Provenance
- Languages
- Chinese (Simplified) → English
- Source
- Photographs of Chinese restaurant menus, widely reproduced online; original provenance unestablished
- Source date
- 2007
- Verification
- secondaryReported by others. This course has not seen the artefact itself.
- Mechanism
- Character merger under simplification, then sense selection by corpus frequency
Input
干爆鸭子
Mechanism
Character merger under simplification, then sense selection by corpus frequency
Inference
Printed
Fuck the duck until exploded
Observed
The dish is 干爆鸭子: duck, dry-fried, hot.
Fuck the duck until exploded
The merger#
Simplification collapsed 乾 (gān, dry) and 幹 (gàn, to do — and, in some registers, to do to somebody) into the single form 干. Three senses now share one key, and the reading that distinguishes them is tonal and contextual, neither of which survives into a lookup table.
爆 is the cooking method. Rendered as explode, it is not even wrong: that is what the character says outside a kitchen.
What the output tells you about the table#
It ranked the vulgar sense first. That is not a bug in the merger; the merger only made the senses share a key. Something downstream decided which one was most likely, and it decided using a corpus in which people write about doing things to each other far more often than they write about dry-frying poultry.
The output is therefore a readable statement about a text collection nobody published.
What it does not tell you#
Whether a human was in the loop, when the sign was made, or whether the menu
existed at all outside the photograph. The corpus holds it at secondary for
that last reason and no other.