Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Subvert Censorship With a Popular Pun
Anonymusing writes "In spoken Chinese, 'grass-mud horse' sounds virtually identical to an obscenity (hint: it begins with "mother-") — and as a cartoon character, it has become an amazing phenomenon. Meant as a subversive attack on censors, the alpaca-like mythical creature has led to a cuddly stuffed animal — selling over 180,000 in a few weeks — and a wildly popular YouTube video with children's voices singing words that are either completely benign or incredibly offensive, depending on how you listen." Update: 03/13 09:29 GMT by T : Since this story was set up, the originally linked video seems to have been pulled. Searching YouTube reveals that there are some alternatives available, at least for now.
Watch the cnut moderators censor this fscking post for all the shirty language it contains!
Hey, mods: kiss my RSS!
I find it fittingly ironic that in a story about the nefarious Chinese censorship that the slashdot editors felt it okay to censor the expletive in question.
I ended up doing this to phonetically construct sentences to pass a filter at someone's job, as you cannot write about less by Anns without it triggering it. And if you have friends who are less by ann, that might be a problem if you decide to write about it.
I hope this doesn't inspire spammers though; Just imagine an inbox with Jew cheese hot who men taking a hot low duh! Now with 5 extra inches of pie Nile mask joule in men lay Ness. With slew tea nurses.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
mother-in-law?
Yes its like that in Cantonese as well. I gave up trying to learn my wife's language when I found out that the words for Aunt and Vagina sound exactly the same to me.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Fayle.
What's the difference?
We call it here as "Intellectual Property dispute", "DMCA Violation", "Child Porn", "Meth Making Instructions", or other undesirable works.
In Utah, possession of even a single picture considered to be child porn is 10 years. So, why pretend that Censorship doesnt exist here? It does, just under other names.
There's something ghoti-y about that comment.
That is Sofa King Awesome!
As a Chinese, lemme explain some background..
The "grass-mud-horse" thingy used to appear in the Baidu Baike, Baidu's Wikipedia-like project. The Baidu Baike is widely regarded as part of government's effort to control Chinese people's source of information and a central hub of the whole "harmonization" stupidity, for Baidu is at the same side with the govn't. By creating a new webopedia it gives them more control over it. Naturally the contents in Baidu Baike are heavily censored against politically incorrect material but no one gives a shit about factual accuracy or copyright violations that's rampant there.
Some anonymous person thus put the articles for "grass-mud-horse", along with other jokes of this kind, to Baidu Baike. Unsurprisingly they stayed there for quite a long time without being removed, because there was no "political" stuff in them, even if the contents were outrageously out of touch with reality. This was seen as a punch in Baidu's face, and by extension, a joke on government's attempts to control online speech. After the "grass-mud-horse" became widely known the Baidu Baike articles were removed but the meme went wild.
So much for the background. I hope I made some points across the Great Language Barrier.. It's kinda surprising to see you guys here discussing the caonima stuff at /. ;)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
This results in tons and tons of words sounding exactly the same, and the only way to know them apart is by context.
It is, however, not as bad as you make it sound; the "context" is very often that certain meanings are expressed by certain combinations of words. The main reason why we think of Chinese as very confusing, I think, is that we associate 1 character with 1 word - which was the way it worked originally, but it would be more accurate to say that each character is a "mono-syllabic meme" which can occasionaly stand on its own, but more often is combined to form polysyllabic words. In this sense Chinese is actually not that dissimilar to most other languages.
Thus you have "qiche" (two characters) meaning "car" or "to ride a bicycle" - the ambiguity being an artifact of my inability to conveniently represent the tones of the language. Traditionally the "qi" part of it means "steam" and "che" means vehicle, so "qi" is still used in many combinations that are associated with steam and "che" is used as part of most vehicles.
Well, in most of continental Europe, claiming that "The Holocaust didn't happen" will land you in jail for a few years, too.
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
The follies of English orthography
achieve heights of linguistic pornography
when the fish that you fry
you spell g-h-o-t-i
for pleasure instead of cryptography...
They even copy Briney Spears.
Is she Britney's pirate cousin?
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
Yeah, but unfortunately her best album "Arr!... I Did It Again" never made it to the top twenty. Her second album: "...Lubber One More Time" was even less successful. Sad but true.