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A prophesy of Kanjidamus (a puzzle)

#1
Here's a bit of a puzzle for you; can you work it out?

An old man death's the fruit of shallow toil,
His body's water but spit on the soil,
The overseer draws iron and strikes the leg,
Wretched dog, your suffering begins, look forward to beg.
The tiger blinks and twists its collar for the few,
The horse's bottom surface picks a hue,
Buy powder, alter the joyful wash's dye,
The valley drums with an ancient skeleton's thigh.
The duo commence to use the dart of history:
Ancestor groups police the well of scenery,
Look for the marsh; courageous, swim for eternity.
Perform extensively to conceal an eyelet ghost,
A divination patch takes an exam roast.
The ceremony's logic is the plum: invite
To write in blood -- be careful: merely exhausted tight.
Five military dances at noon rotate,
The angle stirs the foot, such and such negate,
Turn the full card, the plank a printing plate.
Untie older sister, go back against -- how?
But fear a cavity in every beautiful shadow.

The ruler hurries to feel brave; his territory
Gives rice and goods -- a spacious factory.
The fort safeguards the treasure willow tree.
I walked at nightfall, sweeping flat grass went:
The mouth's a very noisy general orifice;
So milk only then. Fu's rotten supplement:
For comfort, bow your head for government office.

To the big dipper your self raise and look up to
The pagoda someone's woman belongs to.
The associate's spine travels towards the net and port
Think to enjoy the echo, permit the distant and short.
The nine long time liquor can be thirsty, child;
Mother's chinese acre's cold and also wild.
Choose good products, lord, store up.
Small dawn's hundred clear foundations lift up.
The merchant will vacation first -- economize
The great committee's bogus tail prize.
Language eaves offer rain feathers to the clown;
The building pipe of the island guide's upside down.

Files of the political party give face
Which friends possess; grasp this malicious place.
Already, by means of the second ant, an entire bird;
Which standard method can handle the third?
Our shears: opt for the simple, examine, and reduce the roar
The only purpose is to stop the paper finger's claw.
Avoid universal notebook, unfold to hew,
Compare pen and ancient spoon -- understand you?
If you condemn early, your ear adroit agrees,
Fire doesn't endure soft snow or swelling seas.
Overall the obvious is perilous,
Moreover such and such's superfluous.
Edited: 2009-12-03, 10:29 am
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#2
Hanzidamus might be better... comes of writing late at night.

If you need a hint, try writing the pinyin for the characters.
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#3
The answer is 42.

Where's my prize?
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#4
The magic words are squeamish ossifrage
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#5
Quote:42
Quote:The magic words are squeamish ossifrage
sorry no...
more hint: it may help you remember something about the hanzi.
Edited: 2009-12-04, 9:42 am
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#6
I don't know anything about hanzi/piniyin, so I can't go any farther. Hopefully someone will. But your organization of the "words" is quite astonishing. I enjoyed:

"Perform extensively to conceal an eyelet ghost"

"But fear a cavity in every beautiful shadow."

"Language eaves offer rain feathers to the clown"

"The valley drums with an ancient skeleton's thigh
The duo commence to use the dart of history:"

"Files of the political party give face
Which friends possess; grasp this malicious place."

"Avoid universal notebook, unfold to hew,
Compare pen and ancient spoon"

"If you condemn early, your ear adroit agrees,
Fire doesn't endure soft snow or swelling seas.
Overall the obvious is perilous,
Moreover such and such's superfluous."
[deleted RTK reference]
Edited: 2009-12-05, 6:02 am
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#7
Thora, thanks, but it really is a way of stringing together a fixed set of phrases. Where do the phrases come from? Now this is a forum for discussion of Heisig and Richardson's Remembering Simplifed Hanzi.

So let's take one of the sections that you quote...

The valley drums with an ancient skeleton's thigh
The duo commence to use the dart of history:
Ancestor groups police the well of scenery,
Look for the marsh; courageous, swim for eternity."

Now all these are keywords in Heisig's system for characters:

谷 穀 gǔ 698 valley
鼓 gǔ 1136 drum
古 gǔ 16 ancient
骨 gǔ 1055 skeleton
股 gǔ 649 thigh

俩 倆 liǎ 1479 duo

始 shǐ 674 commence
使 shǐ 838 use
矢 shǐ 1000 dart
史 shǐ 630 history

etc

Notice anything?
Edited: 2009-12-04, 10:36 pm
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#8
Readings? Memorize them as an absurd poem?
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#9
I was imagining that if someone wrote the corresponding hanzi it would be text readable vertically....and the text would give you the answer to a riddle!

