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Unicode Dicks

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Re: Unicode Dicks

#71

Post by yorwba »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #64
Radim wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't "remove vowels" as much as started out without them! We're talking times when writing itself was utter novelty, a curiosity performed by a handful of scribes primarily for accounting purposes, and of no great importance to daily life at all. By contrast, cuneiform (of Sumer origin -- a traditional rival power to ancient Egypt) did have vowels. A surprising amount of history—writing, speaking, war, splitti…

> By contrast, cuneiform (of Sumer origin -- a traditional rival power to ancient Egypt) did have vowels. One caveat: As I understand things, Sumerian started out without vowels (or consonants), much like Chinese, but developed phonetic usage over time (unlike Chinese :( ). This has resulted in early texts being much harder to read than later texts.

Chinese did develop phonetic usage. Most characters are phono-semantic compounds, where part of the character is a character whose meaning is related (e.g. 驴 [lǘ] (donkey) contains 马 [mǎ] (horse)) and the other part has a similar pronunciation (e.g. 吗 [ma] (auxiliary word marking questions) also contains 马).

Unfortunately, those characters are mostly pretty old and the pronunciations have diverged. So the situation is a bit similar to that of English, where the orthography is a good guide to Middle English pronunciation, but confusing for modern people. Linguists love that it enables them to reconstruct ancient pronunciations, of course.

Re: Unicode Dicks

#74

Post by iaml »

gouggoug wrote: post #47

On my mac os Mojave, those glyph do not show up (aka, they show up as square boxes). Anybody else experiencing this on mac os mojave or is it something wrong on my end? edit: they don't show up in chrome and won't work in slack, they do work in iMessage. edit2: safari happily displays them

That's chrome text rendering for you. IIRC chrome was the only browser on windows that wouldn't display emoji properly even when system could.

Re: Unicode Dicks

#75

Post by grandmczeb »

Honest question: Why isn't there a penis emoji? As far as I can tell, the exclusion criteria given by the UTC doesn't forbid it and it seems to meet all the standards for inclusion. Is it just prudishness on the part of the UTC?

Re: Unicode Dicks

#76

Post by [deleted] »

gouggoug wrote: post #47

On my mac os Mojave, those glyph do not show up (aka, they show up as square boxes). Anybody else experiencing this on mac os mojave or is it something wrong on my end? edit: they don't show up in chrome and won't work in slack, they do work in iMessage. edit2: safari happily displays them

[deleted]

Re: Unicode Dicks

#77

Post by Umofomia »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #63
jrochkind1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't remove em, it just never occured to them to have them. There's still an interesting question about why old languages from that region didn't have vowels, if this is true of other ancient written languages from other regions, when vowels were added/why/etc.

Chinese writing to this day doesn't indicate the sound of the word at all. A fortiori, it doesn't indicate vowels. The first written Semitic language, Akkadian, _does_ indicate vowels, because doing so is mandatory in the writing system Akkadian used, the cuneiform originally developed for Sumerian. (Egyptian is closely related to the Semitic languages, but not quite closely enough that it's called Semitic. Instead b…

> Chinese writing to this day doesn't indicate the sound of the word at all. A fortiori, it doesn't indicate vowels.

That's not true. The vast majority of Chinese characters (estimated at around 90% or more) are phono-semantic compounds, which were also devised based on the Rebus principle that the OP of the thread mentioned.

These compounds consist of an element that hints at a word’s pronunciation (the "phonetic"), together with an element that hints at its meaning (the "radical"). The phonetic and radical are respectively analogous to the rebus and determinative of Egyptian hieroglyphics that the OP also mentioned.

For example, the following characters all share the same phonetic 青, which is pronounced qīng in Mandarin Chinese:

請 - pronounced qǐng - with the 言 speech radical, means "to invite, please"

情 - pronounced qíng - with the 忄 heart radical, means "feeling, emotion"

清 - pronounced qīng - with the 氵 water radical, means "clear"

睛 - pronounced jīng - with the 目 eye radical, means "eye"

The character 青, which means "blue/green", lends its pronunciation qīng to the characters in these examples, not its meaning.

One major caveat is that because the Chinese writing system has been around for a very long time and both the meanings and pronunciations of characters can shift over time, the phonetic and semantic components of many characters are no longer as reliable in indicating their pronunciation or meaning. In many cases they are still good enough though. It’s interesting to note that because sound changes are often systematic, the phonetic components of phono-semantic compounds still generally work within any particular spoken variety of Chinese (i.e., the pronunciation of the phonetic evolves similarly to the pronunciation of the other characters that make use of the phonetic), even though the various Chinese varieties may have diverged differently.

