There is a proverb in Turkish that means “One madman (ein Chinese) threw a stone into a well, forty wise men couldn't get it out.” This discussion is a bit like that.
Turkish proverb: "Bir deli bir kuyuya taş atmış, kırk akıllı çıkaramamış."
I married a southern gal, eastern North Carolina to be exact. As a Minnesotan, I have become familiar with the following:
1. "[he/she/they] are doing the lord's work" roughly translates to, "that task is so terrible/annoying, but someone has to do it, so props to them for doing it without complaining."
2. "bless their heart" roughly translates to, "they are really trying, but wow, so much fail"
As someone from NC with a LOT of family from eastern NC specifically, I'd like to provide an addendum to "bless your heart".
I see it frequently cited as always meant sarcastically/disingenuosly. It certainly can mean "screw you", "go away", or "... so much fail".
However, if there's one thing people should understand about southern/NC etiquette, it's that passive aggression is the primary form of aggression. There are plenty of southerners who would never tell you to GFY straight to your face. That doesn't mean they aren't thinking that and trying to say that, though. Perhaps even with a "bless your heart".
Given all of that, "bless your[/their] heart" is absolutely to be taken at face value about as often as it shouldn't. That level of plausible deniability provides the highest level of potential passive-aggressiveness.
I can't speak for absolutely everybody, but at least if someone from eastern NC says "bless your heart", they could mean anything between "GFY" and "I'm so sorry that happened, please come to my house so that I can shower you with hospitality". You might never know which they meant, and that's intentional.
I also take it to mean that it's either work others are often unwilling to do, or something that's really difficult, or something that I've been wanting for a long time but haven't gotten anyone to help me with.
For example: There's a fluorescent light above my desk that flickers and has been driving me crazy for years. I can't get facilities to fix it because they need a ticket that's approved by management and has an approved budget, and all their other tasks are more urgent.... so it slowly drives me mad for a year. Finally, a facilities person says "You know what... I'm not supposed to do this without management approval... but I'll just fix this real quick and it'll be our secret" ..... Me: "Oh, thank you, you're doing God's work"
I suspect the saying may be more common in North America. I’ve never heard anyone say it in Ireland – though American phrases and spelling are starting to become more popular thanks to the Internet and the success of American tech companies.
Maybe I'm also misunderstanding you, but if that comment was aimed about me then I wasn't remotely offended by somebody mentioning god, I just didn't understand if they were literally talking about the God they believe in or if it was a joke/idiom/whatever
I’m confused to how you made the assumption that the designer would be searching for “axe” in Chinese. That still assumes axe but then they decided to color it yellow afterwards?
My first thought was bopomofo ㄚ (which corresponds pleasingly to pinyin "a") but that's just a normally-oriented Y! And it sits on the other side of the keyboard anyway
> I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about
The sibling post's "bopomofo" seems far more plausible, but if you're talking European alphabets, the Greek letter Lambda (for the L sound, AIUI) looks pretty much like an upside-down (lower-case) 'y'. Maybe one working hypothesis at the time was that the person set to find pics for the Chines pirate manufacturer looked at it the wrong way around, read it as a Lambda / L, and looked for pictures to illustrate that. Idunno, WAG.
Later, there's a comment pointing out a transliteration of battle axe into english yields a word that starts with y.
Combining that:
> 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese.
and another comment shows that using Chinese to search for Axe on Google Images returns the original clip art:
> Me getting into the shoes of the designer: Assumptions: 1. The designer is in a hurry. 2. They would search in their language which I found via google translate is 斧头
However, 斧头 doesn't yield anything that starts with Y, and Google image search doesn't really seem to understand that that 鉞 (yuè) means axe. Duck Duck Go image search returns pictures of axes for 鉞, but doesn't show the original clip art in the top of its search results.
At any rate, it's unlikely the designer was using either of those search engines. Perhaps some Chinese search engine displays the "translation" of 鉞 to yué, and also provides the correct clipart.
I started reading the accepted answer on Stack Exchange, found it unconvincing and went to Wikipedia to look at the entry for axe. There I found that Yue is a type of Chinese battle axe.
The ball is probably Chinese-made. So I believe the answer that talks about Yué as the Chinese word for battle axe is the right one.
Wikipedia has an image of this rather odd-looking, but beautiful Shang dynasty Yue.
