Please, grammar us!

It's all too wonderful
I'll never find the words
That say enough, tell enough
I mean they just aren't swell enough

You're much too much, and just too very very
To ever be, in Webster's dictionary
And so, I'm borrowing a love song from the birds
To tell you that you're marvelous
Too marvelous for words

Hey, at least it's not too good to be true.

Would it be ok if I came up with an alternate phonetic spelling for your name?

Does that mean four billion people would spell it Kuo...?

Yet it was the same guy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Hsieh

No, I don't work for them.

http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=local&id=4757721

Just the man trying to geep us down...

As far as I'm concerned, it's Kuo until Hong-Chih tells me different.

Of course, in Taiwan, where Kuo's from, they would spell it Kuo. =)

I for one don't understand why anyone around here got peeved about xeifrank's mission to spell Kuo via Hanyu pinyin romanization, but pinyin does have some problems. My name, for example, would be xie in pinyin, which for English speakers is far more mysterious than Hsieh (the reason, btw, it isn't Shieh, the closest English could come, is because the x/hs sound in Mandarin is subtly different from the usual English sh sound, and my impression is that the linguists wanted to distinguish that somehow).

Of course, my own name has some romanization issues. The ROC immigration people got my name wrong--it should be Wei-hsiang Hsieh--and both my parents and INS followed their spelling for reasonable reasons. It was only maybe six months ago that I realized that even by Wade-Giles romanization (the Taiwanese system also used by Kuo), it was incorrect.

WWSH

郭泓志

WWSH

I understand Xei is on a mission to ensure correct pronunciation, but if I had an unusually pronounced name (like Mr. Favre), I wouldn't appreciate somebody purposely misspelling it, even if their intentions were good.

"The unaspirated b, d, and g are also unvoiced, meaning that they do not employ the vocal cords in their pronunciation. This makes them slightly different from the English b as in "boy," d as in "dog," or g as in "goat." To be very precise, they are like the p in "sport," the ti in "stage," and the k in "sky."

There is a "k" used in Hanyu pinyin, a "guttural" sound--i.e. controlled at the back of the mouth--which matches the english equivalent. This is where xeifrank has a real point--although the english G sound is also not quite right, its IMO closer than the English k sound.

WWSH

WWSH

I shouldn't have to fear we're going to go down the same path every time I mention Kuo's name or every time Xeifrank mentions Guo's name.

Kenji Johjima of the Mariners is the first Japanese player to come out to North America and insist on the "oh" spelling.

The "oh" is a slightly longer "o" sound than a plain "o" like in Nomo.

I apologize.

Xeifrank wants a romanization that is closer to the actual pronounciation of Kuo's name--your objection seems to be that xeifrank is "correcting" Kuo's own spelling. But Kuo doesn't actually "spell" his name Kuo, he writes it out properly as 郭. When he writes it out as Kuo, he is simply following the fairly arbitrary Wade-Giles system Taiwan/ROC happens to use. When xeifrank is spelling it as Guo, he is following the far more common Hanyu pinyin romanization used in the PRC and what is almost always taught in American colleges and universities. In this case, he's right that its closer to the correct pronunciation than the K.

BTW, as another fun Chinese lesson, the Chinese practice is to say the last name first, so even in Wade-Giles, Kuo would call himself Kuo Hong-chih (or Guo Hongzhi). Also, there are pitch variations in Chinese--Kuo is a first tone--a high level pitch; Hong is a second tone, which rises; while chih is a falling fourth tone. In Chinese, the pitches are crucial--Kuo with a different tone is a totally different character. This is why Chinese Mandarin has such a "sing-song" quality to it to the western ear.

WWSH

WWSH

Will update when Colletti deigns to rock the mic.

My pleasure

"Never talk to D4P!"

Xeifrank, I completely understand you responding to those questioning how you spell it, but I do think there have been occasions where you have taken the lead in challenging others on spelling or pronounciation more than needed. Similarly, there have been times that Xeifrank has been put on the defensive unnecessarily.

Anyway, I just think we could use a break, because for the most part (though not entirely), the arguments have been reruns.

Lil' ole' me...?

Sometimes it's hard for me to believe that I really didn't do the drugs in high school. It would explain so much. Maybe I just forgot?

Every argument (including this one) about transliteration boils down to something like this:

Sound in Language A has features (X, Y, Z).

Language B does not have a sound matching all three features. It has a sound (A, Y, Z), and another sound (X, B, Z), which each have two of the three features.

