It's a rigged game. If there's a bet that player X will foul player Y, without proper safeguards, player X can bet on himself and then intentionally player player Y. The actual harm is that by the rules of the betting, no one should know the outcome who could also bet on the game, so the losers are being robbed of their money.
In this particular context, it's also possible that there are illicit transfers of money without being immediately noticeable. Bribery could happen at the highest levels with it being very difficult to trace and prosecute.
> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”.
> Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。”
Two observations. One, I see this in Thai, too, which might yet preserve that earlier syntax. ไม่เผ็ด ไม่กิน ("No spicy, no eat") is perfectly fine in Thai, though it is possible (and very unidiomatic) to create a formal conditional using เพราะ ("because").
Two, it's also true that ancient languages in general have a different logic to their syntax than their modern descendants. I've always felt it was easier to read and understand academic French than ancient Latin, despite having much less training in the former than the latter. There is probably a shift that happens, that isn't always deliberate, when speakers of a language encounter a radically different world than one they were born into. And add contact to that: the author write of creolization, though it's not only about vocabulary and syntax. That's the just the visible. It's often about changing how we perceive things. To return to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types.
"to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types."
Then, ปลาหมึก = coleoidea? If so, the squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are (in English and many other languages) all just types of coleoidea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleoidea
Tai languages are a completely different language family to Chinese, written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred. By contrast, Chinese has an uninterrupted written history spanning thousands of years with world leading poetry, philosophy and science. In terms of historical and linguistic nuance, comparing the two on the basis of an excluded adverb is like eating a banana and declaring it tree-rice.
(Re: child as can't post reply - Assam was always effectively surrounded by larger empires (Tibet, Myanmar, Bengal/Pala/northern India) and a disease-ridden tropical backwater so I guess its cultural and political fate was always to be dominated by larger outside influences.
Actually IIRC there's some linguistic history in the Taic languages that Ahom influence moved eastward through Myanmar. If you look at the geography (much wider spaces) it makes sense that you'd shift focus to richer climes. Perhaps much as the south Indian seafarers who contributed so critically to Cambodia saw it as a vast and wealthy land with geographic echoes of home.)
> written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred
I agree that Thai is in a completely different language family than Chinese, but I don't see what this quoted bit has to do with anything. (And surely it would apply just as well to their neighbors to the west, who do speak a Sino-Tibetan language)
I wasn't saying that Thai and Chinese are in the same family, but that it was doing the same thing as ancient Chinese, perhaps due to contact. I think the consensus is that Kra-Tai speakers were living in China and moved into central Thailand only about a thousand years ago.
As a Fedora user, I would actually recommend Ubuntu for gamers new to Linux, just because companies that offer Linux builds tend to only support Ubuntu. It's a bit more work comparatively to get to smooth sailing on Fedora. I think that work is worth it, of course, but new users might beg to differ.
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.
>>Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
This, too, is the problem with movies and TV shows today. They worry so much about offending anyone they lose the interest of everyone. When was the last time you laughed hard and out loud?
Is there no room for describing the setting? Must every utterance that sets the atmosphere also advance the plot or reveal character? Is there no room for mood?
describing the setting should (ideally) be done through a character's interaction with the setting.
if you're developing some sort of dystopia where everyone is heavily medicated, better to show a character casually take the medication rather than describe it.
of course, that's not a rule set in stone. you can do whatever the fuck you want.
Some authors rarely describe a place objectively. We see a space through the eyes of the characters - and in doing so, we learn about our characters as we learn about the space they inhabit.
sure, if a character is in some narrative role; however I would argue that no author ever describes a place objectively, especially not a completely fictional place. The question really is if the unobjective description serves a coherent narrative purpose.
He's very efficient with prose and I find it a joy to read (well, given what he's writing about it's not always joy, but still). I'm not sure he's following that rule 100% of the time, but it's close. Depending on the setting, you can often describe it through characters' actions or how it shapes them.
Setting would provide the context for action or characterisation to occur in a meaningful way, or provoke it, so it is necessary part of both (if done for either of those purposes). Given that, the charitable interpretation would be to only provide enough description of the setting for that.
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