u/Shyam_Lama

Somewhere in his many videos about Divinity lore, Mortismal (the YouTuber) points out with some emphasis that Lucian was not the first Divine; that there had been an earlier one, albeit a long time before Lucian became the Divine.

Is there any lore or other information about who this previous Divine was? And was *he* the first? Or was there yet another one before him, and so on?

And most importantly: what *happened* to the previous Divine? and to his predecessors, if there were any?

(Note: I initially posted this thread with the title "Did Satan trick Jesus after all?", but this got insta-removed by the modbot because this sub requires that every thread title be phrased as a thesis not a question. I would've preferred for it to remain a question as it's somewhat less likely to cause offense that way, but alas I must comply with the rules if I want to post this at all. Anyway, here goes.)

Earlier today I replied in a thread about a "veil" in the backstory (aka "lore") of a particular computer game, an RPG. Here's the comment. I replied that it made me think of the veil that is rent when Jesus dies on the Cross, Matthew 27:51. While this may seem like a stretch, the association is actually not so strange because the game's backstory is full of religious concepts.

This got me thinking: did Jesus know that the veil would be rent? If not, are we to conclude that (some of) the consequences of the Crucifixion were. unintended? If so, that would put it up for debate whether or not Jesus fully understood what he was getting into by going to Jerusalem. Did he? If not—which means he was to some extent mistaken about what the ultimate consequences would be—howcome he was deceived?

When thinking this over, I was reminded of the final scene from the movie The Devil's Advocate that I recently watched again. In this film the protagonist (Kevin, played by Keanu Reeves) seems to escape the trap that the Devil has set for him by committing suicide at the last moment, which resets his life to the moment when he first came under the influence of the Devil. But the final twist is that in the last scene the Devil reappears under the guise of a journalist, and successfully tempts Kevin into giving an interview, thus once again bringing him under his influence. The Devil then grins into the camera and says (to the viewers): "Vanity, definitely my favorite sin."

Now, as we know, Jesus was tempted by the Devil when he spent 40 days in the desert, and he turned down the Devil's offers and challenges, thus defeating him—or so it seems. But right afterwards Jesus commences his ministry, and goes about telling prospective apostles that he will make them "fishers of men", performing miracles, and lecturing people about how to live life, and how belief in Him personally would save them from perdition—all of which has since long struck me as not being altogether free of vanity, precisely the sin that the Devil mentions at the end of the aforementioned movie as his favorite sin, presumably because it's the sin that allows him (the Devil) to bring a man under his influence.

So... while this may offend the sensibilities of staunch mainstream Christians, I can't help but wonder if perhaps, after Christ thought he had successfully rejected the Devil's temptations during his stint in the desert, fell for the subtler temptation of vanity after all and thus ended up doing the Devil's work without ever becoming conscious of it.

Which brings me back to the veil being rent. If we take the reasonable interpretation that the veil represents the separation between Heaven and Earth—as I argued in the other thread, see there—we may well ask whether it getting rent was that a good thing. Aren't Heaven and Earth supposed to remain separate? I suspect they should, and that therefore the rending of the veil wasn't exactly a good thing; and this makes me wonder if perhaps by submitting to Crucifixion Jesus brought something about that wasn't exactly beneficial for mankind.

If this notion causes offense, I understand, but I ask you in earnest to either bear with me, or, if you find the idea quite insufferable, to simply ignore this thread. For me, it's an open question. I am willing to listen to well-argued defenses of the traditional view that by submitting to Crucifixion Jesus did work the possibility of man's salvation. It would in a sense be a relief if someone restored me to this view. As things stand though, I'm not so sure.

Do comment.

(Reposting this after realizing the title was all wrong; it said Divinity 2 instead of Divine Divinity. Since editing a post's title isn't allowed these days, I deleted the original post and am posting this one instead, as follows:)

Can someone explain the opening cutscene of Divine Divinity to me? Supposedly the Tarzan-like figure is the protagonist of the game, but...

1. Who are the three sinister characters underground?

2. What is the point of the ritual they're performing?

3. Who is the hovering foetus, and why does it change into three light-spirits, and why do these shoot up the ground, and why does (only) one of them fall back to earth to hit Tarzan and why does that make him light up and hover above the ground and, presumably, transform him into the game's protagonist?

4. (Edit, bonus question:) Why is the protagonist a Tarzan to begin with?

Just a few questions I have. Maybe the game explains it somewhere along the way but after watching a combination of lore videos and selected parts playthroughs, I still can't make sense of it.

Edit: I'm guessing now that each of the three light-spirits fall back to earth and each hit someone to turn them into a "Marked One". Still leaves most my questions unanswered.

Can someone explain this cutscene to me? Supposedly the Tarzan-like figure is the protagonist of the game, but

1. who are the three sinister characters underground?

2. what is the point of the ritual they're performing?

