Re: OT: Conorthography aesthetics (WAS: Re: Featural code based on ...

In a message dated 2003:09:11 05:33:38 AM, ray.brown@FREEUK.COM writes:

>In fact, H.S Teoh, but I don't find the example of Eisedian at all ugly.
>in fact, I like it - I find it attractive.
    Likewise.
    Teohie and I both came up with somewhat similar con-ortho's at about the
same time.
    Not too odd that we are both South East Asian Chinese, too - therefore we
have seen oodles of very different orthographies in everyday life... _and_,
historio-culturally and aesthetically, for the educated, cultured Chinese
person there are the _Si Mei_ - "The 4 Beautiful Things": music, good food, poetry
and interesting conversation(s)/_objets d'art_ = "atmosphere", "ambience"...

    One would be absolutely appalled and loathed to be without any one of
these things in life (or in the life-after-death/next life)...
    Only "crude Barbarian-like persons" and "running mongrel-dog-like Asians
*** and imperialistic foreigners" disregard/disrespect these things... and the
basic, essential Taoist religio-philosophical aesthetic sensibilities
undergirding these 4 things...

    *** i.e. the vandalistic Red Guard neo-Maoists during the so-call
"Cultural Revolution" (1966-68); the invading Imperial Japanese Army during the
Sino-Japanese War - esp'ly the Rape of Nanking & Shanghai; and - in some Cantonese
opinions - Manchus, Koreans and Taiwanese in general.
    Additionally, some really "hard-core" Cantonese consider most northern
Chinese peasantry in this scorned, despised category --- like Mao himself, most
of the early Maoists were dour, "grey-ash-faced," puritanical northern
peasants afterall. Northerners also tend to be way more Neo-Confucianist than
Southerners, who are generally more Taoist _and_ Buddhist in a bewildering assortment
of varying mixtures. Northerners also say the Cantonese are "too smart/cheeky
for their own good - and the good of others," that the Cantonese will eat
"almost anything four-legged with its back to Heaven" and that the notorious
gamblin', congame-playing Cantonese are always after _their_ money by hook or by cr
ook...
    Hey!!!, if you survived hundreds of centuries of disasters like floods,
famines, wars, invasions and military/cultural occupations, ya'd be the same
way --- wiley, feisty survivalists _par excellence_ - like Bruce Lee - ready and
most willing to thumb their noses at the hostile world ... make weirdly
gleeful spooky loud noises as the shit hits the fan ... roll with the punches -
even if the odds/gods are stacked and lined up against them.


---  º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º  º°`°º ø,¸~->

Hanuman Zhang, Sloth-Style Gungfu Typist
"the sloth is a chinese poet upsidedown" --- Jack Kerouac {1922-69}
http://www.boheme-magazine.net

    "The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language,
and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of
human comprehension." - Ezra Pound

    "One thing foreigners, computers, and poets have in common
is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt

    "There is no reason for the poet to be limited to words, and in fact the
poet is most poetic when inventing languages. Hence the concept of the poet as
'language designer'."  --- O. B. Hardison, Jr.

"La poésie date d' aujour d'hui."   (Poetry dates from today)
"La poésie est en jeu."             (Poetry is in play)
                --- Blaise Cendrars

Reply