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I noticed the word 'jugaad' from his speech and looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad

It seems like a very befitting word for the eponymous "hacker" ethos of this site.


But the same word has also been over used to provide cover or respectability for all types of anti-patterns from poor planning, to lack of any safety net or margins, to cutting corners, disregard for standards and regulations, and hustle culture where the ends justify means however questionable.

So a pinch of salt needed when we hear this word.


see also "bricolage"



Green (綠) in Chinese also came later. In Old Chinese, 青 was generally used to represent both blue and green colors.

While the word 綠 to mean green has been attested as far back as 1000 BC, the idea that it was a separate color rather than describing a shade of 青 is relatively more recent. Wikipedia[0] indicates that it was adopted in the early 20th century in Chinese (as part of vernacular language reforms) and after WWII in Japanese, though these claims are currently marked with [citation needed]. While both are relatively recent, the usage in Chinese did have a longer period of time to take hold.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...



You have truncated a character so that url does not work

https://archive.ph/GxPxr


It looks like some of the omissions you mentioned are instead included on a separate page for the OEM Service Release 2 version of Windows 95: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/win95osr2


> This is the first and only Windows to denote the current time zone on the map. Surprisingly, in the next editions of Windows, the world map simply occupies space and the highlight is nowhere to be seen.

Explained here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...

> In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.

> The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.


I thought this was solved by setting map boundaries according to your locale.

Whatever country you set everything you, adjusts maps as well?


No, this is a false cognate. Chinese bāo (包) is short for miànbāo (麵包), literally meaning "flour wrap/package", and its use has been attested since the Song Dynasty (ca. 11th century), whereas the Portuguese didn't have contact with China until the 16th century. The pronunciation of 包 at that time was still mostly similar to what it is today – using IPA notation, it is reconstructed as /pˠau/, compared to /pau̯/ today.


I'm not affiliated nor do I personally have any experience with this service, but have heard good things about the Canto To Mando Blueprint: https://www.thecmblueprint.com/


Evidence that Chinese can be perfectly understandable written without the use of characters can be seen in the Dungan language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language), which can be considered a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

> Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.)

Indeed, because of the way Dungan is written, it ended up evolving differently with respect to how new vocabulary is derived, often borrowing words phonetically from Russian instead of constructing them from Chinese morphemes that might otherwise be considered ambiguous when used individually.


No, "Chinese Traditional" refers to the character set used to write each character[1], but the actual text is still written according with the vocabulary and grammar of Standard Written Chinese, which is based on spoken Mandarin.

As an example, this is the sentence "Please give me his book" written in Standard Written Chinese using "Chinese Traditional" characters: 請你給我他的書。

If you use "Chinese Simplified" characters[2] instead, it would still be the same words, but some of the characters have simpler forms: 请你给我他的书。

However, both of those renderings still follow Mandarin vocabulary and grammar. Even though Cantonese speakers generally read and write Standard Written Chinese (in either Traditional or Simplified characters), if they were to actually convey that sentence in spoken Cantonese, it would actually be quite different. Written Cantonese[3] is generally only used in informal contexts, but a rendering of the sentence in Cantonese would instead be: 唔該你畀佢本書我。 (Traditional) 唔该你畀佢本书我。 (Simplified)

The written Cantonese version uses vocabulary and grammatical constructions that are not part of Standard Written Chinese, and Google Translate is currently not able to translate to written Cantonese. I've found that over time though, Google Translate has been getting better at translating from written Cantonese to English (however, for the example I just gave, it appears it still completely botches the translation; it currently thinks it translates to "You shouldn't have let her book me").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese


I just tried Bing Translate, and even though it nominally supports "Cantonese (Traditional)", their translations don't seem to be much better for the example sentence I gave.

"Please give me his book" is translated to: 請把他的書畀我。 While it does use the usual Cantonese word for "give" (畀), the rest of the sentence still mostly uses Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, notably the 把 construction, the third-person pronoun 他, and the use of the 的 genitive particle, which aren't typically used in spoken Cantonese.

Conversely, 唔該你畀佢本書我 is translated to: "Please give him this book me." This seems to indicate that it doesn't understand Cantonese's ability to use measure words (such as 本) as genitive particles, nor does it understand that the word order of the direct and indirect objects in the sentence are switched compared to the usual order in Standard Written Chinese.


ChatGPT seems to fare much better:

> Translate "please give me his book" to Cantonese.

> > "請俾我佢嘅書" is the Cantonese translation for "please give me his book".

This appears generally fine though stylistically not as colloquial. Using 請 for "please" is considered more formal since it's usually more written than spoken. In addition, it uses the Cantonese genitive particle 嘅, though I think most speakers would prefer to use the measure word 本 in this context, but this is still perfectly grammatical. Lastly, it still retains the same word order for direct and indirect objects as Standard Written Chinese, which while not completely colloquial, is still considered acceptable when spoken.

BTW, since written Cantonese isn't standardized, 畀 can often be seen written as 俾, but they refer to the same word.

> Translate "唔該你畀佢本書我" to English.

> > The Cantonese phrase "唔該你畀佢本書我" translates to "Please give me his book" in English.

Exactly correct.


Google translate Cantonese: 唔該你畀佢本書我

Real life Cantonese: 拎佢本書黎thx


Being a native hk Cantonese speaker this is a surprise you really cannot maintain the word sequence …


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