And then people spend hours upon hours arguing whether (A, Y, Z) is correct or (X, B, Z) is correct, when in fact, neither is exactly correct, and the choice of one or the other is completely arbitrary.

1. BUH-kett

or

2. Boo-KAY

...?

colorful glamorous neighbors of the world unite! we cannot in good humor and conscience continue to perpetuate this antiquated orthography.

My guess is Joe Nathan.

enouGH
wOmen
juncTIon

Over the last four years, Darin Erstad has played 86 fewer games than heartless, soulless, gritless, undetermined J.D. Drew, who has never watched or heard of American football. During that span of time, he earned $3.3 million more than Drew. No one likes J.D. Drew.

If you're not reading www.firejoemorgan.com you really should be.

How could anyone not read FJM? Most hilarious sports site around. And second only to DT as my favorite baseball site.

Flanders on Pierre, again.

Umbrage is bad!

He was unwilling to go into the season relying on Kemp, Repko, Loney and Anderson (prior to the Gonzalez deal). You can disagree with that mindset but that is what it came down to.

Sounds like Neddy wants to import the Drew schedule for Nomar (which is probably what most think would be the best we could expect anyway).

Uh oh. Two legal references in one sentence...

But as we all know, that did not happen.

Maybe I'm not paying too close attention but if I can say anything about Ned, he is pretty transparent when it comes to the deals he makes. Conservative, yes, absolutely but the reasons why he did it are usually right there for everyone to see.

I thought The Mustache was conservative too, until somebody steered me right.

Not to mention that the dang Giants are the televised team up here. such sacrifice!

I'm going with "dumb".

Gurnick: General manager Ned Colletti's reaction was to replace Kenny Lofton with a younger version, signing free agent Juan Pierre to a five-year, $44 million contract

Steiner: Juan Pierre is a younger version of Kenny Lofton

Lofton career: .299/.372/.423/.795, 79.7% SB%
Pierre career: .303/.350/.377/.727, 73.7 SB%

One of the things I thought about on my walk was that words that have the "-our" ending, might lose the "u" when they get a suffix.

Labour - laborious
Humour - humorous

However, looking in a dictionary, that rule can't be applied uniformly and the spelling is all over the place.

humour, humorous, humourless

Speaking of which, on a scale ranging from "A little" to "A lot", how would you rank the variation in

1. texture, and
2. flavo(u)r

of your Protein Berry Pizzazzes?

The fact that you know what I normally order at Jamba Juice is ... disturbing ...

West leads the East 8-5 in the second. It took me a while to find the Versus Network on my TV.

It's channel 267!

We've blogged about that before.

I find there's quite a bit of variation. Among my last 4, the first 2 were so thick I could barely extract them through the straw. Then the most recent 2 were almost like milk. And the flavor fluctuates quite a bit.

I'd expect more homogeneity.

But I better order something new the next time.

Geaux Dodgers...

:) ?

Me too. I'll take you there when you come out for your Carolinas trip.

*Raleigh-Durham

http://www.clippersbaseball.com/

D4P knows what kind of Jamba Juice Bob gets. I need to get him to update my files for me...

See comments 214, 222, and 225

https://dodgerthoughts.baseballtoaster.com/archives/353856.html

Favre is a very common French Canadian (and not obscure French French) name, pronounced as it's written.

So presumably Brett pronounces it some other, Americanized, or illiterate, way? ("r" before "v"?) I guess that's his privilege. Big deal.

That said, the games will probably be cheap and fun.

These guys do a real good job and will have tons of Clippers info up once the rosters get sorted out through Spring Training.

http://www.farmauthority.dcsportsnet.com/

Off the top of my head:

1. D4P
2. The Piazza Trade
3. Konerko for Jeff Shaw
4. Signing Darryl
5. Signing Driefort
6. Not signing Vlad
7. Sheffield for Brian Jordan and FTOG
8. Signing Kevin Brown
9. Victor Diaz and Jose Diaz for Jeromy Burnitz
10. The Tampa Bay panic trades of 2006 (Hendrickson, Hall, Lugo)

I'm sure I'm forgetting some...

Actually, that's a really good list Disabled, er, List. I'm tempted to move Vlad higher up a spot or two, and looking at that Sheffield trade makes me a sad panda, but it's a really good list.

Everybody's memories of 1988 are always warm and fuzzy, but Tudor was a stiff in the postseason that year and missed almost all of the following season, while Guerrero nearly won the NL MVP award in 1989 with the Cardinals.

Mike Davis was also a free-agent bust that year. Funny how things work out.