Slashdot Mirror
A Gallery of Unusual Chinese Robots
Roland Piquepaille writes "Chinese engineers have unveiled a series of robots lately — without releasing lots of technical details about them. In the past two months, I've gathered pictures of robots which can act as waiters in restaurants in Hong Kong or pull rickshaws near Beijing. I've also found a four-finger robotic hand able to play organ, a female robot greeting tourists visiting the Sichuan Science Museum with 'ni hao' ('How are you?' in Mandarin — if my sources are correct), and even a robotic chimpanzee."
Ni hao : Hello
Ni hao ma : How are you
Literal : You well
ma == ?
Ni hao: You well -> Hello
Ni hao ma: Are you well? -> How are you?
I believe that you just restated the exact same thing as the post to which you replied (see "Literal : You well
ma == ?" in that post). That being said, if you want to correct the post to which you replied, you should have probably picked upon the fact that the poster neglected to include the tone marks (specifically, the numbers associated with them in PinYin).
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
artifical feces has already been done by a Belgian artist:
http://www.cloaca.be/machines.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Delvoye
I believe that you just restated the exact same thing as the post to which you replied (see "Literal : You well
ma == ?" in that post). That being said, if you want to correct the post to which you replied, you should have probably picked upon the fact that the poster neglected to include the tone marks (specifically, the numbers associated with them in PinYin).
Yes, it looks like Slashdot doesn't permit the use these characters, specificly the vowels with the accent marks, so one should if they have a clue gone with... I believe ni(3) hao(3) ma? (i and a with inverse ^) is correct for Mandarin, where if you were using njstar's Cantonese input you would type in "Nei ho ma?" IIRC.
As far as a translation, my favorite has always been "You good, 'eh?", not to poke too much fun at Canadians but the popular use of the Canadian English interrogative particle "'eh?" is a good way to communicate exactly what the words mean.
But as for the poster, they were close enough to being correct. The problem in looking up such details is books tend to list Chinese as a single language, and not specificly say which particular Chinese one is talking about, and the phrase "ni hao ma?" tends to be listed without the tone marks, as is normal for Chinglish.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.