I think there’s evidence found for the origin of “彁” as the result of a poor scan of a newspaper article. Look up “彁 新聞” to find some japanese sources about this.
Ghost characters reveal something about the joint semantic and phonetic nature of most Chinese characters. I know 彁 isn't real: but it still insists on a pronunciation: ka in Japanese, (gē or gé Mandarin). And it hints at meaning: bowed weapon, sound, elder brother; but your guess is as good as mine!
Where did you get the original 'example' of 沌 / 屯 from? Most people prefer to use examples that they have some kind of personal knowledge of.
> There are other meanings to it. [沌]
Not as many as you might expect. It's (part of) a mythological term referring to the state of the universe before it took the form we can observe today. It has a couple of other metaphorical meanings coming from that, or from traditional sayings related to that.
I see that wiktionary lists 沌がる as an alternate spelling of 塞がる "be blocked" [塞 - obstruct / block / plug], which looks like the closest thing we're likely to find to your earlier claim. Obvious problems using this to support your comment are:
- There's still no "gathering" or "accumulating" sense. (Nor is there an "obstruct" sense of 屯.)
- This is a meaning assigned long after the character came into existence, which means it cannot have informed the construction of the character.
I learned about 沌 quite a while ago when I studied the first few chapters of Genesis in Japanese (混沌 was used to describe the earth in Gen 1:2) and something jogged my memory when I was looking for examples.
The dictionary link I posted had あつまる、水があつまる in the first definition. I don't know if that's a reliable dictionary. Maybe you think it's not?
> - This is a meaning assigned long after the character came into existence, which means it
> cannot have informed the construction of the character.
I don't know anything about which meanings were used first and which were added later, but what you say sounds believable.
> - There's still no "gathering" or "accumulating" sense. (Nor is there an "obstruct" sense of 屯.)
Let me clarify. Even without the first sense for 沌 in the above dictionary (あつまる、水があつまる) some of the other definitions for 沌 had "gather" included in it conceptually, namely clog and joined together without distinction.
I confirmed a few, and they seem correct. I thought 界 was the most easily understood example. 介 means being between two things and contributes the pronunciation. 界 means region, span, separate, division.
> This phenomenon we are talking about is called 会意兼形声文字
There are no kana in that word, but if you search baidu for it you'll find a total of zero uses. It's not difficult to understand what the phrase means - "a character that is simultaneously 会意 and 形声" - but it's not an existing term. It looks more like a joke, the way English speakers will sometimes talk about "autoantonyms".
There is a list of six traditional categories of character construction, and we still understand what five of them mean:
象形 - a character that literally pictures its referent, as 日 depicts the sun or 木 depicts a tree.
指事 - a character that metaphorically pictures its referent, as 刃 indicates the edge of a blade by placing a mark next to 刀 ["knife"], or 本 indicates roots by placing a mark at the bottom of 木 ["tree"].
会意 - a character whose meaning derives from the interaction of two semantic components, as 明 ["bright"] pictures the sun and the moon, or 休 ["rest"] pictures a man next to a tree.
形声 - a character with one component indicating the meaning and another component indicating the pronunciation. The vast majority of characters are in this class, but we may use the example 河 ["river" or specifically "the Yellow River", today pronounced hé], in which the semantophore is 氵["water"] and the phonophore is 可 [a modal verb having to do with permission or ability, today pronounced kě].
假借 - a character that is borrowed from some other word (because it shares the same pronunciation). These have tended to be "corrected" over time, but an example would be the tendency in ancient texts to write 女 ["female"] for the word that is today written 汝 ["you"].
(The other category is 转注. We don't know what it means, but we are given an example - it means whatever the relationship between 考 and 老 is.)
> I confirmed a few, and they seem correct.
Really?
Really?
--- EDIT - my discussion of 与 is flawed. There is an ancient 与, and it is given as sharing its pronunciation with 與, while 與 is said to be 会意 with 与 as one of the components. 與 could be fairly called "both 会意 and 形声", though 与 can't. ---
The first example on the page is 与. This is a simplified form (from 與) and it doesn't carry any phonetic or semantic weight. It's a representation of that bit in the top middle of the older form. I can be sure that the page meant to list the simplified form, though, because it's in the category of "three strokes".
----------------------
Moving to the "four stroke" category, we can see 切 ["cut", today qiē]. This is as clear as they come: it has a phonetic component 七 [today qī], and a semantic component 刀 ["knife"]. There is absolutely no possibility that it could be interpreted as 会意, because the meaning of the phonetic component is "seven".
円 is another simplified form. It means "round" (like a circle). The older form is 圓, which does have two components: the semantic component 囗, and the phonetic component 員. The meaning of the phonetic component is "staff; personnel". I'm not seeing the case for how that contributes to expressing roundness.
攴 ["strike; beat"] is another 形声 character with a phonetic component 卜 and a semantic component 又 ["again" - the connection here isn't obvious to me]. The phonetic component on its own refers to divining the future, a concept unrelated to 攴.
(仁 appears to be a fair call. It is identified as a 会意 character for what I assume are good mystical philosophical reasons. But equally it's true that 仁 shares its pronunciation with its lefthand component 人 (and this was also true in the past).)
