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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)

#131

Post by timr »

dastbe wrote: post #128
timr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's definitely a lot of wanking about learning methods, but if you're taking an immersion class, you have to consider the amount of word study you're already doing. I'm just responding to the self-learner folks who want to start by "learning kanji", as if that's some kind of preliminary step to learning the language. I've met a bunch of those people, and it rarely works well for them. (Though, it should be said t…

And even if they don’t know the words, they have internalized the learning methods to quickly ingest characters. Chinese classes go from learning barely 200-500 characters in a semester at the introductory level to that much in a week by your third or so year.

Wellll...I don't know Chinese and have never studied in China, so I can't speculate in that domain. But I wouldn't be so quick to infer specific techniques from their memorization speed -- they're fluent in a very similar written language, and it's much faster to learn things (in any language) when you're fluent. They also grew up in a...well, let's call it a memorization-intensive learning environment.

The only things I can say with confidence are:

  * focus on words
  * learning words becomes faster in *any* language as you gain proficiency
  * learning radicals helps you recognize kanji, and is a good thing to do
That's really my complete set of advice on the subject.

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

#132

Post by dastbe »

mc32 wrote: post #45
dastbe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure if you're coming from a purely japanese background, but in chinese 左 and 右 both have the same stroke order for the upper left portion. and to show just how ridiculous han unification is, on my laptop your example makes no sense because the 臭 has a 犬!

Also, radicals and roots can adjust shape to accommodate the partner, so they can vary in exact shape from one character context to another.

this is true, though these cases are fairly limited and 𠂇 is not a radical (you would look it up as 丿+ 1)

after looking through my dictionary, it appears that 右 was originally written with 又 which is a pictograph of a right hand (no idea if the split-top was an accepted variation of the radical or the original form) and was later standardized to use 𠂇 for both characters. Japanese picked them up before the standardization occurred and so missed out on the homogenization.

this also makes 友 a combination of the left and right hand, which imo is kind of cool.

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

#134

Post by kobeya »

tanilama wrote: post #34
kobeya wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically alphabet based phonetic descriptive written languages are a recent invention.

Not really, the Phoenician alphabet, which considered as origin of the writing system of many western languages created somewhere around 1200 BC. Oldest Chinese oracle script is discovered around the same time.

Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing goes Back much further than that, and while the alphabet has it’s origin in he Phonician sea peoples, it didn’t become widespread through Europe and Central Asia until the Greek empire a thousand years later. Alphabet like writing systems have been prominent for less than half of written history, hence recent.

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

#135

Post by patal »

dastbe wrote: post #129
patal wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for your claim? Particularly, you're suggesting that the stroke order for the top left part was once different in China. I'd really like to see a document on this.

I can buy that, as I know the top left portion in chinese historically is for the left hand. If the historical variation of right was for the right hand, that would make a lot of sense.

Are you really suggesting that writers changed hands during writing a single character? That sounds totally impractical. Also, that does not explain why there should be a different stroke order.

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

#136

Post by anw »

anw wrote: post #56
tjallingt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a Japanese reader so i can't fill you in on what exactly the characters mean but they are characters from the Japanese katakana script. Katakana are generally used for loanwords and each character represents a sound: ツ - tsu シ - shi ソ - so ン - n The reason these are difficult to learn is because the tiny differences in stroke angles (especially when handwritten) make it easy to confuse them.

In college, my Japanese teacher told us that a lot of foreigners get these characters wrong, but if you know the stroke order then it's easy to see the difference. シ (shi) is written top to bottom. You can see that all the starting points for the strokes line up vertically on the left. Also, the last stroke curves from the bottom-left to the upper-right. ツ (tsu) is written from left to right. You can see that all the…

Replying since I can't edit: The sentence for "ソ (so)" should read "The starting points for the strokes line up horizontally at the top".

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

#137

Post by Manishearth »

smallnamespace wrote: post #123
SerLava wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah except for counters. Those god forsaken counters. You can't just say five pencils. You have to say 5 long thin object even-numbers-4-and-under-and-odd-numbers-5-and-over-counter pencil Go hon enpitsu The pattern for which is Pon Hon Bon Hon Hon Pon Hon Pon Hon Pon etc. They can't simply say the number of clouds the same way they say the number of machine presses. Or count small animals the same way they count ap…

Although if you just use the generic 个 for everything besides (formal) people, people will understand what you're saying and give you a pass for being a non-native speaker. At this point for me, the measure words are actually a help instead of a hindrance when I encounter a new noun that I don't know -- it hints strongly enough at what sort of noun I'm dealing with that the context usually allows meaning to more read…

This seems to be true in Chinese as well. I know perhaps 10 measure words, but folks seem to be ok with it when I default to 个.

(Chinese is also much simpler when it comes to measure words)

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

#138

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

Manishearth wrote: post #98
HumanDrivenDev wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. If I could be very pedantic for a moment... Mandarin can be written in many alphabets. Almost every single native speaker one earth uses an alphabet to input chinese characters on computers and phones. And almost every native speaker learns their language using an alphabet - at least initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https:…

To get even more pedantic: I wouldn't say Cangjie or Dayi inputs are an "alphabet", and a sizeable number of users use those. They're certainly a way of inputting characters; and a method of looking at how glyphs can be broken down (one by stroke order, one by shape), but for it to be an alphabet there must be a rough phoneme mapping AFAICT; which there isn't. (but yes, the majority seems to use phonetic/alphabetic i…

As a fellow pedant I made sure to use words like "almost" (:

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

#139

Post by HumanDrivenDev »

wildmusings wrote: post #58
yeukhon wrote: post #27

> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…

Maybe they should just romanize (switch to Latin script) the way Vietnam did.

You've been down-voted, but it's something I often think about as well. Chinese speakers - even those who speak chinese languages that aren't usually written - seem to have a deep attachment to characters. But the attachment is not free.

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

#140

Post by Manishearth »

patal wrote: post #135
dastbe wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can buy that, as I know the top left portion in chinese historically is for the left hand. If the historical variation of right was for the right hand, that would make a lot of sense.

Are you really suggesting that writers changed hands during writing a single character? That sounds totally impractical. Also, that does not explain why there should be a different stroke order.

No, 左 is "left" and 右 is "right", they're saying that the 𠂇 radical itself means "left hand", and they later added a similar one for "right hand".

Looking it up (on wiktionary, at least) it seems like originally 又 was "right hand", however if you look at really old versions of that character it looks mostly like a mirror of 𠂇.

Interestingly, Wiktionary lists both left and right as phonosemantic compounds where the phonetic part is "left hand" or "right hand" and the semantic part is "assist" and "mouth" (I think in this case the "mouth" is used to bolster the "pronounced like" of the phonosemantic compound, since it's used on the right side not the left). This seems to be because the word for "left hand" became the word for "left" and same for "right hand", so they're pronounced the same; and the semantic component was added later to bolster/specialize the glyph.

Anyway, it seems like the 𠂇 radical in 右 is etymologically a variant of 又 which is a mirror of 𠂇 (well, a mirror of a three-pronged historical form of that) except it was rotated around the glyph so that it looks exactly like 𠂇 but the stroke order is reversed.

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