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jkaufman comments on Look for the Next Tech Gold Rush? - Less Wrong Discussion

34 Post author: Wei_Dai 19 July 2014 10:08AM

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Comment author: jkaufman 23 July 2014 04:11:08PM 2 points [-]

I'd be somewhat worried about this if I were selling jefftk.com or something, but "wei" and "dai" without tones could mean many things. I don't remember much of my Chinese, but looking at a dictionary I see:

wei: place, seat, not, because, become, tiny, tail, yes, taste
dai: doctor, belt, dynasty, stay, wait, going to, bag, wear, dangerous, lazy

Now, not all of these combinations will mean what they look like they might mean, but there are a lot of reasonable things "wei dai" could mean aside from a person's name.

(It also looks like "wei dai" can mean "grave danger".)

Comment author: Wei_Dai 25 July 2014 04:23:14AM 4 points [-]

To expand on this, there are several thousand commonly used Chinese characters, each with different meanings. These map onto about 400 possible syllables (ignoring tone). However not all combinations of two Chinese characters are valid Chinese words. My Chinese input software gives three possibilities when I type in "wei dai".

  • 未带: not bring
  • 微带: microstrip
  • 危殆: grave danger

However new Chinese words are invented all the time, using combinations of existing Chinese characters. In this case I believe the highest bidders of my domain actually want to use it for 微贷, which means microloan.