I am confused why jkej concluded that "the pictures from the second source are better explained in Swedish" from Hedstrom's response. As you discovered earlier, the swedish translations for cat or dog wouldn't even be Katt or Hund on this ball.
I would bet that the Chinese manufacturer that cloned the design never had one of the original balls in their possession in the first place. They probably saw photos of the ball online, copied the design as closely as possible and googled some clipart to fill in the letters that weren't visible in the photos. That clipart was Swedish, maybe by coincidence but probably intentionally.
Pretty much. Although the toys for young kids (at least in the EU) are quite regulated, including the plastics that can be used. Other than that, I'd have immediately considered a mistake - it's designed for kids, it should be obvious. No need for extensive research or a question on the interwebs.
I still don't get it. That comment just says they searched google images for axe pics. In Chinese, for some reason. They don't even address the letter Y mystery.
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> I think the manufacturer of your son's ball mixed in a Swedish word
I found this super unconvincing at first. But they just kept goin. And going. And going. And the more I scrolled and the more I read, I started to think that they are right. And by the end I was fully convinced!
Same! But then I read another answer further down that suggested it might be a Chinese word for axe, romanized in pinyin as yuè (for 鉞). Since the knock-off ball seems to have been made by a Chinese company, that seems more likely to me.
That doesn't explain the weird u-boat thing, though.
The "weird u-boat thing" further supports the Swedish hypothesis - "ubåt" or "undervattensbåt" are the standard terms for a submarine in Swedish (https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t). The word "U-boat" is also used in English, however with the meaning "German submarine during WW1/2" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat) - but I don't think it's widespread enough (or appropriate) to be eligible for a toy.
Why English doesn't just call them "under-sea-boat" or "underwater-boat" has been a mistery to me for a long time. (as a Dutch, we call 'em Onderzeeboot or Onderzeeër - underseaboat, undersea-er). It's so much simpler than combining latin/scientific terms.
That is completely unlikely. As ximeng says, it's an archaic word for a special weapon, but also:
* Most of the other letters on the ball work well in English but would not work well for Chinese words with pinyin
* Children do not learn the alphabet by studying pinyin since pinyin only has a subset of letters. The initials in pinyin are: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s, w, and y. As you can see, there is no 'v'. Children in Chinese-speaking countries would still use English to learn their ABCs.
V also doesn't occur in any pinyin finals, but Chinese people commonly use it in their own pinyin spelling anyway because it is used in pinyin input methods as a substitute for ü, which is harder to type.
Your list of initials left out the zero initial, which is important for words like 饿 or 安. As I've commented elsewhere, though "y" is a pinyin initial, "yue" does not feature it - "yue" is just the spelling of the final -üe when no initial is present.
This leads into a question I've had for a while - I know that some Chinese people do not distinguish between y- initials and r- initials. I'd like to know whether that lack of distinction somehow extends to every pinyin syllable that might be spelled with a "y", even if the "y" is normally not viewed as being part of an initial, as in "yu" / "yin" / "yue". Do you know the answer?
(I know that the lack of distinction occurs for 人 even though it does not rhyme with any syllable that might theoretically begin with y- in Mandarin. But that's not quite the same as what I'm asking about; 人 is definitely not a syllable with a zero initial. I would be interested in how the lack of distinction plays out for a syllable like "ri", where it's not obvious to me how the vowel would accommodate changing the initial to y-.)
In Cantonese pronunciation ru often becomes jyu (in Jyutping), ri becomes jat, similarly for rang, rong, ran. I guess this same shift is likely reflected in mandarin pronunciations in some areas. This suggests that this is a general change.
I think the relevant wikipedia article might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology, which should reflect the shift from the earlier Cantonese-like pronunciation (yu style) to modern Mandarin-like (ru style), but it's a bit beyond me. Maybe this "The class of EMC palatals is lost, with palatal sibilants becoming retroflex sibilants and the palatal nasal becoming a new phoneme /ɻ/." is relevant?
I didn't mean to ask about how the same character is read in different varieties of Chinese. I meant to ask about how different people pronounce Mandarin.
But she seems to have some trouble distinguishing r- from y-. To my nonnative ear, when she sings renbuzhu the r- is fairly clear, but her rang uses more of an intermediate sound, and in one case the palatalization is so heavy that I just hear yang.
On the other hand, where the Mandarin calls for y-, I don't notice that she inserts an r- quality.
This is the phenomenon that I'd like to know more about.