3. who is the hovering foetus, and why does it change into three light-spirits, and why do these shoot up the ground, and why does (only) one of them fall back to earth to hit Tarzan and why does that make him light up and hover above the ground and, presumably, transform him into the game's protagonist?

Just a few questions I have. Maybe the game explains it somewhere along the way but after watching a combination of lore videos and selected parts playthroughs, I still can't make sense of it.

This is a spin-off from my inquiry in r/translator. The phrase seems to mean, "the hand dares not hike the price". My question here is, is this a saying or proverb in Chinese?

Btw, in the other thread a minority report identified the first character as 咋 instead of 手. Would that make the phrase as a whole more meaningful?

Hello all. Are decent wines available at affordable prices in China? I gotta ask because I'm still considering a trip there and I like a glass of wine "every now and then", where the scare-quoted expression is a euphemism for "pretty much every day". I'm not a wino or alcoholic—I think 🤔—but nevertheless I thought I'd ask so I know what I'll be faced with when (and if) I get there.

I'm currently (still) in "wine heaven" at the moment, a little country commonly known as Portugal, where a glass of passably good wine will cost a man 1 euro, a bottle will cost him €2 or €3, and an excellent wine (a bottle) will cost him €7-€8. That's insanely affordable, and I don't expect China to be able to match those prices. So, what will I be paying for wines there?

And how about availability? Does every corner shop serve wine? Probably not. What then? Upscale restaurants? Regular supermarkets? Only international supermarkets? Let me know.

Bonus question: Does China have its own wines? And if so, are they of acceptable quality by the standards of someone used to European wines? Thailand's wines, e.g. are atrocious. It's a lovable country in many ways but it'd be better if they gave up on producing wines; they do quite well in the beer-brewing department though. Maybe China produces some decent wines of its own?

Is there something like a novelization or otherwise detailed write-up of DOS2's plot? I don't have time to play the game but I find the story fascinating so I'd like to understand it in some detail. My interest is primarily DOS2 but also the rest of the series, especially insofar as it's either relevant background for DOS2 or—which is sometimes equally interesting—contradicts it.

I could watch a playthrough of course but the one's I find on YouTube are crazy long. (Maybe there's a speedrun available but that would surely skip over most of the story.) I've watched Mortismal's "supercut" (3 hours, so doable), and while that gave me a pretty good idea I do think I'm still missing out on a lot. Any tips?

I recently read a write-up on how 小姐 is nowadays not necessarily a safe way of addressing a young woman because in some circles this term has come to be regarded as derogatory or disparaging, it (apparently) being evocative of "ladies of loose morals". I think that's tragic, what with the term 小姐 literally being quite courteous, but I can't change the way things are, so that leaves me wondering: what are safe forms of address toward females—but also toward men. Is 太太 still safe, or is 女士 safer? How about young girls, either teenagers or children? How about men? Surely 先生 is still okay for grown men? How about teenage boys? And how about the elderly? I'd like to be updated on what's currently considered best because I think my textbooks may be a little outdated. Also, please do point out if there are important differences between mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and diasporas. Thanks all.

Consider the question "Can I charge my phone here please?" Google translates this as "请问我可以在这里给手机充电吗?"

Two things surprise me here. First, why not simply "请问(我)可以(在这里)充电我的手机吗?" What I mean is, GT's translation moves the direct object (手几) before the verb, but why do that?

Second, even if moving 手几 in front of the verb is better (more idiomatic?) here, why does GT use 给? I would expect 把 instead.

This here thread by u/Jay35770806 is a lament about how difficult classifiers (aka measure words) and verb modifiers are, but that's not what interests me. What interests me is that the OP lists a dozen or so verb modifiers, many of which I don't recognize and don't seem very plausible to me based on the dictionary meaning of the particle or auxiliary verb used. So I'd like to ask the Redditors here to take a look and confirm or correct these. Here's the list:

• 食 shí, to eat
• 食落去 shí lùo qù, continue to eat
• 食起嚟 shí qi3 lì, started to eat
• 食開 shí kài, habitually eat
• 食下 shí xìa, momentarily eat
• 食埋 shí mái, eat to completion
• 食晒 shí shài, eat entirely
• 食緊 shí jin3, eating
• 食住 shí zhù, continuously eating
• 食住先 shí zhù xìan, temporarily eating
• 食返 shí făn, resume eating
• 食咗 shí zuo3, ate
• 食到 shí dào, successfully ate
• 食過 shí guo, have eaten

Thanks all.

