141–150 of 153 posts
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It’s hard to do in Japanese due to all the homonyms. Kanji gives meaning where romanizations would not.
Spoken language doesn't have kanji and people can communicate just fine.
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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" (:
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So interestingly, for 左 and 右, the etymological stroke order is the japanese one. It was "simplified" in mainland China and Taiwan.
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.
Which in and of itself, is not sufficient, but is a strong clue.
Then, if you look up the seal script origins of 左 and 右, you find that the top-left part of the character comes from different directions: It comes from the left for 左 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/%E...) and from the right for 右 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/%E...). One way to look at it is that the descending stroke of 𠂇 in 左 is the arm, while it's the horizontal stroke in 右.
But at this point, that's mostly conjecture.
So the next step is to simply find how the characters were actually written by writers from far in the past. And it turns out there are such resources:
左: http://shufa.guoxuedashi.com/5DE6/
右: http://shufa.guoxuedashi.com/53F3/
This contains the characters as written from a lot of different material from different periods. And in those many instances of the characters, the way the two first strokes can be connected is a strong indicator of how they were written.
For instance, on 左, they connect on the top-right end, indicating the horizontal stroke comes first: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/6t1/29792.jpg http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/6t1/29793.jpg http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/ks/R201308025_TM.TXT.0248.0... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/sf26/r201509387.0252.9ea9de...
And on 右, they connect on the lower-left end, indicating the horizontal stroke is last: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.18[26288... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xsd1/r201308030.0150.23[3dd... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.16[24a6b... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xsd1/r201308030.0150.23[3dd...
You can't do such connections by writing the horizontal stroke first.
There are also examples of the horizontal stroke connecting to the 口 part, further indicating it's the second stroke: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xsd1/r201308030.0150.5[6f86... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.2[0a33aa... http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/xs/r201308029.0111.4[0a2633...
If you look at the pages linked above, you'll also find the names of those writers, which you can look up and check out some of them were living > 1000 years ago.
Funnily, there's this interesting exception of 左 with the horizontal stroke second: http://pic.guoxuedashi.com/shufa/sf26/r201509387.0252.9eb7a9...
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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 standard…
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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 standard…
Actually, the writing with 𠂇 is older than the japanese using the characters. The wikipedia page on stroke order suggests the homogenization in stroke order might have happened last century.
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I think yeukhon means that if you get lazy and write 已 or 己 with a single stroke (easy to do with a ball-point pen), they are basically indistinguishable.
No educated Chinese-writer will write those in a single stroke AFAIK
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Chinese has a lot of tricky ones. 荼 vs 茶 日 vs 曰 已 vs 己 vs 巳 vs 巴 士 vs 土 水 vs 氺 人 vs 入 vs 八 vs 几 干 vs 千 vs 于 天 vs 夫 ... the list goes on.
Here's some more. I made these mistakes when typing using Pingtype, and then checking my results with my teacher. https://pingtype.github.io 給 耠 辦 辛力辛 重 量 困 因 痕 㾗 眉 㞒 部 卶 蓑 䒾 任 仼 挑 狣 推 猚 䒷 苦 阿 冋 共 芖 休 你 衡 𧗾 一 – 幹 龫 幸 辛 我 找
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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…
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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.
Here's how I made my opinion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order#Stroke_order_per_... separates traditional stroke order, Taiwan, Japanese, mainland China and Hong Kong, and specifically talks about 𠂇, saying that the traditional stroke order differentiates its stroke order according to etymology and character structure. Which in and of itself, is not sufficient, but is a strong clue. Then, if you look up th…