More generally, I'm interested in how some pinyin spelling choices that do not seem intuitive from the outside were made. Consider yi / sun / diu / yan. Anyone who approaches these syllables assuming that the letters in their spelling should have the same values that they do in other pinyin syllables is going to get a shock. ("Shouldn't yan rhyme with tan?") But the spellings must have made sense to the committee that fixed them... right?
When people pronounce mandarin they often pronounce differently depending on their local dialects, which is why I brought up Cantonese/hokkien. In turn these often derive from older variants of chinese. It seems like there has been some kind of shift from ngxxx in Middle Chinese to yxxx in Cantonese and to rxxx in mandarin, but only for some vowel sounds now represented by y… in mandarin, which is why we don’t see the y to r shift for other vowels. Just guessing here, definitely not an expert.
The pinyin spellings are confusing, and I’m not sure the history of why they were chosen exactly like that. It definitely makes it hard to learn the pronunciations.
> It seems like there has been some kind of shift from ngxxx in Middle Chinese to yxxx in Cantonese and to rxxx in mandarin, but only for some vowel sounds now represented by y… in mandarin, which is why we don’t see the y to r shift for other vowels.
I think this is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon. Historical sound changes that occurred between Middle Chinese and the present can explain why the same word is pronounced differently in different varieties of Chinese.
But they can't explain why or how certain people perceive different sounds to be equivalent. Consider a non-Chinese example - the letter Y in the English words yard and day derives from an original G. (There was also a G at the end of the word I, and it changed in the same way, but this is not reflected by a letter Y in the modern spelling of I.)
But the historical sound change does not mean that modern English speakers have trouble telling the difference between the sound of a Y and the sound of a G. They don't. All modern speakers will effortlessly maintain the distinction between yard and guard or gird, and between yes and guess, just like they maintain the distinctions between big and bee or bag and bay. If you suggested to them that any such pair of words might sound similar to each other, they'd give you funny looks.
I'm interested in the ability of speakers to produce and perceive differences between different sounds, not in the different evolution of one sound as it develops along different historical paths. (Well, not here. I am interested in the historical development of the sound as a more general matter, but it's not what I was asking about.)
I was hoping that a fuller understanding of the identification of r- and y- in certain Chinese regions might help explain why certain pinyin syllables are spelled with an initial letter Y. For example, I have been saying that "yue" represents the combination of a final -üe with a zero initial, and this is indeed the official definition, but there's a bit more to it than that - I knew a Cantonese girl for whom the Mandarin words 肉 and 月 began with the same sound. That's easy to explain if "yue" really does have an initial y-; it's much harder to explain if "yue" has no initial consonant.
月 and 肉 initials are much closer in Cantonese which is why Cantonese speakers often fail to differentiate these sounds in mandarin. I don’t think it’s directly linked to the pinyin, which has a different evolutionary path.
You see the same in Nanjing dialect, where speakers fail to differentiate l/n initials and n/ng finals. The pinyin is different, but their home dialect doesn’t distinguish so they fail to distinguish the sounds. Presumably if Nanjing speakers had been writing the pinyin standards there would be more chance that lan/rang would have ended up written the same.
I think what you’re after probably is a historical analysis of romanisations including pinyin. Such an analysis might also cover other no-obvious features of pinyin, like why jiao and yao have similar vowel sounds but different spellings and the nv/yu and nu/wu similarities and differences.
For your historical English example, I think in some dialects and in some historical times there would have been people that fail to distinguish some of your examples and others but all of this is a bit beyond my expertise.
That’s an uncommon historical term for axe. A Google image search will show it doesn’t resemble the picture. There are more common characters with pinyin starting with y, like 月 for “moon”.
Chinese probably stole the cliparts without understanding where they come from and what needs to be adapted.
Similar thing happened with "Polish dancing cow meme song" being used in some singing toys. The song is very vulgar and talks about hard drugs withdrawal, depression and suicide.
The best part about that RegEx answer is the moderator's note at the bottom.
> Moderator's Note
> This post is locked to prevent inappropriate edits to its content. The post looks exactly as it is supposed to look - there are no problems with its content. Please do not flag it for our attention.
Hi lolinder, welcome to HackerNews. Your comment implies that Stack Overflow isn't currently fun. You are of course well within your rights to make that assertion. However, I find that your comment may be improved by removing any implication that Stack Overflow isn't fun. So I invite you to explain your reasons and maybe consider future improving edits to your post.
