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Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

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Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#101

Post by jpatokal »

jack1243star wrote: post #87
azernik wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the…

If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation. Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not. Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random…

English loanwords are only a tiny part of either language. The parent was pointing out that in Chinese 生 is always sheng, while in Japanese it can be any of sei, shou, san, nama, ikiru, ikeru, ikasu, umu and 50-odd more readings depending on context.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#102

Post by Manishearth »

glandium wrote: post #100
Manishearth wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While reading that I also got confused between 犬 (which I haven't encountered before) and 太 (which I have). Though that's just my lack of vocabulary. Still, it's pretty hard to tell these apart as a learner since it's not always clear which parts of a glyph are the important features. My favorite one of these "look the same but aren't" pairs is 土 & 士 which differ only by the relative lengths of the upper and lower st…

In the category "differ only by the relative lengths of the upper and lower stroke", there's also 未 and 末. I'm not sure what you mean about the hooking of the second stroke of 囗 and 口. Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, the former is not a character on its own (at least, it's not in the 2136 Jōyō kanjis, ne…

> Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be No, I mean that the end of the stroke in the former is often hooked and crosses the third stroke, whereas in the latter the second stroke stops short of the third stroke and isn't hooked. I'm not 100% sure; and I'm still learning :)

I don't think it's a common character on its own in Chinese either; I know it as a radical.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#103

Post by gurkendoktor »

gfaure wrote: post #22
tankenmate wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Katakana derived from Kanji, but were typically only used for their sound rather than their meaning and a very very simplified version of how you would write the character quickly allowing for lifting the brush (Hiragana is the simplified version quickly without lifting the brush) roughly speaking; so you are mostly right but not completely. シ comes from the Chinese character 之, meaning either "of" or "this"…

> ソ comes from the Chinese character 會 ソ comes from 曾 ("once, at one point") not 會. Yes, those are different characters.

It gets worse. 曾 and 會 in your comment look clearly distinct to me in Safari, but if I check with Firefox, they suddenly look very similar.

The trick is that 曾 is sometimes written with 八 as its "roof", which makes it look like 會, and sometimes with 丷, depending on your font. (Similar to 兑 and 兌 in the article)

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#104

Post by glandium »

Manishearth wrote: post #102
glandium wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the category "differ only by the relative lengths of the upper and lower stroke", there's also 未 and 末. I'm not sure what you mean about the hooking of the second stroke of 囗 and 口. Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be I don't know about Chinese, but in Japanese, the former is not a character on its own (at least, it's not in the 2136 Jōyō kanjis, ne…

> Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be No, I mean that the end of the stroke in the former is often hooked and crosses the third stroke, whereas in the latter the second stroke stops short of the third stroke and isn't hooked. I'm not 100% sure; and I'm still learning :) I don't think it's a common character on its own in Chinese either; I know it as a…

Do you mean this? http://www.geocities.jp/yokomoko3/kihon-5.jpg In japanese, there is not, but there is this difference in how the second and third strokes interact.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#105

Post by rangibaby »

IgorPartola wrote: post #46
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱

The question is if you would recognize the difference if they weren’t side by side. I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Hiragana as far as I can tell makes no internal sense. The characters for yo and ya don’t incorporate elements from o or a. And when you are done eh Hiragana you realize that it is on its own not enough to actually communicate in Japanese, so now in addition…

The "internal sense" is that they are both derived from kanji:

Hiragana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana...

Katakana: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/Katakana...

Kanji isn't that hard if you are realistic about how large of a task it is. Japanese children spend 10 years learning kanji at school and that is their native language.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#106

Post by Symbiote »

ksec wrote: post #68
emodendroket wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My biggest frustration with Han unification is that on my phone Japanese text appears with Chinese variants and there's no way to correct this without rooting the phone or setting the system language to Japanese (both kind of a lot of work to get something working that should just work out of the box). People say "well, what's the big deal? You can read it anyway," but think about how you'd feel if English text rando…

My exact same feeling. Even if the Han Character, as in the Han unification are the same, the glyph matters a lot in context. It a little like replacing every french word / character à with just a. And à is only accessible with variant fonts which is not supported by most OS, and if you have your system locale as French every English word would have à instead of a.

Is this because developers have their locale set to their language, so it looks good for them, and they're forgetting to define the language of the text?

That's the case for HTML:
But I don't know about other instances.

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#107

Post by rangibaby »

jack1243star wrote: post #87
azernik wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am trying to teach myself Japanese, which allegedly is easier than Chinese. Who did you hear that from? The Japanese writing system is the Chinese one, minus all of the internal consistency, plus lots of characters the Chinese aren't traditional enough to keep in the language. It often uses the same character to write distinct Chinese loanwords which differ wildly in pronunciation based on when and from whom the…

If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation. Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not. Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random…

> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible.

That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"):

I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni.

Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield Conveni: Conveni-ence store

> Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters.

This was standard in Japanese too (ateji). It is more common now to just make a loanword, but if someone doesn't learn them they may be confused about why Japanese abbreviate America as "rice".

米 US from 亜米利加 A ME RI KA (亜 is for Asia) eg 米軍 (US military) or 米ドル (US dollar)

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#108

Post by rangibaby »

emodendroket wrote: post #43
tanilama wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

刀 simply means knife/sword, or knife in general, while 刃 means the sharpest part of the knife. In fact, 刀刃 is its own word in Chinese, in this case meaning the blade of a knife.

Never seen it before, but in Japanese that's apparently "tohjin," meaning the blade of a sword. http://www.weblio.jp/content/%E5%88%80%E5%88%83

or just any blade as "ha": https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/刃物

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#109

Post by Manishearth »

glandium wrote: post #104
Manishearth wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you mean the fact that in the former, the angle tends to be 90° while in the latter it tends to be No, I mean that the end of the stroke in the former is often hooked and crosses the third stroke, whereas in the latter the second stroke stops short of the third stroke and isn't hooked. I'm not 100% sure; and I'm still learning :) I don't think it's a common character on its own in Chinese either; I know it as a…

Do you mean this? http://www.geocities.jp/yokomoko3/kihon-5.jpg In japanese, there is not, but there is this difference in how the second and third strokes interact.

Yeah. To be clear; this is what I've guessed from seeing it written in various ways; I don't have an authoritative source.

(In general there doesn't seem to be a good source for what kinds of variations in a character are accepted and what the "kernel" of the character is.)

Re: Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)

#110

Post by Manishearth »

rangibaby wrote: post #107
jack1243star wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. Also Japanese dictionaries could be easier to check, since you just need to know the pronunciation. Your conception on the writing systems is quite weird, consistency (if any) is the same, I would say. I do not get what you mean by characters being "traditional" or not. Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random…

> If you know English, the loanwords become immediately accesible. That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"): I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni. Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield…

IIRC 米国 (mi guo / "rice country") is used in Taiwan as well. The other Chinese word for America (美国 / mei guo / "beautiful country") is also a phonetic thing.

(I used to think 美国 was descriptive since it didn't sound phonetic, until I came across 米国 and was confused as to why anyone would describe the US as "rice country", and then I learned that both were phonetic, but for the "me" in "america")

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