A shitty question

[klortho]

I'm trying to find a character that's in one of my dictionaries, but not in Wenlin, on my cell phone, or on Zhongwen.com, or in any oneline dictionary that I can find. The dictionary that it is in is the "New Age Chinese-English" dictionary, published by the Commercial Press. It has an entry pronounce "bǎ" meaning "urine, piss, stool". It says that the reduplicated form "bǎbǎ" is baby talk for those unpleasant things.

The character has "尸" with "巴" placed under it, much as "屎" is composed of "尸" and "米". Does anyone know of this character? Is there a Unicode entry for it? If so, more generally, how would one go about searching for that?

[roddy]

Radical-stroke search on Unihan gives us 㞎.

Incidentally, it's conventional to find unknown characters in daily life and then use the dictionary to find them, not to go through the dictionary looking for wierd stuff and then trying to find it in the real world

Also incidentally, I find that Unicode.org is inaccessible without proxy - does anyone else find that?

Much more incidentally, at what age do Chinese kids start to produce tones accurately? 'Cos, y'know, 爸爸 and 㞎㞎 . . .

[gougou]

Also incidentally, I find that Unicode.org is inaccessible without proxy - does anyone else find that?

No problems here.

However, I find that the character is inaccesible - with or without proxy . I only get a question mark. Do I have to download the babytalk plugin for Firefox, or are there any other ways of getting the character to appear?

[roddy]

Odd, I'm consistently unable to get the website.

I'd guess you need some kind of extended Chinese font, not sure exactly which one though. I don't think I've ever installed anything beyond what you get as standard in Chinese XP (Although I did install the 'Official Shanghai Government Edition - Quick, Convenient, no need for license key or registration!' version of XP . . .)

[klortho]

Incidentally, it's conventional to find unknown characters in daily life and then use the dictionary to find them, not to go through the dictionary looking for wierd stuff and then trying to find it in the real world

In fact, the sequence of events was: 1, my Chinese friend told me the word but didn't know the character; B, I found it in my print dictionary; and 丙, I tried to enter it into Supermemo, but couldn't find it online.

Thanks for the link to Unihan database -- I'll have to figure out how to use that.

However, I find that the character is inaccesible - with or without proxy . I only get a question mark

My browser also won't display it -- either Firefox or IE. Nor will MS Word, when I paste it in there. I tried changing the font to "Arial Unicode MS", and a number of others, and that didn't work, either. Roddy, your computer displays it correctly? What makes you so special? At least, though, I can get to Unicode.org without a proxy.

[roddy]

Yeah, my computer displays it fine. Easy as 1B丙.

The Unihan database is handy for this kind of stuff, but to be honest if you have to resort to Unihan to find info on a character you can probably be sure it's of curiosity value only and is very unlikely to come up more than once or twice in a lifetime.

As for Unicode.org, I'd always assumed it was blocked for some bizzare reason. Very strange. Perhaps my internet connection is set to GB2312 . . .

[zhwj]

My dictionary gives a second reading of pā, used as a quantifier for cattle in Shaanxi local dialects.

The unicode site has been inaccessible to me for several years now, but I'm in Beijing like Roddy, so the situation may be different elsewhere.

Edit: I use Netcom ADSL for my ISP.

[gougou]

But I'm in Beijing, too, and I have no problems.

[roddy]

Ok, ISP check folks. I'm on Beijing Netcom - gougou, klortho?

[gougou]

Err, I'm on the router of my roommate. Any way to find out my ISP without interrupting his sleep?

[roddy]

It's ok, I just found it out for you

I just did a tracert to unicode.org and it gets through to the US before timing out. I suspect someone over there had a problem with someone with a Chinese IP address at some point and blocked a range of IP addresses.

[gougou]

'Cos, y'know, 爸爸 and 㞎㞎 . . .

The Unihan database is handy for this kind of stuff' date='[/quote']

I suspect someone over there had a problem with someone with a Chinese IP address at some point

Now we don't wanna rush to conclusions...

[roddy]

Yeah, well, a few years ago I was bored, so I started looking up rude words in the Unihan database . . . guess it just got a bit out of hand . . . I figured I could stop any time, but there were just so many . . .and when they emailed me about the load on their server, I tried to stop, really I did, but I'd heard about this one character which is 屎 inside 口 . . .

Sorry guys, guess I spoiled it for everyone.

[klortho]

I'm in Shanghai, using ADSL set up by Shanghai Telecommunications Ltd. My apparent IP address (as looked up at http://www.ipaddressworld.com/) is 218.80.154.237.

Whois gives:

OrgName: Asia Pacific Network Information Centre

Which I then looked up at http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois.pl as:

inetnum: 218.78.0.0 - 218.83.255.255

netname: CHINANET-SH

descr: CHINANET Shanghai province network

descr: Data Communication Division

descr: China Telecom

country: CN

admin-c: CH93-AP

tech-c: XI5-AP

mnt-by: MAINT-CHINANET

mnt-lower: MAINT-CHINANET-SH

status: ASSIGNED NON-PORTABLE

changed: hostmaster@ns.chinanet.cn.net 20011227

changed: hm-changed@apnic.net 20040927

source: APNIC

Is that what you wanted to know?

[roddy]

Yeah, although I'd realised I already had the info logged (forums logs IP addresses for every post).

Looks like a subset of Beijing Netcom addresses are blocked somewhere Stateside. Communist Fascists

[Lugubert]

I could copy the ba from Unihan, but being a picture, the quality was lousy. But if you just want to look at it in your own documents and print it, you'll find it in the Mojikyo font. There is also a possibity to link to them to have the character in GIF format, but I don't know how to use it: at 24*24, and another at 96*96.

[imron]

Easy as 1B丙

You know you've been learning Chinese too long when you not only understand that joke, but actually find it amusing

Oh, and here in Hebei I can also access the unihan database without needing to resort to proxies.

Incidentally, that character doesn't seem to exist in any of the Chinese input methods I have, but can be found in 现代汉语词典.

[Dang Dang]

Pleco Dict's ABC Dictionary has it. As a single character, ba3, did not have a definition but when input twice as, ba3ba5, the definition was "excrement (of a baby)."

[mph]

The 2002 現代漢語詞典 also has the culprit under ba3.

The two meanings are below.

1)屎;糞便:屙~

2)拉屎:想屎就屎,想~就~.

I cannot input the character using the MS IME pad or the Crystal touch 手寫板.

Nor is the char inputable with the 2003 MS pinyin

Cannot find it in the unicode site either.

So I guess no one will be getting email containing this character in the near future..

Interesting.

Got any more like this??

[pandaxiongmao]

The character is available in Wenlin - look it up by Unicode. Also, you can get it to show up in regular searches if you change your Hanzi filter in the Options menu. I suspect you have it set to only show the first 15,445 GB/Big5 Hanzi.