Here is a comment that must be helpful because it got upvoted, but it's impossible to understand because the sibling comment it replies to is hidden somewhere at the bottom of the comment list.
Hmm, I recently thought it would be a great idea to answer a question on SO again, and did that by first posting a link. Then I realized how useless that would be if the link disappeared, so I clicked edit and pasted the actual info.
All this took like 20 seconds, but the hounds had already descended. Someone had posted a note on an answer that was literally 20 seconds old saying that it could be improved.
When I responded with an offended comment they deleted all their comments, and I lost the ability to report them.
That was the first, and also the last time in the past 4 years I thought to post anything there.
You wanted to report them for asking you to do the thing that you also thought had to be done? What would you even report them for? Giving valid criticism? Responding quickly?
A bear falls into a well. The depth of the well is 19.617 meters, and it takes the bear 2.0000 second to reach the bottom of the well. What is the color of the bear?
I don't really like that because it's obviously a troll question. Its wording and a large number of significant digits clearly demands the acceleration of gravity to be reverse-engineered, so it can't be a real question even by a chance. One thing to consider if it's indeed real: how much water is in that well?
Given the viscosity of air vs. water, one might assume there's no water in the well. Also, given some surface area of a bear, and air pressure from a cushion of air formed under the falling bear, the fall speed does seem a little high, at least for a calculation with that number of decimal places, but perhaps the well was located in the crust of the earth where gravity's a tad higher.
Living bears are also buoyant, and will be slowed down considerably on meeting the water, so the bear is unlikely to have reached the bottom of a water-filled well for a long period, if at all.
To answer OP, I'd say the bear is brown, because of the mud from the base of the (somewhat empty) well. However to an outside observer, given the lack of light in the well the shade of brown might not be discernable. A human in the well with the bear will see the colour of the bear as a low relative concern compared to A) being in a well and B) being in a well with a bear.
One variant of this question was designed to test the theory that students try to fit the inputs to an answer regardless of whether the answer has anything to do with the question.
People see this as some sort of failing of students but I think it says more about the teachers. You’ve overtrained students on problems that mean nothing to them, then you throw another nothing problem at them that’s simply three times as much nothing as the usual level of irrelevance.
Randall Monroe said it best: we should be teaching high school students how to split the bill for a birthday dinner. That’s more complicated math than most 20 year olds can correctly manage. It’s also what they’re going to do with math about 75% of the time.
Fur is probably pretty low-friction to begin with. Also, bears presumably have wax glands in their skin like other mammals, so if the bear hasn't showered very recently that would lessen the friction even more.
I like the work he put into the answer but he totally flubs it at the end. Black bears are actually dark brown and brown bears are also brown, so there’s no need to try and guess a specific bear species; the bear is necessarily brown.
I couldn't get GPT4 to answer it either, even with several variations on the prompt. It gets too fixated on the "bear" part, so it just assumes that the answer is "white", because that's a "common trick question".
I find it interesting that it disregards the rest of the question, and just picks "the most common answer to a trick question involving the color of a bear"!
The HTML parsing question is an annoying meme that people laugh along with to feel part of nerd culture. This one is an extremely thorough attempt at answering the question. Not comparable at all.
I like saying "Soy espalda" to my Spanish speaking friend, bugs the hell out of him. It means "I'm back" but uses the Spanish word for the body part instead of someone's presence.
I really like preserving english word order and just swapping out words for their lowest string distance portuguese equivalents, especially false cognates. I also forcefully transform english -ing and -er words into portuguese equivalents or completely new words if necessary. Everything comes out hilariously backwards and almost but not quite nonsensical, tortured yet parseable with mental error correction, like some portuguese newspeak. I especially like rendering book, movie and video game titles this way, especially to my english speaker friends who consume all this content in native english and aren't used to or look down on their translated portuguese versions.
I also really enjoy assembling portuguese words out of japanese phonemes. The pronunciation of japanese and portuguese is remarkably similar and I often find that even the most innocuous japanese vocabulary sounds like portuguese slang or swear words. Sometimes they sound like complete portuguese sentences. The full names of actual japanese people can sometimes be literally transcribed into extremely unfortunate portuguese sentences. Just imagine the amount of bullying targeted at Brazil's immense japanese immigrant population. At least one japanese word -- shoppai -- sounds to me like an english verb but with portuguese conjugation and my brain can't decide whether the radical is shop as in buy or shop as in photoshop, and it's such an archaic imperative first person plural conjugation I can't help but mentally imagine a catholic priest commanding his flock to digitally edit images during a church sermon. And that's the least offensive example I remember off the top of my head.
