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Japanese writing system basics

candyjapan.com

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Re: Japanese writing system basics

#141

Post by prewett »

Zarel wrote: post #107
0xfaded wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting the parts together, 吃 would mean the begging mouth. The native Japanese word for eat, kuu, was at least at one time written 喰う which I think we would all agree makes a lot of sense. Both languages underwent different simplifications, I suspect in Chinese it became 吃 and Japanese 食, so in both languages the original logic has been lost. I'm a westerner who learned Japanese as an adult. I feel its quite unfortu…

Nah, 喰 is entirely unrelated; it's one of the few characters Japan invented (most are imported and sometimes simplified from Traditional Chinese). On the other hand, you might recognize 吃 as the 喫 from 喫茶店 (café). The Chinese simplification was overall a good thing. A lot of the simplifications are from Japanese, even. Like, compare the Traditional 體 with the Simplified 体 (body) - the latter is from Japanese.

The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气 doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem to have kept the artistic flavor.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#142

Post by escape_goat »

biot wrote: post #6
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

Ok, thats a fun hack.

A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :) I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written in the foreign language.

I feel sort of like it's a fun hack for getting email addresses within minimal effort, but the material wasn't entirely new to me, so perhaps I am underestimating how genuinely interesting it was to other people.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#144

Post by userbinator »

asimjalis wrote: post #9
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?

Maybe because in the eclipse the moon eats the sun.

...and in the Eclipse, the Oracle eats the 日.

(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%A3#Etymology and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5#Etymology if you didn't get the admittedly horrible pun.)

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#145

Post by w1ntermute »

ggreer wrote: post #126
andrioni wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>• It's possible to know how to say a word, but have no clue how to write it. This phenomenon is called character amnesia, and it affects most native speakers.[1] Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). > >• Likewise, it's possible to know what a symbol means, but have no idea how to pronounce it. This is extra-fun in Japanese, where most kan…

I've had Chinese colleagues who, when asked to write a word they'd just used in a sentence, were simply unable to. At first I thought they were playing a joke on me. But nope, they'd just forgotten the appropriate hanzi, and they couldn't even hazard a guess. It's a totally different failure mode than imperfectly-phonetic languages like English.

From Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard[0]:

> I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China. English is simply orders of magnitude easier to write and remember. No matter how low-frequency the word is, or how unorthodox the spelling, the English speaker can always come up with something, simply because there has to be some correspondence between sound and spelling.

0: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#146

Post by bemmu »

comboy wrote: post #111
bemmu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could write a second one if I somehow knew there would be enough (1000?) people who would read it. I'll put up signup form here: http://eepurl.com/ccistz

Given how popular this tiny article has become I think you could take the risk. If you link it under the current one, you can probably get 1000 views just from the current wave.

It took me three sessions of a few hours each to write the current one. If I start writing the next part now, traffic to current one will be dead before it's finished.

Also it's hard to get people to click through to anything, be it another article or a sign-up to get updates. Most people go back to HN and read the comments or another article. I know I do.

Edit: People didn't seem to be at all interested, so I removed the sign-up link from the post.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#147

Post by thaumasiotes »

dnautics wrote: post #75
thaumasiotes wrote: post #17

If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too? If king is 王, kingly is 王ly, and royal is 王al, what is regal? If mouth is 口 and mouthed is 口ed, why would ate be 食t rather than 食ed? Japan misinterpreted the Chinese writing system (already terrible) into easily the worst writing system known to mankind. It won't look cute when…

>If 口 substitutes for mouth -- the adjective form of "mouth" is "oral", an etymologically (and audibly!) distinct word. Should that use 口 too? Yes. And that's exactly what they do in Japan. Rather uncommonly among languages, English is a fusion between romance and germanic stems. Often you'll see two phonographic bases for the same concept: Easy ones are food: Pork/Swine, Cow/Beef, but Oral/Mouth, etc. Japanese is si…

> Yes. And that's exactly what they do in Japan.

I'm aware that that's what they do in Japan. I'm pointing out that it's idiotic.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#148

Post by prewett »

chewxy wrote: post #125
ttflee wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), 吃 is equivalent to 喫, which means `to eat`. Its another meaning was `stuttering`. The ghosts part was not supported. http://tool.httpcn.com/Html/KangXi/22/PWCQUYAZMEUYILAZKO.sht... http://tool.httpcn.com/Html/KangXi/22/PWCQRNKOCQUYUYAB.shtml

Agreed. The ghosts bit is apocryphal. Not difficult to see where it comes from though. Mouth + Qi = spiritual nonsense.

I had to look a bit to figure out how you got "qi" from a word pronounced "chi". 契, the right part of the character is pronounced qi4, as is the character 氣, which does have spiritual meanings. 契, however, has no such meaning (according to wiktionary), so I assume this is another one of those Chinese superstitious puns.

Is a preference for 食 a Taiwanese thing? All the mainland Chinese people I've ever heard say 吃.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#149

Post by anqurvanillapy »

In Chinese, 'eat' is usually '吃'. We use '吃了 (le)' to say we 'ate' and '在 (zài) 吃' or '吃着 (zhě)' for 'eating'.

It is really interesting that in China people often ask their friends '吃了吗? (Have you eaten?)' rather than '嗨 (Hi)' in daily life. So initially I thought this post was describing something in Chinese w/o my noticing the URL.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#150

Post by prewett »

GFK_of_xmaspast wrote: post #140
vacri wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If chinese characters weren't unusually cumbersome, why then do chinese schoolchildren learn a different alphabet first (pinyin), just to assist them in learning chinese characters? > people wouldn't be able to memorize thousands of 20-stroke character if they were all completely patternless. Well, people don't. 20 strokes is an unusually high stroke count, and people don't remember thousands of those. Simplified chi…

> If chinese characters weren't unusually cumbersome, why then do chinese schoolchildren learn a different alphabet first Also why did Korea and Vietnam abandon them entirely?

Probably because Chinese characters are a poor fit for Korean and Vietnamese grammar/vocabulary. They are a poor fit for Japanese grammar/vocabulary, too, as you can see by the fact that every character has multiple possible sounds depending on which word it is used in. In Chinese, however, the characters very much make sense for the language. Most words are one or two syllables, and correspond characters correspond to both the meanings and the pronunciation. A large number of characters even have a pronunciation hint built in. I, personally, think that Chinese is much easier to read in characters than pinyin, and you certainly won't find any Chinese ever using pinyin for more than a teaching tool. (Especially because nobody except foreigners seems to put tones on the pinyin). The fact that China has kept using them, despite a very pragmatic government that wanted to move the language more phonetic, should say something about their utility.
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