Tuesday 10 March 2015

Nottingham

Орёл и Решка is a russian language ukrainian TV travel programme. Season 9 episode 14 was all about Nottingham which in russian is Ноттингем. The presenters were Регина Тодоренко and Евгений Синельников. I watched this episode and found it fascinating to see and hear of Nottingham from a different point of view and language.

There is an English wikipedia article about Орёл и Решка https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryol_i_Reshka

A russian language writeup of the visit to Nottingham/Ноттингем is available on the programme's website orel-reshka.net/9-sezon/321-orel-i-reshka-07-12-2014-nottingem-velikobritaniya.html

Регина Тодоренко stayed in the Edwards room at Langar Hall Country House Hotel langarhall.com/rooms/edwards/

The London RouteMaster Bus was hired from Blackmore Commercials blackmorecommercials.co.uk

Throughout the video there are popups specifying the cost of various items. Interestingly, three different currencies are used - Russian Rubles (РУБ), British Pounds (£), US Dollars ($).

I used a Unicode savvy shortening service to create links to the below video - ta.gd/nottinghamta.gd/ноттингемta.gd/诺丁汉ta.gd/ノッティンガムta.gd/노팅엄ta.gd/नाटिंघमta.gd/Νότιγχαμ doiop.com/น็อตติ้งแฮม

Letʼs also have an emojified link ➜ 🍆😁🌊🏂🎳🐤🎉🍣.🆒🔗.ws


Monday 9 March 2015

Duang

There has been much buzz about the invented word duang. It consists of both a Chinese character (well actually two) and a romanized form. The romanized form has even acquired the Chinese 1st tone, duāng

The Chinese character is constructed from Jackie Chan's Chinese name which has both Simplified and Traditional Chinese forms - Simplified ➛ 成龙 and Traditional ➛成龍. The Chinese character for duāng is constructed by placing the first character on top of the second to form a single composite character. Using Ideographic Description Characters, the two new duāng characters can be represented as the sequences:
  • ⿱成龙
  • ⿱成龍
What few realise is that there exists a font which contains glyphs for the duāng Chinese characters - BabelStone Han PUA babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/PUA.html. This font maps glyphs to codepoints in the Unicode PUA (Private Use Area) in the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane). PUA codepoints can be used for any purpose by anyone, unlike the other codepoints which have to go through an approval process before they can be used. This font maps it's two duāng glyphs to PUA codepoints U+F4E2 and U+F4E3.

I installed BabelStone Han PUA font and here is how the duāng characters look in TextEdit on my iMac.


Update: The two duāng glyphs (using the same PUA codepoints U+F4E2 and U+F4E3 ) are also available in font BabelStone Han babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/Han.html