
Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters, part 2 - mdturnerphys
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=44269
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mdturnerphys
Part 1 here:
[https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43784](https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43784)

See the footnotes of part 2 for other related posts.

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bjornsteffanson
Far less serious (and not polysyllabic), but still linguistically interesting:
the Chinese character for _biáng_, one of the most complex in modern usage.
There are 15 variants of the character consisting of between 56 and 70
strokes, which can be recalled with various mnemonics. It is not yet included
in standard Unicode, but scheduled for inclusion in March 2020.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles)

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roenxi
Wikipedia claims that the Chinese character with the most strokes translates
to the English word 'verbose' [0, 1].

Whoever came up with that one must have been a wicked deadpan humourist. I
live with regret that I will never appreciate good Chinese (written) poetry.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Rare_and_co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Rare_and_complex_characters)
[1]
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%AA%9A%A5](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%AA%9A%A5)

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Lucadg
Can the Hk government ban these? Honest question.

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dmix
Ban what exactly?

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Lucadg
They banned cryptography in Australia recently so we can't safely assume weird
characters are safe neither.

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ggg3
do i have to know the cantonese roots? because the 3 components are nowhere in
the red and black image.

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mdturnerphys
Components of each of the three characters are in the constructed character. I
think it's the top two components of the first, the full second character, and
the left and right components of the third. The constructed character is in
calligraphic style so the components look a bit different than in the printed
representations.

