Japanese writing system basics • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#41

Post by gizmo686 » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:18 AM UTC

rett12 wrote: post #25

Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.

I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate.

I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that sound (do we really need a 'c').

Having said that, the Japanese phonetic system writes voiced sounds as a modification of their unvoiced counterparts. why can't we all do that.

The biggest risk of using Latin is that simply sharing an alphabet could cause spelling conventions of other languages to bleed in.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#42

Post by arthurcolle » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:18 AM UTC

rezashirazian wrote: post #18

That was cool. Interesting enough, you can come to the same conclusion with emojis.

This was my thought about how the article would progress until finishing it!

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#43

Post by sdrothrock » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:18 AM UTC

haimez wrote: post #12

asimjalis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.

Thus proving that symbolic meaning applied at the glyph level is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires pure memorization of all possible combinations of glyphs and conjugations thereof.

Thus proving that the alphabet is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires the pure memorization of all possible combinations of letters, with the lengths of such combinations becoming longer and longer as words are added to vocabulary.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#44

Post by zorceta » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC

andreygrehov wrote: post #7

I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?

It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't.

Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of the moon, to distinguish from eclipse of the sun, so Google Translate did this wrong. It should translate it to "eat" or "food" first.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#45

Post by robzyb » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #20

This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.

I agree. And I'm an Australian in Japan learning Japanese.

(I was expecting it to be a rant about insufficient unicode usage.)

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#46

Post by tasnent » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC

Gigablah wrote: post #36

ggreer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kanji for mouth. Depending on context, it can be pronounced "kuchi", "guchi", or "kou". That's the big problem with logographic writing systems: there's no connection between the symbol and the sound. Japanese lets you fall-back to phonetic alphabet, but other languages (Chinese) don't have that feature. Still, that was a fun post to read.

Not to mention that the katakana for "ro" looks really similar depending on font: ロ

But there's usually context given.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#47

Post by et-al » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #21

囧

For those that aren't up to date with the Sinosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiong

btw, just peeked your profile. Are you working in Beijing now?

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#48

Post by rett12 » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:20 AM UTC

laretluval wrote: post #31

rett12 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work due to the insane amount of homophones. When you are speaking with someone you have context and you can discern the meaning of what it's said. But random words or texts can change it's meaning depending of what character is used. And the tone system doesn't help as it can be seen in Chinese pinyin. For example, how many kanji can be read as 'shuu'/しゅう: http://jisho.org/search/%E3%81%97%E3%82%85%E3%81%…

Korean has just as many homophones and used to be written with characters like Japanese. Now they are doing just fine with their phonetic writing system.

Korean didn't work at all under the imported Chinese system. Japanese also had problems but they solved inventing the Hiragana, a syllabary system. Both languages chose different systems and both languages work fine.

Also Korean avoids many homophones thanks to it's 10 vowels. Japanese has 5.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#49

Post by PeCaN » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:20 AM UTC

haimez wrote: post #12

asimjalis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.

Thus proving that symbolic meaning applied at the glyph level is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires pure memorization of all possible combinations of glyphs and conjugations thereof.

Alternatively, it could mean that Google Translate is not very good.

If I had to guess, most Japanese people aren't going to have much trouble disambiguating ‘eat’ from ‘eclipse’. (And as zorceta explains, Chinese uses different hanzi for them anyway.)

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#50

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Aug 20, 2016, 2:21 AM UTC

donatj wrote: post #13

kevindeasis wrote: post #8

How many symbols are there? And how would the keyboard look like though?

Hah, and there's the kicker. In Japanese the most common input method is phonetic, either with a latin alphabet keyboard or a hiragana keyboard. The IME kicks in and has you select the ideogram you mean, so in reality it would save you no time typing and actually cost you time.

I highly doubt that's true, based on my experience with Chinese pinyin IMEs.

A Japanese phonetic IME should have enough local context to guess which Kanji is correct. You type, then go back and quickly proofread later.