Tuesday, November 25, 2014

The mysterious code in SCMP. (vickii chung)


Entering the 21st century, there are more and more prophets 預言家/先知 to predict some issues. For instance, Maya瑪雅 in Western world and Tui bei tu 推背圖 in China are some famous case studies around the world. No matter wrong or right it is, it sounds interesting to us.

And 1 May 2014, there was an interesting advertisement 宣傳廣告(or announcement? 宣告) posted on South China Morning Post and aroused public concern. The sentence (or passwords密碼, codes? ) may be an out-group language and most hongkongeses do not understand.

Here is the preview of the advertisement:

20140501_190632_zps059246c0

There was a hot debate among facebookers and netizens who are passionate to solve this code. Finally, they believe that it involves Norway(norsk) 挪威文and Lingua Latīna拉丁文 and gives us advices on DEMOCRACY 民主.  

Let me quote the solution:

網民指聲明是給香港人看,因為語句是廣東話語法:
X (名詞) Y(動詞) 埋來,冇 X (名詞) 
X (名詞) 唔來,冇 X (名詞)


之後再逐個字解釋。
「盟+主」:粵語諧音,解「民主」 
「祀」:粵語諧音,解「自己」
vei」: 挪威文解「道路」 
ueo」: 拉丁文解 「後裔」



最後網民認為整段文字意思是指,「民主唔會自己埋來,已經無路行;民主再唔來,香港下一代玩完。以利亞」。網民再解釋聲明署名Elijah,是聖經中的「以利亞」,是反抗以色列王國墮落敗壞的先知。
(we must be active to pursue democracy, if not there is no path for us. The next generation is hopeless without democracy)

(sorry for the poor translation>/////<)

However, we cannot ensure that it is a multilingual advertisement多語廣告 since we cannot prove that it is a message-bearing sentence or just some characters from different languages.


From this case, we can’t believe the solution by hongkongese at all, but I realize that the mixing of languages sometimes sounds mysterious to us, as our imagination of the culture behind. 



Do you believe the answer by the facebookers and netizens?

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