Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schriffestschriiji: &say in Honor of John DeFrancis
-1984). Significantly, Lull was a key influence on the "proto-sinologist"
Athanasius Klrcher, discussed in D. E. Mungello, Curious Land: Jesuft Accom-
modation and the Origins of Sinology (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1989), 174-188.
4. Lorayne, Super-power Memory, 40; emphasis in original.
5. Lorayne , Super-power Memory, 45-46.
6. Judging from examples in the book, it appears that the digraph is
treated as if it were /t/ + /h/; likewise, is taken as /n/ + g , at
least when pronounced as in finger.
7. There are of course rare individuals, like the Indian prodigy Srinivasa
Ramanujan (1887-1920), for whom numbers seem to be have individual personali-
ties. British mathematician J. E. Littlewood remembered "once going to see
him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxicab number 1729, and
remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it
was not an unfavorable omen. 'No,' he replied, 'it is a very interesting
number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two
different ways'" (G. H Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1940). If you have memorized the first dozen cubes, you
might notice that 1,7.29 = 1,728 + 1 = 12" + la = 1,000 + 729 = 10m + grn but,
unless Ramanujan was simply recalling a result he had found at leisure earli-
er, it is remarkable he could assert immediatelythat no smaller integer is
likewise decomposable.
I have been told that Ramanujan's epitaph reads, "Every integer was his
friendw--si non G vero, 6 ben trovato.
8. Lorayne, Super-Memory, 16; emphasis in original.
9. Lorayne, Super-Memory, 144.
10. In fact, of course, the so-called meanings of kanji are just a by-product
of how they are used in the orthography of Japanese. It is the morphemes of
Japanese that convey meaning; the kanji are merely semantic parasites and
sometimes correspond to something more or leas than an actual morpheme.
I
11. Indeed, -:g stands for a noun in Mandarin, shB 'book ' , and only for the
invariant ka part of Japanese kaku, which has dozens of other forms including
kad ta, okaki ni narimasu, and kakaserarenakat tara.
12. James W. Heisig, Remembering the Kanji I: A Complete Course on How Not
to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters (1977); 11: A Sys-
tematic Guide to Reading Characters (1987). T5ky5: Japan Publications Trad-
ing Company.
13. Actually, a whole act can be developed around this one technique. The
best known method Is the so-called Nikola System, which makes it possible to
execute a mystifying group of seemingly unrelated effects. See Jean Hugard &
John J. Crimmins, Jr., eds., Encyclopedia of Card Tricks (London: Faber &
Faber, 1961).