Close enough: glossing Sinographic Mandarin with Pinyin Mandarin

Intriguing t-shirt that is making the rounds these days: (source) The characters say: zúgòujìn 足夠近 "close enough" The Pinyin says: chàbùduō 差不多 "almost" The two idiomatic terms, though expressed in quite different ways with dissimilar orientations (to be explained in detail below), amount to roughly the same thing, so it is reasonable to gloss one […]