Viewing profile — ickoonite

The remote! How could I forget the remote!

Gosh, the first screenshot took me back. The MIDI player was part of a set of apps that came with the SoundBlaster 16 that stacked together like hifi separates. There was a CD play…

Deployment in particular, in my (limited) experience. We had to deploy Slack and I was amazed that there was no way of configuring it via Group Policy or such. It had to be done ma…

The stereotype of Japan as technologically advanced persists in the West despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Japan still uses floppy disks and fax machines. They prefer to p…

Oh my. You have got yourself in quite a pickle. “Must have had been” is simply wrong; in your examples, it should always be “must have been”.

No, this is just wrong. You are conflating two tenses. Must can be present (be) or perfect (have). In the example above, you would say: “She must have been being watched.”

If you can explain the logic by which 臭, composed of 自 (self) and 大 (big), can come to mean “smelly”, or 義, composed of 𦍌/羊 (ram, sheep) and 我 (I, we, our), can come to mean “just…

Korean has the same problem. I believe they occasionally put the kanji in brackets after a word to disambiguate.

I remember a Spanish colleague expressing his exasperation at “cucumber”. I had not noticed its inconsistency until that point. (The Japanese equivalent that springs to mind is the…

This was the point I made at the top of this thread: that Japanese manages to combine the complexity of written Chinese with the inconsistency of English spelling. Does any other l…

> Anyway, you know it's completely wild when their official help site points you to switch to Shift-JIS compatiblity mode on a fresh install of Windows 11 :) Oh dear. I just skimme…

Precisely. A couple more: 隼人 (hayato), 盗人 (nusutto). Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one …

In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.

Absolutely. Japanese Twitter is another great example. I’ve often liked to describe kanji as a form of compression: the problem is the encoding and decoding are done in your head r…

I suppose it depends what you consider efficient: I would counter that using a mere 26 letters to encode all the varying sounds of English is wonderfully parsimonious, an incredibl…

I have read the “must have had been being” over and over again and as a native English speaker, I still can’t understand what it means. I hesitate to call it ungrammatical, but ins…

支払手数料 a fine example of how messy the language can become. What looks like a run of 漢語 actually contains a mix of on-yomi and kun-yomi and “you just have to know”. That there would…

読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And fo…

> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the …

Thank you. This was the counter-citation I could not be bothered to produce.

Outside of Chinese (where it is standard), I’ve not seen 苹果 before, but the Japanese input on iOS suggests it after a bit of scrolling. It’s in the dictionary on there as well, whe…

becauseitsbasicallylikewritinglikethissoquitehardtoparse

They actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the …

Precisely. The feeling I am getting from this discussion is there are quite a few people who have dabbled in the spoken language without having to grapple with its intractable writ…

Yes, this is quite common in subtitles. I seem to remember that in GoldenEye, Xenia Onatopp was subtitled 女上, glossed with furigana オナトップ。 (I will try to dig out a relevant song ly…