Romance of the Red Dust, ep. 01-05

[oyceter]

(aka, Technicolor Female Assassin Squad!)

I was going to post screencaps, because this drama is absolutely gorgeous (except when it has plastic horses flying through the air or random black spandex screens), but I forgot and returned the Netflix DVD already.

But! shewhohashope has pictures in her post on eps. 1-3

Comments

[heavenscalyx]

It... it's like all the Chinese Ghost Story movies and all the Swordsman movies mashed together with The Heroic Trio and a touch of The Bride With White Hair.

Episodically.

Thirty. Episodes.

I've just added them all to my Netflix queue.

[oyceter]

I've just added them all to my Netflix queue.

WHOO! Mission accomplished.

[heavenscalyx]

And now I find out that apparently the closest copy of disc 1 that Netflix is willing to ship me is in Santa Ana, California.

Heaven forfend that Netflix Boston/Worcester/whatever BUY IT THEMSELVES.

*taps fingers impatiently*

[oyceter]

How annoying! I grrr on your behalf.

[thomasyan]

Hm, I wonder if this one has hopping vampires later on.

And, oyceter, about:

(except when she's in orange, but everyone still seems to think she is dressed in red)

One consideration is that in Mandarin, I think there is a single color word for red/orange. Hm, I wonder what the etymology is for the Mandarin word for the fruit, since I don't recognize any of the constituent sounds.

(As opposed to, for example, "potato", which I think is literally "ground bean", or "computer", which is "electric brain".)

[oyceter]

One consideration is that in Mandarin, I think there is a single color word for red/orange. Hm, I wonder what the etymology is for the Mandarin word for the fruit, since I don't recognize any of the constituent sounds.

(As opposed to, for example, "potato", which I think is literally "ground bean", or "computer", which is "electric brain".)

Really? I thought "hong" or "chi" were red (chi if it's more classical Chinese). I figure in classical Chinese red and orange might be mixed like qing is used for green and blue, but I'm pretty sure they were using "hong." And "orange" the color is ju(2)se(4) and orange the fruit is ju(2)zi.

Also what are you using for "potato"? I usually call them ma(3)ling(2)shu(3) which doesn't seem like bean?

[thomasyan]

Hm, could be I'm wrong about red/orange. As for "ju(2)se(4)", is that literally, "orange-fruit" and "color (of)"? Or does ju(2) come from somewhere/something else? Is it used in other constructs? (My knowledge of Chinese has lots of holes, and in particular, I have trouble recalling words. I do pretty well recognizing them, but when I visited Taiwan and I tried to think of Mandarin words, I got French instead. Argh!)

For potato, in Shanghai they say "tu do". I don't know the tones. My coworkers ordered a dish, and I didn't recognize the word, but when the dish came, I realized what "tu do" must be referring to. To my surprise, my coworkers treated it as a single word instead of, like I do/did, a compound word.

[oyceter]

Huh! I suspect the word for the color orange came from the fruit, but that's because the "ju" has a wood radical. "se" is "color" and "zi" is... um. It's the same character as "ko" in Japanese.

Also, re: potato, interesting! I've never heard that before! Maybe it is Taiwan vs. Shanghai? I usually hear "shu" for starchy root-like things, like "fan shu" for yam.

[oyceter]

Interesting! I do "ju hong" for orange as well, and have heard "di gua" used for yam pretty often, but never "tu dou." Hrm, if you don't mind, what part of China are your parents from? Am trying to pin down possible dialect differences. My grandparents were from Zhejiang and Guangdong, but my parents were both born in Taiwan. I have to ask my mom about htis now...

[thomasyan]

I did a little Googling. this page says: The color orange is difficult to translate from English into Chinese, because most shades of orange are considered either red or yellow by the Chinese.
It gives as an example that the Chinese consider persimmons to be red, rather than orange.

At some point I should read that page more carefully. It looks like there are a number of interesting things that I'd never heard of. Of course, I'd feel better if there were something that had the same content and looked more reliable.

[oyceter]

Interesting link, thanks! It's hard for me to figure things out in terms of usage, particularly modern vs. older, especially because some of the phrases they cite sound like set phrases (chen(2) yu(3)?) and I can never figure out if it's commonly know or commonly used or what.