The great thing, you’d think, about sign language, is that it is universal. A smiley face is a smiley face; you don’t need words.<\/p>\n
But you’d be wrong. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
I was corresponding by IM with a friend in Korea and thereby learnt that a smile in Korean web-writing is ^^, and a frown ^-^.<\/p>\n
Which reminds me of one time in eastern Syria when I was trying to get a taxidriver to take me to the train station. Phrasebook Arabic didn’t work, so I had a brainwave and signalling with a pulling down motion with my arm, as you’d operate a train whistle, and said “choo choo”. Smiles all around; he understood perfectly!<\/p>\n
Shortly afterwards, we arrived at the church – complete with bells. I caught the bus in the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The great thing, you’d think, about sign language, is that it is universal. A smiley face is a smiley face; you don’t need words. But you’d be wrong. \ud83d\ude42 I was corresponding by IM with a friend in Korea and thereby learnt that a smile in Korean web-writing is ^^, and a frown ^-^. Which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,1,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-miscellaneous","category-travel","author-natalieben"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philobiblon.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}