[ This response was adapted from my original answer in Quora: https://qr.ae/TUhrP0 ]

Re: Unicode Dicks

#78

Post by thaumasiotes »

yorwba wrote: post #71
thaumasiotes wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By contrast, cuneiform (of Sumer origin -- a traditional rival power to ancient Egypt) did have vowels. One caveat: As I understand things, Sumerian started out without vowels (or consonants), much like Chinese, but developed phonetic usage over time (unlike Chinese :( ). This has resulted in early texts being much harder to read than later texts.

Chinese did develop phonetic usage. Most characters are phono-semantic compounds, where part of the character is a character whose meaning is related (e.g. 驴 [lǘ] (donkey) contains 马 [mǎ] (horse)) and the other part has a similar pronunciation (e.g. 吗 [ma] (auxiliary word marking questions) also contains 马). Unfortunately, those characters are mostly pretty old and the pronunciations have diverged. So the situation…

I'm familiar with the Chinese writing system. :p

It's not similar to English at all. Compare this translator's note from https://www.amazon.com/Xunzi-Complete-Text/dp/0691169314/ :

> The other feature of this translation that warrants comment is the handling of rhymed lines. The Xunzi contains numerous rhymed passages... Both Watson and Knoblock often overlook them, as do many translations of the Xunzi into modern Chinese and Japanese and Korean... I consider the presence of these rhymes a feature of the text that is sufficiently noteworth to deserve being reflected conspicuously in the translation. Since the rhyming sections can easily be overlooked... I have chosen to make them conspicuous by translating rhymed passages in Chinese with rhymed sections of English...

> The identification of the rhymes in the Chinese text requires detailed knowledge of ancient phonology that I lack, and so I have relied on published studies of rhymes in the Xunzi by other scholars. Since their analyses may have missed some of the rhyming passages, and since there is ongoing scholarly debate about how to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Chinese in the first place, I do not claim to have identified every instance of rhyme in the text...

So:

- In Old Chinese, before the pronunciation divergence you mention, the form of a character is not a guide to its pronunciation. (Rather, the pronunciation of another character is often used as inspiration when inventing a new character. But the relationship of a new character to its component parts is not regular or predictable.)

- By inspection of text, it isn't possible even to tell the difference between text that rhymes and text that doesn't rhyme, much less to tell what the words sounded like.

- A scholar who is competent to translate text written in Old Chinese is completely incompetent to determine whether Old Chinese text rhymes or doesn't rhyme. That's an entirely different field of study.

- Even when a scholar has published a book devoted to identifying rhymes within a very famous text, it is considered likely that that book will have just plain overlooked a number of rhymed passages.

These are not symptoms of a writing system that reflects the sounds of the language. The information conveyed by the writing about the sound of Chinese is so close to zero that the difference is immaterial.

Go look at some English rhyming poetry, and ask yourself how easy it would be, if you didn't know English, to tell the difference between that and unrhymed prose.

Re: Unicode Dicks

#79

Post by rococode »

grandmczeb wrote: post #75

Honest question: Why isn't there a penis emoji? As far as I can tell, the exclusion criteria given by the UTC doesn't forbid it and it seems to meet all the standards for inclusion. Is it just prudishness on the part of the UTC?

For anyone else who's curious what their standards are, the guidelines seem to be here: http://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors

I guess they could say it falls under "Already representable" since we have eggplant emojis lmao. I would have guessed that they want to avoid emojis that are generally used in crude/offensive contexts, but there's a middle finger emoji so...

Re: Unicode Dicks

#80

Post by thaumasiotes »

Umofomia wrote: post #77
thaumasiotes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese writing to this day doesn't indicate the sound of the word at all. A fortiori, it doesn't indicate vowels. The first written Semitic language, Akkadian, _does_ indicate vowels, because doing so is mandatory in the writing system Akkadian used, the cuneiform originally developed for Sumerian. (Egyptian is closely related to the Semitic languages, but not quite closely enough that it's called Semitic. Instead b…

> Chinese writing to this day doesn't indicate the sound of the word at all. A fortiori, it doesn't indicate vowels. That's not true. The vast majority of Chinese characters (estimated at around 90% or more) are phono-semantic compounds, which were also devised based on the Rebus principle that the OP of the thread mentioned. These compounds consist of an element that hints at a word’s pronunciation (the "phonetic"),…

See my other response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18349921 . There is often an element in a Chinese character which is historically related to the sound of the character, but the information flow there is in the wrong direction (and is historical rather than current). You can't predict the sound of a character from its form.
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