"Search Engine of the Song Dynasty"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16xu.html
BAIDU.COM, the popular search engine often called the Chinese Google, got its name from a poem written during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). The poem is about a man searching for a woman at a busy festival, about the search for clarity amid chaos. Together, the Chinese characters bi and dù mean “hundreds of ways,” and come out of the last lines of the poem: “Restlessly I searched for her thousands, hundreds of ways./ Suddenly I turned, and there she was in the receding light.”
Comments
The linked article is a tad bizarre, in my estimation.
The written Chinese language is indeed fascinating and profoundly different from the phonetic representation that most other languages now use. But what does all this have to do with the new ability to type in an URL in hanzi instead of Latin letters?
The only thing this essay does is unnecessarily cloak the Chinese language in an air of mystery. No wonder publishers outside China believe they must seek out a Ph D. holder to translate the latest Chinese writing!
Bruce, May 17, 2010, 7:34a.m.