What bothers me most about the incredible number of homophones in Mandarin is not the effort of learning them from a vocabulary list and the occasional confusion that may cause, but rather how they interfere with what I consider to be the normal reflexes of a learner's mind to try to understand what one hears even when what's being said contains words one hasn't heard before. Here's an example:

Let's say I know 工 as part of 工作 and 工夫, and I'm aware of its standalone meaning "work". Let's say I also know 电, electricity, both standalone and as part of 充电 and 电影. Now let's say one day I take a walking tour with a guide somewhere, and he's showing us around an old town and explaining things in Mandarin. While we're standing in front of a some building I hear him use the word "gōngdìan" several times. I don't know this combination, but my mind enthusiastically attempts to piece something together from the spoken form of these two syllables. They sound like 工 and 电, work and electricity! I guess he's talking about a power station, or a generator, or a something like that? Surely this is a building where electricity got generated, or at least some work to do with electricity got done! Nice how in spite of my limited comprehension I can piece things together, same as in other languages I've learned!

Except, of course, I'm quite wrong. He's saying "gōngdìan" alright, but this gōng is 宫 and this diàn is 殿, and together they mean "palace". The word has absolutely nothing to do with 工 or 电, and so my assumption that I'd achieved a little understanding was actually counterproductive, not so much because I missed what the guide was actually saying, but—which is much worse—because my mind is actually forging incorrect associations. Unless I go through the trouble afterwards of actually verifying my inference somehow (in a dictionary or by asking someone), I will walk away from the guided tour thinking I'd learned a new word on the fly, while actually I didn't at all.

IOW, this way of trying to improve listening comprehension is actually quite reliable in all languages except Chinese, where this absolutely does not work. You'll get it wrong far more often than you'll get it right, so when learning Chinese it's best to not even try to best-guess the meaning of unknown words even if you hear them correctly and can associate them with some meaning. So then how do you try? Frankly I don't know. Where listening comprehension is concerned, I find that my usual way of improving it (in other languages) doesn't apply. In the case of Chinese, you pretty much have to find out what the written form is before you tell yourself you've learned some new vocab. And that's quite a nuisance. It also makes it quite clear, imo, that learning "spoken Chinese" only, using nothing but Pinyin to note words down, is hopeless. It is an intrinsic property of Chinese that you need to know the characters if you want to move beyond the basics—so that's what I'm doing, but that doesn't fix the problem I just described of being unable to infer the meaning of new words from their sound and context.

What y'all say?

I notice that whenever I see a Chinese character I don't know, and I want to look it up in Pleco by handwriting it, I find it difficult to remember the character even though I was only looking at it a few seconds ago. Typically I have to look at it again, then very consciously tell myself something like "okay, such-and-such radical on the left, then the one that looks like such-and-such at the top right, then below that the rectangle part of such-and-such, etc." And then I still forget within a few seconds and have to look at it a third time, and maybe a fourth time.

It puzzles me because generally speaking I don't think I have a diminished capacity for Chinese writing. When I actively study characters, learning them one by one, I believe I do quite well, in the sense that I remember most after a few rehearsals. And the characters I've rehearsed I recognize even if I forget the meaning, and therefore I can reproduce them in my dictionary app. But it's not so for characters I've never seen before. It seems my visual short-term memory is quite weak unless I can link the visual impression to some previously known meaning, thus (presumably) moving the impression from the strictly visual domain to something that's at least partly verbal or aural.

Do others have this same experience?

PS. Bonus question: does anyone besides me see Chinese characters everywhere after he/she's been studying them quite intensively? E.g. in tree branches, lines in artwork, shapes of random objects?

Pleco offers the following example of the use of 可：

你可别小看了这件事

Nǐ kě bié xiǎokàn le zhè jiàn shì.

I would expect simply 你别小看这件事. I don't understand the use of either 可 nor 了 here. Anyone care to explain?

Total fluency to me means you can, for example, go on Chinese TV and give an unscripted interview while being at ease, comfortable, and confident. It's what Jodie Foster is capable of in French, even though she's not a native speaker. (Search YouTube for "jodie foster interview french" to see what I mean.)

I wonder, do any non-Chinese exist who have this level of competency in Chinese? I doubt it for the simple reason that all vids I see on YouTube of foreigners speaking Mandarin, are mostly dudes and gals who have achieved fluency w.r.t. practical household talk and are quite smug about that, to the point where they seem to consider themselves quite fit to comment on the language as "experts". I very much doubt though that they could match (in Chinese) what Jodie Foster does in French. In any case I haven't seen any video evidence of it.

But maybe someone here knows of foreigners who have reached this level? I'd be interested to hear about it.

I find it curious that in Mandarin some syllables are overloaded in the extreme with possible meanings (example: yù), while there also exist syllables that have only a single possible meaning and no homophones at all (e.g. nàng 齉). And then there are some that you'd think would be in use but aren't, so zero meanings, e.g. mei1. The latter is especially puzzling because clearly méi, mèi, and měi are in use, so it can't be argued that "mei" doesn't "sound right" to Chinese ears.

Anyway, today I'm mostly interested in the second category, so syllables like "nàng" that have only one meaning. Anyone know any others?