@snailboat The strange thing is that although I have heard bopomofo I have no idea what it refers to, lol.
Anyway, I studied the Chinese language for ten years from elementary school to high school. But I think now I can only write the simple characters that I learnt in say the first three years of that education.
Unless you write the characters regularly, you just forget how to write them after some time, even if you might be a native speaker of the spoken form.
@CowperKettle I figured out what went wrong with my Acer laptop. It was because I installed the latest graphics driver from Intel to replace the old Acer driver. But Acer customised the old driver for the hardware, and the non-customised version from Intel just does not work well for the hardware. That gave me a black screen. I tried to reproduce this bug successfully, and used my magic thumbdrive to reinstall Windows again easily, lol.
> Who's more bright than a star? That's our glorious M.A.R. Whose each word is more prized Than a golden dinar.
2
> Oh, he is not on the Periodic table, And Mendeleyev never got him straight, For he is bright as fiber optic cable, Although with quite unsteady transfer rate.
@Jasper Do I really spell wrong? I always spell it that way. Recently I have been tired of fussing about English. I find no matter how fussy I am, there is a possibility that I make some mistake. But actually I found German professors commit very absurd English mistakes in their mails to me, so I think they shoud be able to pardon any English mistake I make.
@snailboat we have learnt pinyin since kindergarden if we do go to kindergarten.
The answer to this question is that the 'O' got squashed out of the root by "rhythmic clipping".
First of all, one might think that there has never been an 'O' in the word pronunciation. In fact, the truth is rather different! Before the advent of dictionaries and word-processing spell-checke...
"rhythmic clipping" is just another word for English
I like that when you read stuff like this it confirms some of the things you suspected but also suspected are just gut feelings and not legit linguistic patterns