Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 May 19

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May 19

Reverted to a long wait of Fail. Angry was Heo Mok.

Yep, that's what the article says. See: Bojihwyangdong Bulansonsseonsaeng. I get a vague idea of what's going on from the hanja (at least he was polite enough to say "宋先生"). Anyone up for a challenge?--Shirt58 (talk) 03:52, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

The Classical Chinese literally means "walked to Hwayang-dong, did not visit teacher Song". Searching on Google I found the idiomatic Korean translation "걸어서 화양동에 이르렀더니 송시열선생은 보이지 않네", which basically confirms that: "having walked to Hwayang-dong, [I] did not visit teacher Song Si-yeol". The joke is that, if you read the Classical Chinese in Korean then it's pronounced the same as (pardon my French) "cunt Hwayang-dong, balls teacher Song". --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 21:36, 19 May 2012 (UTC) — Incidentally, this reminds me of an incident I had a few weeks ago. I was reading a passage of Classical Chinese with a Korean friend in the Korean reading, and I got round to the combination "者之", which I repeated because I couldn't remember the following character — my friend was laughing, and I only then realized that I was carefully repeating "genitals" in Korean (자지)... --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 21:41, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

(I've cleaned up the article, added this info, and moved it to the correct title. --Tyrannus Mundi (talk) 01:37, 20 May 2012 (UTC))

Tyrannus, that is just so awesomely awesome. Spectacular rescue work! (The other new page patrollers must have been scratching their heads over why I passed an apparently incoherent machine translation.)--Shirt58 (talk) 03:42, 20 May 2012 (UTC)