There used to be a website that would repeatedly pass a body of text through machine translation back and forth until it stabilized on some hilariously distorted result. I wish I could remember the domain name.
That just calls for the purchase of 2 copies and the application of the learnings inside. A near infinite source of inside jokes. I know well who I have to make.
In a way it is disappointing... Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask.
Yet, while everyone might be only 6 handshakes away from everyone else (on average), we do not have sufficient human connectivity to locate this person, even with hundreds of people putting at least a little thought/effort into identifying the artist.
I'd pay good money to watch a cinema verité documentary capturing the moment when the graphic artist encounters the StackExchange page and reads each comment in turn, while the camera slowly zooms in closer and closer on their eyebrows as they alternately furrow and rise up in surprise.
They found a 2nd, different clipart, from the same original artist, with a different Y with the same Axe.
That proves that the original (Chinese) artist actually thought that the image is associable with Y, and they were paired before going on the ball, not someone (other than the original artist) picking the wrong image to go with a letter.
> Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask.
But the artist who drew the pic wouldn't necessarily -- I'd go so far as to guess probably doesn't -- know how it ended up on that ball; who copied it from where and what word (or letter) that person thought it illustrated.
I think it's not unlikely that if it were actually important (someone's life depended on it, or a serious amount of money was at stake), this person _could_ be located. It would almost certainly require someone who speaks fluent Chinese to go to China and investigate in person, though.
If you're into this kind of content, https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/ may be fun. There's lots of trivial stuff, but you can find many deep investigations like in this submission too.
In this case, only checking the comments on HN brings about a feeling of dismay at the sad state of comments on HN.
People should indeed read the top answer. I assumed it ended after the first paragraph and only after your comment read the rest of it. Quite a rabbit hole and great investigation!
I feel like this video about the Casio VL-1 demo melody has a similar vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwrdseXKI
The fact that people do this much research/investigation to find answers to questions like this is pretty cool.
I wholeheartedly agree as well. The only nitpick I'd have on this incredible dissertation is on the "U" association with "U-boat" - this is an anglicized form of the German word "Unterseeboot" (undersea boat) which was itself shortened to "U-boot" (presumably the etymology of the Swedish "ubåt"). The first known use of the term "U-boat" is 1914, while the Germans and Swedish armed forces were commissioning submarines around a decade prior (in 1906 and 1904 respectively).
It looks like it could also be an anglicized version of the modern Swedish word for submarine, which appears to be Ubåt [0]. In the US we definitely usually associate the word U-boat with the Germans, but I'm not sure how else one would anglicize Ubåt.
The primary sources are hard to find on this, but the common year of first usage in English (1914) seems to coincide with the first sinking of a ship by a German submarine-launched torpedo [1].
Right, I didn't meant to imply that English got the word from Swedish, just that the author chose a reasonable anglicization that their readers would recognize.
I assume the author knows why they're called U-boats, but the fact is that modern English speakers don't call them U-boats unless they mean very specifically German World War II submarines and maybe not then.
I would use "U-Boat" but only in the same way I'd use "Boomer", to indicate a specific type of vessel in a particular context, if I meant a submarine, such as in a simple drawing, I'd say "submarine" and so would other English speakers I know.
And probably also German WW I submarines which were a factor drawing the US into WW I but might be less discussed as the war had less impact on the US and was longer ago
Swedish probably got the word from German, but u-båt is short for the Swedish word undervattensbåt, which is pretty much a straight-forward translation of submarine boat or Unterseeboot. The U- is not from German.
Trying to force a research/speculation on a mistake hardly deserves the most extraordinary answer.
A better approach: the ball, likely, can be traced to the company producing it. The toys for very young kids tend to be regulated, hence expensive. Contacting the company would be a direct approach, significantly improving the yield to provide a correct answer.
I thought yew was springy, which made good bows, but I would think might be too much for an axe: you don't want that sproi-oi-oing. I'm not an expert, but you want a little bit of spring so your wrists don't absorb all the shock, but you don't want a whiplash backlash.
You won't get the sproi-oi-oing on a rod with the thickness of an axe-handle.