In the "five stroke" category, we find 氷 ["ice"]. This character doesn't have two components and therefore cannot be 会意 or 形声. Today it is more commonly represented as 冰, which does... sort of... have two components. However, it's a weird case, because the component on the left, 冫, is usually understood as the combining form of 冰 itself, making this character infinitely recursive. The ancient form of the character had 仌 on the left, but I haven't been able to determine to my own satisfaction what that signified. As best I've been able to tell, 仌 by itself is now considered an archaic variant of 冰, and it means "ice", making the ancient character self-recursive in the manner of the modern one. 冰 (or rather the older form 仌水) is identified as a 会意 character, and I guess you can see it that way - you have a character meaning "ice" built from components meaning "ice" and "water" - but since it seems to be identical with its own left component I have difficulty calling it 形声.
At this point, I really don't see any value in looking further into the page.
> Moving to the "four stroke" category, we can see 切 ["cut", today qiē]. This is as clear
> as they come: it has a phonetic component 七 [today qī], and a semantic component 刀
> ["knife"]. There is absolutely no possibility that it could be interpreted as 会意, because
> the meaning of the phonetic component is "seven".
Originally, 七 meant to cut vertically and horizontally (confirmed on a few sources).
Regarding 與 and 与, the site shows the breakdown for the former and shows how it was the older form for the latter. I guess you didn't actually click on the characters and look for the explanation. The analysis shows it comes from 牙+口+舁. The last is the meaning as well as pronunciation, the meaning being "hold up, carry together"
> > I confirmed a few, and they seem correct.
> Really?
Yes I did click through and read a couple of explanations.
As for 圓, according to the site the inner portion actually represents a picture of a 鼎 (ding). It is surprising to me, and a lot of this is theoretical and there will be more than one opinion. That same site doesn't say 員 itself is related to ding.
> if you search baidu for it you'll find a total of zero uses
It is true that most hanzi are phonosemantic compounds; however, Japanese-created kanji are mostly semantic compounds. You can still guess the meaning, but good luck trying to guess the pronunciation.
The article mentions "an example of 彁 mistakenly used in a digitized Taisho newspaper due to a faded printing of 彊", but to me that implies the symbol already existed before then.
Isn't that backwards? The nonexistent character is in the -digitized- version so presumably OCR or something got 彊 wrong, that's not saying that 彁 was used in the -print- version.
Indeed, the source link is about exactly this: a crappy scan appears to have 彁 but a better copy reveals it was 彊.
I think you're both saying the same thing: the digitization of the article wouldn't have been the source, since 彁 would have had to exist before the digitization happened in order for the OCR to misread 彊 as 彁.
Most kanji are a combination of several smaller parts called "radicals" in English. If you look at these two kanji through this lens, you will see that it's actually a very simple mistake, one existing radical is replaced by another existing radical. It is very easy to imagine software that was working exactly like that: interpreting kanji as a combination of radicals rather than individual unrelated symbols
The API lets you directly choose the model you want. Automatic thinking is a ChatGPT feature since ChatGPT has always been a “GPT wrapper” in that sense.
I don't think the dialog as described in the article is accurate and I can't find a screenshot of Windows NT that says "Windows has been shut down." The only screenshots I can find say, "It is now safe to turn off your computer." The confusion around the Restart button is understandable, but the framing of the story seems to imply that the old dialog led to the later phrase, "It is now safe to turn off your computer."
Looking at the photos, that calculator wheel on the back looks wonderful. Certainly better than the contemporary paper calculator wheel that I got with my Argus.
It is really great and always where you need it. The shutter on these things is amazing and solves all problems with leaf shutters, filth has little effect on it and even if it gets dirty enough to inhibit function you can just open the back of the camera and click the shutter and stop its rotation with your finger so you can clean it, it is like 1/16" thick steel so you are not going to hurt it unless you actively try. The only real problem with the shutter is the spring will need replacing every 10k photos or so, but that is a simple matter and even if you ignore it all that happens is that the shutter speed is slightly slower than it should be. This camera convinced me that leaf shutters should not exist.
In my case, I wanted to edit some HDR environment maps. They are a 360deg image of the environment used for 3D work. They need to be floating-point so that arbitrary brightnesses can be captured and used to calculate the lighting in the scene correctly.
This is interesting... when I visited recently I realized that Suica on Apple Wallet was more convenient than the physical card. The top reason is that you can use Apple Pay to top up your Suica whenever and wherever you are, without downloading any special app or needing to login to something.
However, one of my credit cards didn't work for that with no clear reason given, but a different one worked almost every time.
In my past life I built and sold dispatch software for microtransit / on-demand rides. (UberPool as a service, more or less.)
What this article doesn’t say:
* Many, many cities have something similar already, but only for riders with disabilities. (“paratransit”) You need to schedule your ride the day before, but they will take you from door to door.
* The cost per ride is quite high: more than $20 per ride, often. This cost is borne by the city, while riders pay little to nothing. In very few cases does it make financial sense - most places aren’t replacing their buses with microtransit.
* The best utilization I’ve seen is on campuses, where there are a fixed set of stops in a small region, and a large population of people who can’t or don’t want to drive (maybe due to limited parking).
Istanbul has an oddly good system, where vans run a set route, but you can ask for them to stop wherever. I feel like this would be a better balance that would allow for greater coverage, while also lowering the cost of equipment and in the very least, eliminating the need to walk as much to a stop. It's also faster because it's basically a large taxi, so once the van is full, you only stop where the passengers need. This is only a supplement there, but I think it would work better than the majority of bus set-ups currently used.
