Taiwan 2025 - Chiang-Kai-Shek Residence, Rustic Sign / Looking at Other Languages

Not that I understand anything this says, but it's rustic and artistically done.  Google Translate on the phone helps with most signage, but this one's a bit spotty (literally).

And I just like looking at stuff like this - which is art, really.  The fact that almost all of the the characters are different, the "font" used, the way they are spaced.  It's beautiful.  But Chinese isn't the only language that is unique (to us) to simply look at.  In this post from 2020 I mentioned finding a book as a kid that had its Foreword written in 41 different languages.  I would sit and just stare at those pages for hours, fascinated that someone in the world could read and make sense of all of those squiggles, dots, letters, and symbols.

Then later, during my college years, I started a collection of foreign-language Bibles.  I stumbled into the American Bible Society on 61st at Broadway while in New York City the first time, and was surprised that the vast inventory they had of Bibles in different languages was for sale.  From then on, I bought a few on every trip to the city, eventually ending up with a collection of about sixteen of them.  Some I've given away since, so think now there're only about twelve left.

That's not a sense of wonder that's gone away with age, either.  Just recently I compiled a translation of Genesis 1:1 in more than 250 different languages...again thanks to Google and Microsoft Word that made it easy.  These included new and obscure writing systems that I previously knew nothing about.  One day I'll print the nine pages on glossy paper and post them somewhere.