Some "bong", which is what you want: rather than the energy dissipating through your wrists and elbows into your back and skull, it gets absorbed by the handle, and "boinged" back into the axe-head. A good yew (or carbonfibre) handle is a back- and joint-saver. I owe a few really good axes (swedish make, irony?¹) and one very bad one (chinese). The bad one has some poor and way too stiff wood.
Not only does it break on mis-hits, much easier, it makes a difference on the amount of pain I feel after a day of chopping (I am a mere amateur, so muscle and back will hurt)
Y for yellow, given that's the color of the handle and that you need something to be representative of the color. Even having a yellow square could confuse it with S for square, or having a banana can confuse it with B for banana. Similar problems exist with S for Sun, C for (a yellow) crayon etc.
Also the handle is what has been drawn superimposed over the letter.
Still, confusion with A for axe isnt any better than S for sun or whatever. Maybe the reasoning was that axe was semantically far enough away from being one of the usual standard bearers of the color yellow, that children would associate the letter with the color rather than the object?
As my long-suffering better half said about me recently (to her psych no less): sometimes he just says and does things to see what kind of reaction it gets from people; to work them out, to understand their limits and motivations, to find their boundaries.
...and maybe even more accurately: just to entertain himself.
Certainly. The limits, the boundaries, are where there be dragons; excitement; life!
Personally, I can't see the answer being "yellow", as this is all about nouns and tangible objects (like things and animals).
Having said that, I enjoyed how the case was built on the faded outline, while this entire spot of the ball shows faded black print, as may be observed by the outlines of the infamous "Y".
(I'd rather opt for the "yxa" approach, probably the route taken by someone just browsing image search for quick ideas and failing to realize that this is not an English word. — Non-indo-european languages and scripts do exist.)
I didn't even notice the difference in printing quality on that part of the ball, I just assumed it was part of the normal variation for such things and didn't think it had any meaning beyond that.
However that being said I think the analysis in the original article is probably as valid and likely more so than mine; I was having fun trying to bullshit-lawyer what was clearly the consequence of a hasty mistake into the work of over-thought intent.
Extending this, can there be found a single image that can be representative of all letters of the alphabet?
A is for A Xylohphone
B is for the Band in which I will play the Xylophone
C is for the all the Concerts in which I will play the Xylophone
D is the for the Disappointment my parents showed for my selection of the Xylophone
.
.
.
M is for the Mallets, used to play to Xylophone
.
.
.
W is for the time Wasted, learning to play the Xylophone
X is for the way the Mallets are held whilst playing the Xylophone
Y is for Why did you choose to dedicate so much time to playing a Xylophone?
Z is for the Zoo to which the Xylophone was donated as entertainment for the chimpanzees
Just having the stream-of-consciousness writing above, I think it should also turn into the story of the eventually fatal decline of enthusiasm for the instrument.
Good observation, it could conceivably be a slightly distorted image of paint coming out of a tube! The waviness of the axe handle does look quite strange.
However it'd be a really counter intuitive choice to use a green Y for "yellow"...
Anybody who has bought children’s toys on Amazon before would immediately think, “oh, it’s because it’s a knockoff made in China, this is not worth further investigation”. And they would be right.
The widespread manufacture of low price goods in China had been at full steam for over a decade, closer to two, by 2005 the date of first manufacture of the ball.
And the manufacturer couldn't find the original designers' details. And laid no claim to copyright (which seems strange).
Perhaps it was the case of a knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff. A CAD file from the 1990s bumping around commodity manufactures via QQ and USB sticks, the design adapted the next order of 10,000 items by any one of a multitude of small commodities producers. Having sourced during that time to now, I'd fully believe it.
Wow, that Dan Bron sure put in some legwork. Impressive level of investigation. Same goes for many of the other commenters. It’s pretty impressive when people ban together to use their collective talents and minds this way. Are there any groups/subreddits or other places online where people get together to do this kind of stuff?
This reminds me of a wood board alphabet puzzle that was gifted to my kid which was made to both work in English and French. Every letter from B to Z were easy to guess. However the letter A was the drawing of a little girl playing in a puddle...
After reading that lengthy, well-researched answer, I felt a bit deflated when I saw another answer lower down, that seems pretty plausible given that the ball in question a knock-off created by a Chinese company:
> 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese. This translates to ax.[0]
We'll probably never know if the origin is yxa or 鉞... or even something entirely different, sadly.
