitudes, more statements repeating Trump's positions expressed during his campaign for office. He describes the nature of his relationship with principals. He thanks the Chinese for a warm welcome and their willingness to engage to solve world problems.

3) President Trump Participates in a Business Event with President Xi Sixteen minute video. This is the most interesting. Trump gets straight to the point with his concerns and what he feels we must do to respond. He restates precisely the same points expressed repeatedly throughout his campaign. He lays out his view of global economics.


The last video's key frame caught my attention and the interest that is outside the real area of concern. What interests me is not important but I find it interesting anyway.  What those marks mean. How they write their language. The basic marks, the kanji, mean the same and similar things in Japanese.

Japan has the same mark for their country, "sun book country" Where China is written "middle country"  Sun is a rectangle, and middle is that same rectangle with a line down the middle. So sun and middle are alike graphically.

Beijing is "northern capital" And those signs are the same in Japan too. In Japan the sign for capital with another sign refers to Kyoto and Tokyo, where north is the same.

And their English analogues are obviously reversed. You see that immediately by "middle." It makes sense to reverse them, but If you were sitting there and for the first time trying to learn from this by matching, or if you were presupposing, that would throw you right off. For some odd reason I think that's funny. Because I have tried to match and I was thrown off.



6 comments:

AllenS said...

Get used to it, it's called winning.

Read all about it here --

LINK TEXT

chickelit said...

A Chinese grammar and syntax lesson! Thank you, Chip.

chickelit said...

Shouldn't the media focus instead on LGBLT rights in China?

What about the sex lives and peccadildos of Chinese politicians?

edutcher said...

Beijing is "northern capital"

Nanking, as opposed to Peking, is "southern capital". Peiping is "northern peace".

This way in a lot of places. Baguio, up in the mountains of Luzon, was the summer capital of the Philippines. And one of the last places liberated in '45.

PS Real Chinese pronounce it Bay-ching.

ricpic said...

The sickness of kicking your own country in the head as though that's somehow a mark of your superiority, that peculiar ruling class sickness is coming to an end with Trump. Trump's telling Ji, when you strip away all the diplomatic niceties, that trade better be close to parity in value between the two countries from now on and Ji better discourage the theft of American companies' intellectual property.....or else. And Trump's got American leverage, which is YUUGE, to back up his words. That leverage was there through all the years of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations but all the bright boys in those administrations CHOSE not to see it. Over. That sick stupidity is over.

edutcher said...

The Gray Lady tells us the Reds call him Uncle Trump (not unlike the Grenadians talking of Uncle Reagan after the Rangers paid a call in '83).

Then there's the 84 bil the gang in the Forbidden City says it will drop in WV.

What did the Reds call Zippy?

Ah, yes, "Bumblefuck".