An active imagination works for absurd poems too, Kazelee. At first I had vague images of some gypsy caravan and corrupt feudal town. But then I read it also as being about the topics and people in the RTK forum.

For eg. "Avoid universal notebook, unfold to hew,
Compare pen and ancient spoon - understand you?"

Some critics of RTK avoid the book (universal notebook) b/c its meanings are not etymologically correct. They open (unfold) it only to cut it down (hew) by comparing kanji now written with pen to their original versions once carved with ancient spoons. (I guess all those RTK stories has affected my brain.) haha

A couple lines I found quiet poetic (certainly less random than some modern poetry). Might have to rethink my dismissal of kanji chains. ;-)

At any rate, it was an amusing diversion - even if only a product of my imagination. :-)
edit I'll let the thread get back to hanzi...
Edited: 2009-12-05, 5:55 am
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#10
kazelee Wrote:Readings? Memorize them as an absurd poem?
Ah, basically yes. The first priority is to learn the tones correctly, as that is what I, at least, have the most problems remembering.
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#11
Thora Wrote:...then I read it also as being about the topics and people in the RTK forum. ...
Er no, I don't follow RTK politics that closely. Let us hope Hanzidamus did not have any real revelations. This could be getting out of hand.
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#12
Great work with those mnemonic poems! I've thought of doing something like this when I finish the book. But I would also like to include the pronounciation and tone as well.

In one should follow the ideas of Mathews&Mathews, which I started on before converting to Heisig, you would choose a fixed word for pronounciation and a character for the tone.

A fixed word for pronounciation could be good, but concerning the tone, I'm not sure this would be the best way to go.

I think nouns are propably best to use for the pronounciation. So for gǔ one could use guru or goose for instance. Anf then perhaps use an adjective/adverb for the tone. Third tone is angry of course. Then add the corresponding keywords and only use conjunctions and prepositions to glue it together.

To sum it up, building on your work mellison, one possible line could be like this:

The angry guru in the valley drums with an ancient skeleton's thigh.

Presto, third tone gu(ru) and the connected Hanzi. :-)
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#13
PlutonB Wrote:...But I would also like to include the pronunciation and tone as well. In one should follow the ideas of Mathews&Mathews...
Thanks for the suggestion, but please note.

Tone - try checking the tones of (some of) the characters in the extract. What do you notice?

Pronunciation - I've gone through Mathews&Mathews, and I found that the pronunciation (excluding the tone) was relatively easy to remember. My problem is remembering the tone for each character, and there are just too many teddy bears out there for me to remember which characters they are associated with.

When there are several characters with the same pronunciation, the keywords are together, something like "Five military dances at noon" is actually a mnemonic to indicate that 五武舞午 are all pronounced the same ( - you should at least know 五).

If you count, you will find that RSH1 has some 760 or so distinct pronunciations/tones (out of the 1200 or so found across all characters). Of these, some 400 have only 1 character with that pronunciation, and the other 1100 of Heisig's characters have between 2 and 16 (shì) homophone characters for the pronunciation. So what the mnemonic sequences do is let you leverage your knowledge of some characters (such as 五) to cover their homophones. Admittedly, that doesn't help with the remaining 400.
Edited: 2009-12-11, 9:49 am
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#14
I don't really catch what it is I should notice. All the characters in that short sentence is pronounced gu3.

For a beginner that doesn't know any chinese it's probably easier to have tone and pronounciation included in the beginning of the mnemonic sentence. But that's just my five cents.

The idea behind the adjective+noun setup was exactly to avoid the teddy-bear confusion. There is just one angry guru and he happen to be in the valley drumming away.

Maybe not so fruitful for everyone, but I will try to arrange the pronounciations like this. As for the ones that only has one pronounciation, maybe there is some other kind of arrangement that could help the mind remember easier.
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#15
PlutonB Wrote:I don't really catch what it is I should notice. All the characters in that short sentence is pronounced gu3.
Sorry, I meant in the original post.
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#16
I've done some more work on this, see http://thereisnoend.org/Languages/Chines...damus.html for explanation and then the links at the bottom (under Samples) for parts of two chapters so far.
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