The character '鉞' is not commonly used in modern Chinese. I would seriously doubt that anyone teaching Chinese would use this word to illustrate the letter 'Y' in English or Pinyin, especially to toddlers. There are plenty of child-friendly words starting with 'Y' that could be used instead.
Well, more to the point, someone teaching Chinese would be unlikely to think that illustrating a particular letter was a concept that made any sense. Pinyin is a syllabic system, not an alphabetic system.
For example, the letter Y in the syllable "yue" is notionally silent -- making it an especially terrible choice of something to illustrate! -- and "yue" could appear in the same row of a pinyin table as "wu", since they both start with the same consonant (or, more accurately, neither of them starts with a consonant at all). But Y in "yang" is not silent; it represents the same sound you'd expect if you were familiar with English.
By the same token, "i" represents a very different vowel in "shi" than it does in "ni". And interestingly enough, although "ni" rhymes with "xi" and doesn't rhyme with "shi", the traditional analysis says that "xi" and "shi" use the same vowel (again, it's supposed to be a lack of a vowel, not a vowel that exists) while "ni" is doing something that is somehow different.
Modern analysis would disagree with the traditional claim about vowels, but can support the idea that "yue" and "wu" both begin with a zero onset.
My personal theory is double translation of sorts. The item in question could be a 'hatchet.' Many romance languages use 'j' for the 'h' sound in English. Somebody somewhere was looking at 'jatchet.' Next, someone assumed that the j was pronounced 'y' as in a Germanic language (and also Semitic?). Thus, they ended up with 'yatchet.'
Of course, 'y' is right next to 'h' on a qwerty keyboard, so it could just be a typo if they're going for hatchet.
> Of course, 'y' is right next to 'h' on a qwerty keyboard, so it could just be a typo if they're going for hatchet.
I could also potentially see somebody, not entirely comfortable with reading/writing latin script, mixing them up as the glyphs aren't entirely dissimilar.
It’s questions like these that made StackExchange worth visiting and browsing. When they decided to be super strict about being on topic it made the quality of the sites go downhill a lot. Now there is much less reason for experts to hang out on the sites and while there provide answers to new questions.
> The close votes are misguided. The question is about English. That the most likely answer is a Swedish word does not change the fact that the question is about English.
FFS. Wherever people can put their own words on someone else's website, you'll find this guy.
Sums up stack overflow moderation. At least in the future any time anyone has any tangential questions about children’s toys, axes, or the letter y, they can point to this and mark it as duplicate.
It's not a really really badly drawn ax with a weird wavy yellow handle, it's yellow paint coming out of a paint pot. The reason the "ax" looks nothing at all like an ax is that it isn't supposed to be an ax.
The term 'paint pot' is perhaps confusing, the drawing represents the end of a 'tube of paint' out of which yellow paint has been squeezed. The 'y' word is indeed 'yellow'.
That set of toy cubes had everything: letter not matching a word, image not matching a word (like an orc from Lineage 2 for "щука"), made up words like "knifefork" and of course lots of typos.
That's an American company. I think the GP meant the Chinese knock-off manfacturer. And yeah, the reason nobody did was probably because it was impossible.
I was convinced of this initially, but then I went back, deeper into the rabbit hole of the stackexchange discussion, and someone tracked down this image as clipart attached to the chinese characters for "axe" - so the illustrator did choose this image as specifically being an axe.
that's creative, and now I see it this way too. if only the "tube" was oriented so the "paint" was more lined up with the mouth. that would make for an awkward yaxe though
I think that's what it's supposed to be. Probably one artist's initial sketch was handed off to another artist who misinterpreted it as an axe and rendered as such
Oh yeah, that answer is incredible. Makes me think of the "Obama Harry Potter Sonic Backpack". Don't worry thought, it can't hurt you in your nightmares.
A wonderful example of the human propensity to "hallucinate" meaning starting from a random connection (there's an undoin uncommon specific word for that - also noticeable in children and psych).
Most of the images are hard to figure out. For example, if the picture of the cat was not next to a C, I would have thought it to be a monkey. I would have assumed the dog to be actually a pet cow. The blade of the so called axe does look like a beaker or an old fashioned fountain pen ink bottle pouring out yellow ink or paint.
I came up with 'Yaks', plural of a type of beast of burden/farm animal. Probably not the solution, but I didn't see the solution on the post, just a Swedish word suggested. What was the solution decided on?
