Ed Jaggard's Chinese Words for November 1998
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Saturday
基基藤
ji1 ji1 teng2
kiekie
ji1 - used for the sound in this word
teng2 - 1. cane; rattan 2. vine
Recently, my search for words in Chinese has evolved into looking for new concepts and names of things with which I have been unaware of. Today I found this word, kiekie, in my Chinese-English dictionary which fit into that category. In the interest of expanding knowledge of not only the Chinese language, but also new ideas and exotica in general, I decided to make it the word of the day.
Kiekie is a Maori name for a climbing plant found in New Zealand. The fruit can be used as food and the leaves can be woven into baskets (I got that much from the Chinese-English dictionary - (新西蘭露兜樹科攀緣植物，漿果可食用，葉可用以編織籃筐) [Maori]
I did a web search using Hotbot and found a list of Maori terms and a travel guide with some beautiful pictures of New Zealand and a quick reference to the kiekie plant. Links to these sites are provided at the right.
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November 21, 1998
Glossary of Maori Terms
The
Queen Charlotte Track
Marlborough Sounds
South Island, New Zealand
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Friday
yin3 duo3
indole
yin3 (shen3) - smile at; sneer at
duo3 - chemical element
For the last several years that I have been building my Chinese Dictionary using a program I wrote in Visual Basic and an ACCESS data base, I have been plagued by the problem of encountering characters which do not occur in the BIG5 coding scheme. I am not quite ready to switch over to Unicode just yet, so my response was to just bypass them. That option no longer works for me!! I have decided to augment my database by including graphics for characters not in the BIG5 font files.
This word is my first test case. Neither of these two characters occurs in BIG5. Yin3 is unicode 2.0 value U+5432 and duo3 is unicode 2.0 value U+54DA. The word that they make up, "indole" is a crystalline compound composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that is a decomposition product of proteins containing trytophan, often formed by reduction distillation of indigo, and used in perfumes. (Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary).
From time to time I will include one of these "graphics-only" words, because there are some interesting words that you just can't make with BIG5 code.
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November 20, 1998
INDOLE ALKALOIDS
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Wednesday
氮麻醉
dan4 ma2 zui4
nitrogen narcosis ("Rapture of the Deep")
dan4 - nitrogen
ma2 - numb; torpid; inactive
zui4 - 1, drunk; intoxicated; tipsy 2. infatuated; charmed
ma2zui4 - 1. to anesthetize 2. to dope; to drug
Nitrogen narcosis - Rapture of the Deep - The Bends
Rather than attempting to explain something I know very little about, follow the link at the right to a very comprehensive FAQ about nitrogen narcosis. (And enjoy the animated gif of Mozilla diving!!)
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November 18, 1998
Rodale's Scuba Diving Scuba Diver's Handbook
Nitrogen Narcosis
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