Re: Phaistos Disk side B

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 11/23/04 

Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 16:31:54 GMT

Dylan Sung wrote:

> > (Perhaps Dyl is alluding to the "thousand-character text" of Chinese
> > philology?)
>
> Yep. Also, there is HuiWen Shi or palandromic verse can be read either
> forwards or backwards, and still be meaningful. The Song Dynasty poet Li Yu
> wrote a typical palandromic verse where if you read it one way, it's about a
> father missing his wife and son, and if the other way, a wife her husband
> and son missing his father. It has eight lines of seven character verse.
> Only one character is ever repeated.

"Palindrome" must mean something different there! Every character needs
to appear (at least) twice, unless there's an odd number of them, and
then the central one is a pivot.

> The Chinese character version (GB
> encoding) can be found here
>
> http://yes8.pdx.cn/blog/diary,10467.html
>
> the first is read forwards, and the second stanza is the same with the order
> of the characters reversed. Unfortunately, I can't find an English
> translation.

There's not really any way to render such a tour de force in another
language that captures the point of it.

What's the French "original" of "Able was I ere I saw Elba"? or of "A
man, a plan, a canal -- Panama!"

(The translations of the three kana poems don't make too much sense,
either.) 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net