Ok, I conflated 'looks like' with 'sounds like'. Still curious about the solution though.
Why do I remember something like this resulting in the answer being “yeoman” as in a worker of land, also considered one who often chops wood?
The effort given in the top answer is extraordinary, and is probably the real reason for the submission, so perhaps trying to answer the actual question is off topic…
It isn't a yurt. It doesn't look even remotely like a yurt, even a yurt with a chimney. It's obviously meant to be an axe. It has a clearly depicted edge and the 'smoke' would need to be be coming out of the side at a really weird angle. It doesn't even have a door.
100% yurt.
Yurts in cold climates is a thing. Sometimes they just have a smoke hole in the roof instead of a chimney. All the pictures are at weird angles, they're printed on a ball! :-)
The geometry of the ball isn't relevant - the "smoke" as depicted is going out of the side of the "yurt" at a right angle and continuing in that direction. That's not how smoke works. And the "yurt" itself is clearly depicted as a wedge. With the "smoke" attached to it as a cylinder.
If it's supposed to be a yurt, one has to ask why someone went through obvious effort to make a yurt look as much like an axe as possible.
These theories are fun. My first instinct was that maybe it’s for “yeoman”. But that’s not the most kid-friendly or likely word to appear on a ball. “Yellow” seems a lot more plausible, and the spray paint can idea is especially clever.
The most upvoted answer gives the explanation the ball manufacturer is Swedish ('axe' in Swedish starts with a 'y'), but other answers say it was probably manufactured in a country where English wasn't the first language (e.g. China) and the 'y' for axe was simply a typo.
The evidence against the Swedish explanation is that the ball says c for 'cat' and d for 'dog', but in swedish the translations are 'katt' and 'hund' respectively.
This may be a case where the most upvoted answer is likely wrong, but because it was so entertaining and took so much effort, it was upvoted much more than the boring (but probably correct) answer.
EDIT: I had only skimmed the most upvoted answer, it does indeed trace the ball's manufacture to China and suggest the 'y for axe' is a typo. Apologies for the confusion.
The most upvoted answer doesn't say that it's a Swedish designed ball, rather that it is a Chinese knockoff where they moved things around and replaced some of the symbols with ones from books/toys for Swedish kids.
Hence why the ones that match the 'official' ball make sense in English but the ones that don't make more sense in Swedish.
Is there also a Swedish version of the ball? In that case I have a possible explanation.
When the ball was copied, they may have worked from images. You need more than one image because the ball is round.
Could the copycat have used an English version for one of the sides, and Swedish for the other? By looking at the images and letters around the Y, they actually make more sense in Swedish
The poster may have made a mistake by interpreting the "W" for "worm". If the Swedish theory is right, it is actually an "M" as worm is translated to "mask" in Swedish. They also seem unaware that a picature of the nail can also be translated as "nagel".
E - Elefant
N - Nagel
M - Mask / Metmask
K - Känguru
To me it looks like that side fits the Swedish words perfectly. The "Q" (queen) is copied from a different picture that comes from the English version
Edit: One of the comments on Stack exchange seems to suggest the same theory. The symbols seem to be a mix of at least two different sources.
It's clearly not properly designed to be for swedish, this is noted in the reply, apart from some letters being off, it lacks åäö. But it's still not clear why they would use "u-boat" for u. While apparently correct english (never heard it), it being Swedish ubåt seems higher likelihood to me.
I'm wondering if they might have combined mixed two designs, as a lot of the letters works in both. Maybe they looked at two pictures and didn't realise one was for another language? It seems possible to me that they'd design the ball based on product pictures, and those are often not showing all angles of a product.
That's not a "nowadays" thing. That has always been the meaning of U-boat; it was an explicit propaganda goal to use different words for German submarines and American ones.
Took me about a minute to identify it is a yo-yo (without reading any of the discussions), and they point out there that the official ball has a yo-yo for Y, so I am quite convinced that it is supposed to be a yo-yo as well. Just not drawn particularly nicely: the yellow bit is a cartoon string, the blue-and-white bit is the yo-yo's "body".
Edit: although now that I finished reading the rest of the investigation, there are quite a few arguments for "yxa" as well. Still seems like an odd coincidence to see a yo-yo there myself, and then to read that it is supposed to be a yo-yo on the official ball.
