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Part II: Speed
Which Friends on Friends Were the Closest Friends? Chandler and Joey? Rachel and Monica? Slate crunches the numbers. By Ben Blatt
[Time 2]
This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Friends series finale, which aired on May 6, 2004. In honor of this important occasion, I decided to take a closer look at the series’ decade-long run and attempt to determine which of the six friends were the closest, as determined by which characters spent the most time on screen with each another. The Friends writers did a remarkable job of distributing screen time evenly among the six principal players. While Joey appears in 47.7 percent of all scenes, the most of any character, Phoebe, the character who appears in the fewest, is just barely behind her pals, with appearances in 41.9 percent of all scenes. (In Seinfeld, by way of comparison, Jerry appears in 58.3 percent of all scenes, while Kramer only appears in 38.4 percent.) But just because the characters have equal screen time, does this mean that all of the friends were equally friendly? Is there a pair or trio who spent more time together than the others? Is there a pair or trio or foursome who rarely rendezvoused at the Central Perk for a latte and a chat with Gunther? To determine which characters shared scenes, I downloaded transcripts of all 236 episodes from this remarkably comprehensive fan site. For the purposes of this inquiry, I treated these transcripts as authoritative, as watching all 10 seasons was impractical. Due to inconsistencies in the transcripts, which do not always list all of the characters present in a given scene, I used the following methodology: If a character spoke a line in a scene, I marked him or her as present. Admittedly, this is an imperfect approach, as even with this gregarious group, there were scenes in which a character was present but did not have a line. However, in most instances, all parties present in a scene end up uttering a line, so I’m confident my analysis is sound, even if it missed a moping Ross here or a pouting Rachel there.
[333 words]
[Time 3]
There are 63 possible arrangements in which the six characters could have appeared in any given scene. This includes all combinations of one, two, three, four, five, or six characters. Each one of these 63 combinations occurred during the show’s run, though some combinations are more common than others. For instance, Joey, Phoebe, Monica, and Chandler appeared together 41 times, more than any other foursome. This stands to reason: For a long stretch of the series, Joey and Chandler were roommates as well as friends, and it makes sense that the missing pair were the on-again-off-again lovers Ross and Rachel. Indeed, as you might expect, Ross and Rachel are the two friends most likely to have their own scenes together. Other combinations of friends were much less common. There is only one scene in the entire history of Friends in which Joey, Phoebe, Monica, and Ross appeared together without either Rachel and/or Chandler. The scene occurred in Season 1, Episode 7 when, during a blackout, the four are left in Monica’s apartment to listen to Phoebe’s newest song: “New York City has no power, and the milk is getting sour, but to me it is not scary, because I stay away from dairy.” During this scene Chandler is memorably trapped in an ATM vestibule with an attractive woman and Rachel is alone on Monica’s balcony. Is there an outcast in the group? It depends on how you crunch the numbers. In addition to appearing in the fewest scenes, Phoebe also has the lowest degree centrality score (a measure used to assess importance within a network). However, there were 58 scenes in which all of the friends except Ross were together. This is the most instances any one friend was left out; it exceeds the number of times just Phoebe was left out by more than 30 percent.
[307 words]
[Time 4]
In terms of the most popular friend, again, different metrics may tell a different story. But a safe bet is Rachel. She has the highest degree centrality score, making her, at least from a statistician’s point of view, the center of the friend-network. And which friends were the closest, based on scene counts? There were more scenes featuring all six friends than any other combination of the characters. The most common friend combinations with fewer than six friends present were Ross and Rachel, followed by Chandler and Monica. But those pairings also represent the two couples in the sitcom. If we throw out those more-than-friends combinations, Chandler and Joey are the winners, having appeared in 130 scenes without any other friends, more than any other combination. Run your own experiments with the FriendsFriend Group widget above. Select any specific set of friends and the widget will tell you how many times each group appeared on screen together. Can you find a trio that appears four times as often if Chandler is added to make it a group of four? The most common third-wheel? The least common group of three? Post your answers and other Friends findings in the comments below. [200 words]
Source: Slate
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/05/friends_chandler_joey_ross_rachel_monica_phoebe_which_friends_were_closest.html
Why English Doesn't Borrow Much From Chinese
[Time 5]
As languages go, English is a notoriously promiscuous one, borrowing caricatures from Italian, chutzpah from Yiddish and faux pas from French. And yet despite the English-speaking world's deep and wide confluences with Chinese culture, for some reason, few Chinese words have lately entered the English-speaking world's vocabulary.
China's state media is hoping that could change: Last week, it cited several Chinese entries that have recently appeared UrbanDictionary.com. 'English speakers may soon be saying 'you can you up, no can no bb' in response to criticism,' the official Xinhua news agency said, referring to a Chinese phrase that means if you can do it, do it, and if you can't, don't criticize others. ( In Beijing dialect, 'BB' means to nag or complain.) But don't hold your breath. There are some 8 million entries on UrbanDictionary.com, a volunteer effort akin to a Wikipedia of slang, the majority of which-'asdfwefewfawefwea,' anyone?-most people would never have heard. (By way of comparison, there are only some 230,000 words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary.) Some of the Chinese terms that have entered UrbanDictionary.com include 'people mountain people sea,' a literal derivation of (), a term used to refer to large crowds, as well as 'No zuo no die,' a riff off (), that is, if you don't do something stupid, bad things won't happen to you.
It seems implausible that such terms could enter mainstream English parlance. Linguists note that the heyday for linguistic absorption from China occurred before 1950, as can be seen in the spellings of certain loaner words-kowtow, gung ho, ketchup-many derived from non-Mandarin Chinese languages such as Cantonese. [270 words]
[Time 6]
Though there are other Chinese terms that are well-known in English, such as bok choy or chow mien, as the Economist's Johnson language blog has pointed out, '[English-speaking countries] borrowed the foods, and their Chinese names merely hitched a ride into English.' The same could be true of another-by now-commonly known Chinese term, feng shui. By contrast, China has adopted plenty of English words, each given its own transliterated characters-ku for cool, yimeir for email, leisi for lace, wutuobang for Utopia. Other terms used in China are the same ones that have been exported in English around the world: 'okay, bye bye, man.' On the English side, resistance to Chinese words doesn't seem to be a simple difficulty of pronunciation: though Mandarin's different tones may be daunting, the basic syllables are easy enough, and the trickiness of French or Japanese pronunciation (coup d'etat, karaoke) hasn't stopped English from embracing words from either language. And there are plenty of words that would seem ripe to jump the Pacific: Here at China Real Time, one particularly accessible term, mafan-meaning a hassle, or difficulty-could be easily adopted by English speakers (and in fact already has been by many on staff). And who could resist the roll-off-the-tongue ease of mamahuhu, a term that means 'so-so'? (The literal translation is 'horse horse tiger tiger.') Maybe, as some theorize, it's just a matter of time, as China's reach grows, and exchanges continue to deepen. [238 words]
Source: Youdao
http://xue.youdao.com/biarticle.a?articleId=-3321090316895886341&date=2014-05-05&position=read-history&channelType=personal | 
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发表于 2014-5-11 23:49:16
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