Fortnight Quiz: February Kalends (FreezyTeazie)

First of all, February 1 was the start of the Chinese Lunar Calendar, so Happy New Year!

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This is my first installment of what I hope will be a bi-weekly feature of "Fortnight Quiz", where I will semi-humorously (?) ask about your knowledge of the world around you. Every week I am putting such questions to my co-workers, which is meant only to lightly entertain us - the overworked, overstressed crowd - and not much else. So I decided to share those questions here, too. But a weekly format seems a bit too frequent (= too much work) and a monthly format a bit too sparse (= blog would get too long).

The word fortnight derives from the Old English term fēowertyne niht, which meant "fourteen nights".

So 14 days seems to be an OK compromise (for now). More importantly, though, I like the word fortnight, because to people used to American/Canadian English it sounds archaic and odd, like a character from some story about King Arthur and his court. I like those. So Fortnight Quiz it is.

No, my liking of the word does not come from the homonymy with the name of the popular game Fortnite, even though that name does seem to come from similar roots.  The name comes from the concept (taken from the game's predecessor Save the World) of trying to survive an apocalyptic world for the period of 14 days. And for the homonym angle, there are then those fort-building knights ("fort-knights" trying to survive attacking hordes of zombies).

To add to that odd feeling, I'll also name the odd and even blogs using the Roman calendar system of Kalends and Ides, just to tickle my archaic fancies.

The Old Roman Calendar had (only) 10 months, with each month being exactly one lunar cycle. Each month started and ended with the new moon and had the full moon in the middle.

Additional months (and days) were added in the middle of winter, when nobody cared. That's why the name of our twelfth month, December, suggests that it is the 10th month, not the 12th. At some point in the (Roman) past, it was the 10th month.

• Kalends are what Romans called the days at the beginning of each month (or perhaps all those outside Nones and Ides)
• Ides are days in the middle of each month (at the time of full moon).
• Nones are days about half-way before Ides (when the moon is half-full)

You can remember the phases of the moon with the mnemonic DOC, where the letter shape indicates the shape of the moon, e.g. D for the phase half-way from the new moon to the full moon, when only the right half of the moon is illuminated. In the southern hemisphere this switches to COD instead.

In Czech, it is easier to remember: we have Dorůstá (growing up) and Couvá (backing down) to remember the phases. And there is nobody speaking Czech in the southern hemisphere, so there is nothing to worry about - Czechs that live or travel there speak English, so they (should) know about COD.

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This installment will be shorter, because I'm running out of time and the month is already approaching its second week, so I need to hurry to keep it within kalends.

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Question 1:

The Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 just started and they had a colourful opening ceremony. But the order of national delegations entering the stadium was different from that of other years. It had to do with the Chinese alphabet, but almost every news outlet described it wrong. What (roughly speaking) determines the order?

• (1) Total number of strokes, then sorted by #strokes in the first character
• (2) Total #strokes, then #characters.
• (3) #strokes in the 1st character, then the total #strokes.
• (4) #strokes in the 1st character, then #characters.
• (5) #strokes in the 1st character, then #strokes in the 2nd character.
• (6) #strokes in the 1st character, then stroke order in the 1st character.
• (7) stroke order in the 1st character, then stroke order in the 2nd character.
• (8) #strokes in the 1st character, then pronunciation.
• (9) #strokes in the 1st character, then #strokes in the radical.
• (10) Reference order in the 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (dictionary of Standard Modern Chinese, published by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)

Question 2:

It was below freezing (-5°C) at the 2022 Winter Olympic opening ceremony and everybody was wearing winter clothes and ski outfits. But one person there was in sandals and shirtless. Who?

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Answer 1:

The ordering method was (6), i.e. the number of strokes, then the stroke order in the 1st character, then in the 2nd character and so on. This is the order specified by the standard Wubi (Wubisixing, Wang Ma) input method.

The method was invented in 1984 by Wang Yongmin after years of research and was protected by a patent. But the patent was frequently breached by Chinese computer vendors, so Wang brought it to court. It was the first legal case in China concerning intellectual rights and he won. However, later, the computer maker Lenovo attacked the patent again and the Beijing High Court then ruled that Wubi is based on "public knowledge" that goes back millennia.

This method is different from (7), which describes the Wubihua method.

The stroke order is what, in 2008, made Paraguay march before Bahrain, even though they both start with 2 characters of the same number of strokes and Bahrain has and additional 3rd character. If only number of strokes were used, Bahrain would march first.

The order of delegations in the opening parade of the Olympics, the Parade of Nations, varies with each hosting nation. Greeks always go first and the future and the current hosting nations always go last. But the rest is meant to be "alphabetical" in the language of the hosting nation.

Sometimes that might be tricky and exceptions are applied for political and other reasons. For example, it is well known that Israel and Iran are at odds with each other. So much so that the Iranians ordered their Judo competitors not to face the Israelis, because in their eyes that would amount to implicit recognition of the state of Israel. For that action, the International Judo Federation banned Iran for 4 years from competitions. (An Algerian judoka and his coach received a 10 year suspension for a similar politically motivated refusal.)

So the organizers of Seoul Winter Olympics in 2018 separated Iran and Israel by Italy, even thought this was not the correct order according to the Korean alphabet, Hangul.

The Chinese language does not have an alphabet and uses several different dictionary orders, which depend not only on the number and order of the strokes, but also on the other notions, such as character radicals or the meaning and pronunciation of the words and characters. It can be complicated.

The first characters of the Chinese name of Canada and Ghana are the same, so Canada marched immediately after Ghana.

The Chinese name for Canada is drawn with 3 characters and 18 strokes, with the 5, 10, 3 strokes used for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd character, respectively.

Here is a nice animation of drawing those characters (jia ná dà). Press the "movie" icon to see it (and then the "Rewrite" button on the button to see it again).

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Answer 2:

It was the flag bearer for American Samoa, who continued the tradition of Polynesian flag bearers appearing with oiled-up torso, wearing only a traditional tapa "grass" skirt (ʻIe tōga) and sandals.

The tradition was started in 2016 by the Tongan taekwondo and cross-country skiing athlete Pita Taufatofua, nicknamed the "Hot Tongan".

The 2022 flag bearer is the American skeleton driver (slider) Nathan Crumpton, a Princeton graduate of Polynesian and Chinese ancestry (which allows him to compete for American Samoa). He was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and pays his bills by modeling and talent work in advertisements and commercials, including one for Sochi Olympics as a snowboarder. He is also an award-winning photographer and a published author.  In addition, Crumpton is a track athlete; he attended the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, where he competed in the 100m race. He was the flag bearer there, too.

Note: Pita Taufatofua could not go to the 2022 Olympics. But in the past, similarly to Crumpton, he was able to qualify for both Summer and Winter Olympics and was the flag bearer there.

Note: Skeleton requires the athlete to ride prone (face down), head first, down a curved ice track with speed reaching 140 km/h. Here is what he will see on that ride.

Note: Crumpton's snowboarding is not too shabby, either.

He seems to have a good grasp of the sport.

Some claim that he appeared as a snowboarder in the McDonald's commercial for Sochi Olympics, but the official attribution goes to the professional snowboarder Louie Vito.

Note: Crumpton doesn't seem (or claim) to speak Samoan (or Tongan), but he is proficient in French and Swahili and is learning German and Spanish. Good for him. Nzuri kwake!