u/lol-across-the-pond

I have an impression that the world's tallest buildings are mostly in Middle East and Asia, and mostly in developing countries. Why is it so?

It seems that, while rich people in Americans and Europeans prefer living in a large house in suburbs, those in Middle East and Asia prefer living in tall skyscrapers in city centers. What causes this difference in tastes?

Just curious, sorry if this is a wrong sub to ask this question.

Was it only religious figures or peasants, nobles and royals also practiced it? Just randomly curious…

ん (-ng) is a peculiar syllable - not quite consonant, not quite vowel. One day I realized that many Chinese syllables have nasal '-ng' sound that perhaps didn't exist in native Japanese or Korean words: e.g. Wang, Cheng, Sung, Xiang etc...

So, I'm just curious, by any chance did the Japanese nasal ん originate from adopting a large amount of Chinese loanwords and characters?

I'm an east asian scholar of social science and I'm currently writing a theory on temporality and narratives. My other research was about categories. What's mind blowing to me is that Aristotle already talked about and defined all these constructs in his Poetics and Categories 2,500 years ago. This pursuit of getting to conceptual "essence" of things, abstraction, and building layers of abstract constructs feels so... "ethereal" to me compared to my knowledge of east asian philosophy and history.

When I was young, I read the entire Analects about Confucius' sayings. What he said is mostly about how you should behave in interpersonal relationships. e.g. "When another person suffers a sorrowful event, straighten your bearing and compose your expression." Always try to be a better person. Doing the right things and having the right thoughts will free yourself. "At the age of 70 I (Confucius) could just follow my heart's desires without ending up doing wrong things." These are all about achieving one's inner peace and social harmony but not about developing analytical tools you can apply to understand the complexity of the world.

I feel a common critique for asian social scientists' works (I mean asians from asia) is that their theoretical arguments are rather flat and lack conceptual depths. Lack of the kind of etherealness. It may be because of the language barrier, but may also be due to the fundamental differences in philosophical and analytical ways of thinking. As someone in my country called the "operation systems" of thoughts. I mean asian way of doing things tends to be very practical, but they might not necessarily add an aura of otherworldliness or timelessness, as Plato did. What do you think?

I’m an overseas korean who lives in nice touristy locations and once invited a group of old korean friends for an event (wedding) and I paid for their flights and accommodation. I was flabbergasted when they later (seriously and very unpleasantly) complained that I didn’t pay for every single expenses such as lunch, dinner, and taxis. My foreign partner tried his best so that their logistics would go smoothly but they just left without even saying bye to him in person

Plus I have a feeling that if I cried and publicly confessed how lonely and miserable I am as an overseas korean to this group of friends, their attitude toward me would have been better. That I have friends here who are not korean doesn’t count in their minds, it seems. This feeling was confirmed by another old friend of mine that I separately invited for another event (my child’s baptism). Again I paid for his flights and accommodations plus frequently treated him with lunch and dinner not to repeat the mistake, sometimes at expensive places. He literally didn’t want to spend a dime in the entire trip and his frustration accumulated over his 5 day trip because he “sometimes” had to pay for coffee, meals, and his 30 euros god damn taxi to leave for his next destination after spending time with me and my family. On the last night we had a serious confrontation and he said things like he expected me to “open my heart” and to do everything for his visit without expecting anything in return, then he would have “opened his heart” too and we would cry together and share our hearts and feelings. Like, why should I cry and why am I expected to endlessly pay for everything after covering your flights and accommodations, plus to perform the humiliating act of sobbing and wailing and confessing how miserable I am because I live here “alone” (again, no matter how social my actual life is here)

Like the expectation of the endless financial and “emotional” subservience just because I invited them to foreign locations I live in is wild. I wanted to share my life with them, but the places are very nice touristy locations that many people visit as a once a lifetime event. My partner complained why they all want to be treated like princesses and royals. Just a rant. Life goes on.

Is it possible that the Chinese scripts somehow influenced the evolution of spoken Chinese? For example, there are so many homophones in Mandarin. Is it possible that homophones could be retained because the Chinese scripts allowed people to still distinguish between words that are identical in sounds?

I once took a grad level Chinese history class and we read primary historical sources in classical chinese. The only thing I remember from that class is how many times I saw the phrase "[people] ate each other 相食" in the aftermath of wars and famine. My classmates joked so much about it.

And voila I saw a very highly upvoted reddit post titled "Map of Cannibalism in China: Every recorded mass scaled cannibal activities since Qin dynasty (221 B.C.)"

I also remember that the main protagonist of a famous novel of Lu Xun, the father of the modern chinese literature, was paranoid of being attacked and eaten by other people.

So overall mass starvation and cannibalism seem to have happened perhaps more often in China than in other continents. Or at least the Chinese public seems to have more vivid memories of it than other populations in the world. Even "before" the well known failure of Great Leap Forward.

Why was it the case? Is it mainly about the geography and climate? I vaguely remember that the Yellow River is notorious for its unpredictable behaviors causing many flooding and crop failures. Did devastating crop failures happen more often in China than other parts of the world? Why does it appear that the chinese population was regularly wiped out by such tragic and gory events?

Or if it happened in other parts of the world as well, why does it appear that such events were more deeply ingrained in the collective memory in China? I can recollect countless examples of cannibalism mentioned in chinese folklores and classics.