Split pdf files?

Latte Other Software & Development
21

Wait, don’t let the academics intimidate! A billion plus ordinary folk seem to get along just fine. Modern Chinese has many one-syllable nouns. Given an hour or two I’m sure I could think of more, but just off the top of my head: head, water, tree, foot, hand, leg, lamp, book, pen, door, watch, poem, song, word, wind, ship, sand, mountain, line, ghost, hole, dog, cat, cow, animal hair, lake. And one-syllable verbs too: eat, love, sing, learn, hit, urge, speak, touch, stand, sit, run, catch, burn, kill, lick, vomit, take a bride, dump (a lover), blame, jump, walk (a dog), pull, push, bugger off, think, reprimand, copulate. And think, no declensions or conjugations to memorize. Simple really. Just don’t let them make you write from memory the word for “sneeze”.

Curio does look interesting.

22

How many PDFs do you need to split? If just a few, the easiest way is to use Preview. Open your PDF in Preview and choose View-Sidebar-Thumbnails to view the pages in thumbnail view in the sidebar. Select the pages you want and then drag them out to the Desktop to create a new document containing a copy of just those pages. Hold the shift key to select pages sequentially and the Command key to select pages individually. You can easily chop up a large PDF into several smaller ones in no time. If you have lots of PDFs, however, this would be tedious.

23

Linguistics is my background, and working with translations into English done by native Chinese speakers much of my function, but beyond that you flatter me. Nothing even approaching a single PhD in my make-up … merely a somewhat professorial manner. :blush:

In self-defence, I never said Modern Chinese had no monosyllabic words, though I would contend they are a minority — but that would entail a major digression into the thorny question of what is a word, which I will not indulge in. I merely wished to counteract the myth, as expressed in Jaysen’s original post, that it is entirely monosyllabic, and that the writing system must be easier than our English orthography based on a very limited number of symbols and rules. And living here — for over 10 years now — I am fully aware and acknowledge that “a billion plus ordinary folk seem to get along just fine”, which number does include a tiny fraction of foreigners, though I don’t actually lay claim to being one of them … I am only too conscious of the many limitations and failings in my Chinese.
But I really like the article you link to … expresses my feelings entirely, though much more fully, amusingly, eruditely and academically than I am able to.
:slight_smile:
Mark

24

Occasional lurking here convinced me I was hearing among the many voices coursing through the threads of this amazing board: 1) a brilliant woman moderator on the Pacific rim east, and 2) a genius scholar of Chinese on the west. Another preconception shattered? No it just cannot be. After 10 years, it must be Chinese-style modesty. :confused:

My favorite supporting your point about the futility of romanization is the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. http://zh.wikipedia.org/施氏食獅史. Shishishishishi ….

Now back to checking out Curio.

25

There’s a good one here, particularly to inflict on people from south of the Yangtze, who have trouble distinguishing — among other things — between “si” pronounced /sɪ/ and “shi” pronounced /ʃɪ/. There’s a “city” just north of Xiamen in Quanzhou called 石狮市, “Stone Lion City”, where, reputedly, there are 44 stone lions 四十四石狮. So “There are 44 stone lions in Stone Lion City”, in Chinese is 石狮市有四十四石狮, or “shishishiyousishisishishi”, and since local people tend to use pinyin the way they pronounce things, a Minnan speaker will come up with “sisisiyousisisisisi”.
I once spent a mort of time trying to find the port of “Lingbo” on the map, until it suddenly hit me that the colleague who had written the text was from Zhangzhou, also part of the Minnan area, where they substitute “l” for “n” and he meant “Ningbo” — one of China’s major ports!
Mark

26

Never realized the stone lions are associated with an actual place, and it’s near Xiamen! The tongue-twister variation I heard has the 44 beasts eating unripened persimmons. Prepending the “city” it becomes 石狮市之四十只石狮子食涩柿子, or “shishishizhisishizhishishizishiseshizi”, perhaps south of the river and across the straits “sisisizisisizisisizisisesizi.” And something perfectly unimaginable around Hong Kong.