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Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Crazed Ad in the Washington Post


Some guy paid $30K to have this baby put in the Washington Post. I especially like the crack that "Taiwanese" sounds like "Taiwan Ni Sui" = "Taiwan You Die". Glad somebody is making money off this stuff.

Click on it to see the full size version on my Flickr account (click on ALL SIZES).

8 comments:

  1. I wish I had that much money to throw around.

    In case anyone's wondering what he's going on about, he objects to the the "Chi-" in "China" because it sounds like the Mandarin verb "chāi" (拆), which means:
    * tear open; take apart
    * pull down; dismantle

    Of course, what all this really means is that he's a loon. But one doesn't need to know any Mandarin to figure that out.

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  2. This is so entertaining ...

    "Dragon Time (龍的時代)" to be pronounced as "Long Time"? No, that's wrong. It should be:

    "Long de sheh dai"

    such that the chinese way of pronouncing "time" (as "sheh dai") is honored too.

    I thought, oh yea, this kind of language revolution should have started from inside China, but not asking other countries to initiate it.

    Then one thing suddenly came to my mind: Oh, no, they started it already! I've seen several pictures of Chinese textbooks they use in their English classes. Something like:

    "I am very happy today"

    should be:

    "我今天很高興"

    but you would see such a line right below it:

    哀 頁母 威力 黑皮 特跌

    Reading it quickly, it does sound like "I am very happy today" !

    Now I know where this ads came from.

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  3. Wow. When I first saw that headline, I thought your were exaggerating. How wrong I was, that is one insane ad.

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  4. Why is Zhongguoren Chinese and Taiwanren Taiwan people and not Taiwanese.

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  5. Mark s: Thanks, I read the ad twice and couldn't make head nor tail of what he was rambling on about.

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  6. Do yourself a favor and check out the websites he has provided on the bottom. All aboard the Crazy Train!

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  7. It takes a lot more then the sum of Engrish and Chingrish to pronounce Chinese as 拆你死. I am suprised to learn that he's from Taipei. I was wondering if he speaks some other form of Chinese dialect.

    On the other hand, what is the etymological root of the word "China"?

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  8. Language Log, which is the top linguistics blog in the States, has picked up on this (complete with a link back to your scan) with a guest post by Prof. Victor H. Mair. See Vitally worst: "Chinese" sounds like "to tear you to die".

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