Walking home with takeaway food

[marnanel]

Marn: "You know how in English the spelling system is very conservative, so we spell knight K N I G H T because it was pronounced that way once, even though we don't pronounce it that way any more."
Rio: "That makes sense."
Marn: "Well, in the Chinese writing system they have that problem too, only more so."
Rio: "A more radical problem?"
Marn: "... Ha ha."
Rio: "I did that without even trying."

Comments

[pne]

Clever!

How old is Rio? I wouldn't have expected the general public, much less a child, to know about radicals in Chinese characters.

But yes, the sound clues were a much better fit a couple of hundred years ago than they are now.

[marnanel]

Rio is eleven. We'd been rather ramblingly talking about writing systems earlier, and I'd mentioned the radical/phonetic distinction in hanzi, so it wasn't as surprising as it might sound; what surprised me was not only that she'd actually been paying attention to what I'd said, but that she remembered it well enough to pun with it.