Archive for July, 2006

MM tzai SI


2006
07.26

“The good thing about standards is that there are so many of them.”

ISO 639 language codes and ISO 3166 country codes can get a bit confusing:

For example, Sweden (the country) is “se”, but Swedish (the language) is “sv”.

On the other hand, the code “my” refers to Malaysia (the country) and Burmese — the language locally known as Bamar spoken in Myanmar (country code “mm”), formerly know as Burma (deprecated code “bu”).

“Mm tzai si,” by the way, is Hokkien — Fujien, Min-nan — (language code “zh-min-nan”) meaning “ignorant of death”. Besides the “mm” debacle above, “si” means Slovenia (the country) and Sinhalese (the language).

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Wannabe explorers, take note


2006
07.09

Tahir Shah’s “Expert’s Picks: Travel & Adventure” in this Sunday’s Washington Post book reviews:

Thesiger’s lesson for me, a young wannabe explorer in search of a mentor, was to search for people rather than places. Find great people, he would say, and you will find great places.

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