Before there were blogs and LiveJournals...

[mmcirvin]

people had hand-coded personal Web sites, most of which were garbage, but some of which were filled with wonderful things, private collections of musings and creations united only by their relevance to the author's personal interests. They were typically updated less often than blogs, but made up for that in depth.

They still exist, and some are well worth exploring. zompist.com is one such. Author Mark Rosenfelder's great interests are language, comics, and an elaborate fantasy world that he's been constructing for ages, complete with several invented languages.

I found it via his clever educational page about what it would be like to write English like Chinese.

That in turn had a link to this online Chinese-English dictionary, which is an amazing example of what the Web can do.

Comments

[jwgh]

I felt like plugging USENET, so I thought I'd link to a nifty alt.fan.cecil-adam post from back in the day which addresses the question: How do Chinese people make fun of American accents?

bad accents

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I imagine that the foreigners-getting-tones-confused gag can be used to produce all manner of elaborate naughty double-entendres in the Benny Hill or "Three's Company" mold. (Thinking of Benny Hill because Kibo just subjected me to an old Benny Hill sketch in which he does the worst wacky-Chinese-guy shtick imaginable, and ends up talking to another guy doing an even worse wacky-Indian-guy shtick.)

Somewhere on his site, Rosenfelder says that the Chinese r (at least in Mandarin pronunciation, I think) isn't so much between an American l and r, as it is simply a rolled r, pretty much like the one in Spanish. But Spanish has a separate l sound as well, and I don't think Chinese does.