Borgesian Weekend
I have a copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. I received my copy shrink-wrapped, new, and unopened. While looking up an archaic d-word yesterday, the pages of Vol. I fell open, and not to one of the places marked by the OED’s fine blue ribbon bookmarks. No, a slip of paper had done the job — a slim, rectangular slip of paper torn off at one end. And on this piece of paper is a written message. In Chinese Japanese.
Help me decipher the text! I promise not to shoot you when I learn the secret.
as a second year c+ chinese student I can confidently state that those characters are probably maybe 有大人. and that this literally possibly means… “have big people”?
— doogle · Jun 14, 02:03 PM · #
Concur on the “big people”; unsure as to the overall meaning.
— Klug · Jun 14, 02:10 PM · #
Could that be an etymological string? Like showing the evolution of a character’s change over time?
— Freddie · Jun 14, 02:14 PM · #
My Chinese wife says it is not Chinese. She thinks it is Japanese.
— Steve N · Jun 14, 02:55 PM · #
Careful. This could turn out to be a 3 Days of the Condor situation. TAS doesn’t have offices, but they can track us down.
— Peter Suderman · Jun 14, 03:15 PM · #
The first character seems to be 本, which means book, main, true, real. So, I’d hazard to say “real big guy.” Could be a comment on the dictionary’s size? That’s the best my three years of half-assed Japanese can offer.
— Bob · Jun 14, 03:31 PM · #
If it is indeed Japanese the second and third characters read together to mean “adult”. That first character is written messily. It could be the character for book or maybe direction.
— Tik · Jun 14, 03:33 PM · #
The first character looks like a bit like hiragana お used as an honorific prefix. I’ve never seen it used that way with 大人 before, but Google is showing a few uses of it.
— includedmiddle · Jun 14, 06:48 PM · #
Don’t you guys think the key is that the three characters appear to be a series of similar characters?
— Freddie · Jun 14, 07:05 PM · #
Freddie,
No, if that were the case the sequence ought to be 本木大人, and I can state with pretty high confidence that the first two characters have no etymological relationship with the last two characters.
— includedmiddle · Jun 14, 07:19 PM · #
So, so far I have “this is truly the honorably large book for adults.”
— James · Jun 14, 08:46 PM · #
Like the Japanese, the last two characters (da ren) mean “adult” (in the non-pr0n sense.) Perhaps it is “book for adults”?
— Klug · Jun 14, 09:06 PM · #
BUT WHY WOULD THIS BE STUCK IN MY UNOPENED OED?
— James · Jun 14, 09:44 PM · #
The first character is Hiragana and is in fact an honorific prefix (お茶,O CHA, which is tea), the second and third are Kanji and can be pronounced any number of ways but in this case I would suspect either O KI JIN or O KI HITO (BIG PERSON/PEOPLE)
— ron · Jun 14, 09:46 PM · #
Following consensus, the first character may be Kanji for book, 本, which is HON in this instance.
— ron · Jun 14, 09:58 PM · #
With all due respect to other commenters, this looks more like one of the late medieval scripts from south Uqbar. I think it says something about heresiarchs and mirrors.
— Nick · Jun 15, 12:26 AM · #
I think it says, “Inspected by #23.”
— cw · Jun 15, 01:27 AM · #
As a non-Asian language speaker, here’s my contribution, a couple of questions for establishing context:
Where was your OED printed? Where did you order it from? What are the dimensions of the piece of paper? Is it regularly-shaped, as though it came out of a machine, or does it look hand cut or torn?
If your OED was printed or shipped from an Asian country and the piece is regular, I would guess it’s some sort of product-related message, like a classification mark of an inspection certificate. If it’s irregular, your guess is as good as mine.
— Ethan C. · Jun 15, 02:50 AM · #
Hehe, it is definitely “本大人” pronounced “Bendaren” in Mandarin, which jokingly means something like: “I am too good to deal with this shit.”
Believe it or not, someone in the dictionary-packaging industry doesn’t find their work fulfilling…
— wfrost · Jun 15, 02:57 AM · #
Ethan, I don’t know the place of origin, but the slip is a little wider than the text and about four times as long. Only, the end on the long side opposite from the text is a ripped edge. All the others are regularly shaped, i.e. sides at right angles. The text is written in blue ballpoint pen. Wfrost, what’s the literal translation?
— James · Jun 15, 12:37 PM · #
In this context, “本” is a sort of formal first-person possessive pronoun. For example, “本学校” would be “my school.” This construction is used almost exclusively in writing, so my Chinese colleagues tell me.
“本” is also the measure word for books. In Mandarin they have many different measure words for nouns, such as “a ‘bottle’ of beer” or “a ‘strip’ of dog.” I think it is only coincidental that this character was in fact found inside of a book, but here again I could be wrong.
As others have mentioned, “大人” means “big person.” So, if I’m right about the “本” then you could literally translate the expression as “my big person.” Back when braided mullets were the rage, important Chinese statesmen would refer to themselves in such a haughty way. As far as I know, in modern culture the phrase is only used in jest.
But the etymology and cultural subtleties of the characters/expression are really out of my league.
— wfrost · Jun 16, 02:14 AM · #
If my Asian doesn’t fail me, the slip is an informal country code for shipping purposes: “this book goes to the land of big fat people”.
— tom · Jun 18, 02:48 PM · #