Does it make sense?
With my limited knowledge of no Mandarin at all, I recognize the vectors to be the 5 chinese elements (metal, wood, water, fire and earth).
The matrix just combines these symbols into new characters, but no clue how most of them are read. Could make sense in the context of alchemy, could be total bs. The few I do recognize work sometimes, like fire + fire = blaze, others don’t - or I’m reading them wrong.
A lot of them aren’t common words at all. A lot of them with the 金 radical are probably names of elements. At random I looked up 釷 and it’s the name for Thorium lol
A lot of them… name of elements
Only two of them (釷, 鈥: Holmium) are currently used element names.
Some of these are uncommon but they are legit Chinese characters.
I know even less Mandarin that you, so I hit it with Google translate. It translates the vectors the same as you did. It tries to translate the matrix characters with various odd results. It keeps changing, but guesses things like “Holmium sulfide smear” and “Thorium juice stove gui.” If I actually take a picture so it can do a full analysis on a still image, it transcribes them into surprisingly accurate unicode characters that look almost exactly like the original. It even includes a pronunciation guide, but the translation just says that they are unintelligible characters. I’m guessing that these are syntactically valid character combinations that are basically nonsense.
It likely tries to read these whole thing as a sentence hence “thorium juice stove gui”.
5 Chinese elements
Can these be used to summon the Chinese Captain Planet?
Yes. I don’t know mandarin, but it makes sense if you look at the figures.
On the left side of the equation, the top icon of the column vector is a house. The first icon in the row vector is also a house. So in the matrix on the right side of the equation, the top left icon is two houses.
The rightmost icon in the row vector is a ± sign. So the top right icon in the matrix is a house next to a ± sign.
The middle icon is clearly shortened as a slanted line with two horizontal lines above it on the left side of the merged icon. Because the entire centre cross section of the matrix (the middle row and the middle line form a cross) contain that icon-part on their left side.
The diagonal (top left to bottom right), (the identity), is all double icons in some sense. (House times house is two houses next to each other, running man times running man is two running men on top of each other, etc)
Theiy’re all pretty logical in that sense. I haven’t a clue what it all means though
The characters in the final matrix are the combination of the characters in the operands, according to the rules of matrix multiplication. (So the characters of the first row and column of the matrix consists of two 金 [metal] etc)
Recognised characters:
- 淦 – alt. form of 幹 – alt. form of 姦, from zh-min-nan – fuck
- 釷 – thorium
- 林 – forest; a surname
- 沐 – appears in 沐浴 – shower
- 杜 – appears in 杜甫 – a famous poet
- 淡 – watered down; appears in 淡水 – fresh water
- 炎 – flame
- 灶 – stove
- 圭 – appears in 日圭 – alt. form of 日晷 – sundial
For anyone as slow as I am: the symbols in the matrix are all made of two hanzi each, by combining the individual hanzi from the vectors with each other.
Btw, this combining quality is said to be the reason why Chinese manufacturers tend to print awful-looking English (and other Western languages) on labels and in manuals: since hanzi are all monospace but can be smooshed to combine with each other, Chinese people don’t really care about proportions in the characters. So they use their monospace hanzi fonts with weird monospace English characters in them, stretch or squeeze them as they see fit, and call it a day.
ＬＩＫＥＴＨＩＳ何
First of all it’s just Chinese. Mandarin is one (Most common one) of several spoken dialects but they’re all written with the same hanzi (symbols). At least, that’s my understanding.
Second, as far as I can tell this really is a Chinese linear algebra joke. The left side is just the five elements of Chinese philosophy (Metal, wood, water, fire, soil), and the right side seems like it might be people’s names? They’re unintelligible enough to me that I assume they’re names. But the names are constructed of hanzi that use the same radicals (Brush strokes) as the five elements, combined with each other according the the 2D matrix. I wish I knew what the names were but, I’m a beginner student.
The meanings of the characters in the matrix aren’t part of the joke, just the radicals used in them.
I think that the elements in the final matrix are just the characters in the operands put next to each other (like in math we put a to signify a*b, they put 金 金 together to make up… whatever is that character in row 1, column 1 of the final matrix.
Gram Schmidt process got me feeling like a Ming dynasty peasant.
On the left are the 5 classical Chinese elements. On the right are characters made by combining the elements, but they’re mostly gibberish as far as I know.
It is unfortunate that the characters 鈥釷 are replaced by 钬钍, ruining the consistency.
I mean in traditional Chinese they’re probably fine…
gestures at butterfly Is this loss?
