{"id":10753,"date":"2011-05-03T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T07:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2011\/05\/03\/like-a-chicken-talking-to-a-duck\/"},"modified":"2011-05-03T07:00:01","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T07:00:01","slug":"like-a-chicken-talking-to-a-duck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20110503-01\/?p=10753","title":{"rendered":"Like a chicken talking to a duck"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many years ago, I called the home of my Chinese-speaking nieces. This was before they started learning English and before I started <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/01\/11\/9946369.aspx\"> learning their dialect of Chinese<\/a>. After the call was over, the eldest niece asked, &#8220;Who was that on the phone?&#8221;\n &#8220;That was Uncle Raymond.&#8221;\n &#8220;Oh, I want to talk to Uncle Raymond!&#8221;\n Her mother replied, &#8220;That&#8217;d be like a chicken talking to a duck.&#8221;\n <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk\/dictionary\/words\/2191\/\"> <i>A chicken talking to a duck<\/i><\/a> is a Chinese idiom referring to <a href=\"http:\/\/kluwerconstructionblog.com\/2010\/01\/07\/a-chicken-talking-to-a-duck\/\"> two people who cannot communicate due to a language barrier<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> It seems that ducks are somehow central to the concept of language unintelligibility. Is there a duck-related language idiom in your language? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many years ago, I called the home of my Chinese-speaking nieces. This was before they started learning English and before I started learning their dialect of Chinese. After the call was over, the eldest niece asked, &#8220;Who was that on the phone?&#8221; &#8220;That was Uncle Raymond.&#8221; &#8220;Oh, I want to talk to Uncle Raymond!&#8221; Her [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-10753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Many years ago, I called the home of my Chinese-speaking nieces. This was before they started learning English and before I started learning their dialect of Chinese. After the call was over, the eldest niece asked, &#8220;Who was that on the phone?&#8221; &#8220;That was Uncle Raymond.&#8221; &#8220;Oh, I want to talk to Uncle Raymond!&#8221; Her [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}