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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#81

Post by vvilliamperez »

chris_st wrote: post #64
vvilliamperez wrote: post #23

request.setURL("serverurl").send() This style of sentence structure was one of the strangest things to get comfortable with. You have to think a bit differently. The function chaining makes sense here and I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. Anyone interested in the language should definitely check out the Genki series. It's written well enough you could fully teach yourself. https://genki3.j…

> I wonder if the language had influence on Ruby's development. The primary author of Ruby is Yukihiro Matsumoto, who is Japanese.

Yeah that's the link what I was referring to, I forgot to add context.

What I meant was if Matz "trying to make Ruby natural, not simple" was due in part to the way the language is spoken.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#82

Post by PurpleRamen »

iraldir wrote: post #19
Cruncharoo wrote: post #10

"Being born in France, I was immersed in Japanese culture from a very young age." I fail to see how these two things are connected?

sorry it's almost a meme at this point that France has a thing for Japan and vice versa. The 90s in particular were ripe with animes on the main French channel, lots of collaboration between France and Japan. We got Japanese movies in the cinema much prior the rest of the world and even today you can find gigantic sections for mangas and anime in bookshops, cinemas...

To add a bit, the first manga in Europe was released in France, in 1969. The first anime was 1972. Also in the 70s, a number of co-produced france-japanese anime were produced for the first time, followed by many others over the decades. I also remember a number of cooperations for Live Action-Movies too.

In general, I get the impression that France and Japan seem to have a deep friendship with each other, on the cultural level.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#83

Post by aeonik »

hsn915 wrote: post #79
aeonik wrote: post #70

In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT how Japanese refer to "fish that are blue" since "blue fish" is also the word for mackerel. Coincidentally, it's exactly how I just distinguished them in English just now. You can read ChatGPT's replies below (I manually collated the replies, leaving my prompts out): In Japanese, mackerel is written as 鯖 (さば). Blue fish" in Japanese is 青い魚 (あおいう お). The middle character in "…

ChatGPT's response is full of BS. 青い魚 is あおいさかな NOT あおいう お The middle character has nothing to do with the verb to be; it's an adjective suffix. 青い魚 is literally "blue fish". It's not a full sentence.

I appreciate your call out, I would've had no idea.

Is the main idea still correct? I'm curious what technique Japanese speakers use to avoid collisions like the one referenced in the article.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#84

Post by Adverblessly »

capableweb wrote: post #26
ickoonite wrote: post #24

I have to fundamentally disagree with the premise: Japanese is probably one of the least logical languages on the planet. To wit, it combines the written complexity of Chinese with the spelling inconsistency of English. The one-to-many relationship between a given kanji and its many pronunciations makes it maddeningly difficult, even for native speakers. 生, for example, has at least nine pronunciations. The only way…

Question: What are your mother tongue(s)? Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.

> I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones

As a counter example, I think my first language (Hebrew) is more logical than English. It makes a lot more sense to me to put words that modify or add detail to other words after the word they are modifying instead of before (most notably, it seems strange to put adjectives before the noun they apply to, since logically you should first introduce a subject before adding more details to it). It also feels a lot more logical how in Hebrew you construct words from stems and templates rather than every word being essentially arbitrary.

Though I'll also readily admit that Hebrew has many problems of its own...

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#85

Post by Tor3 »

shiomiru wrote: post #25
Tor3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very important distinction which textbooks often fail to explain clearly. The subject is always and only が. Even if there's no が in the visible sentence.

Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?

It's called the zero-が and is before the object, in this case. Note that you don't need 私は for that sentence to be a fully valid sentence. It does not serve an actual grammatical function. The subject happens to be 私, and it is the unspoken subject. But every valid Japanese sentence which is not just an exclamation needs a subject, a "が"-marked subject, and if you can't see it you have a zero-が. For this sentence you would only use ”が” if you need to emphasize the subject, i.e. 私が牛肉を食べます - "it was I who..", or "I, in fact, .." - otherwise it's implicit, and not emphasized.

But the topic marker does not mark the subject. Any sentence with a topic can remove the topic, and the sentence is still a fully valid grammatical sentence.

For more about this, check out Cure Dolly's excellent videos about the zero-が on Youtube.

Edit: Various typos

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#86

Post by karatinversion »

shiomiru wrote: post #25
Tor3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very important distinction which textbooks often fail to explain clearly. The subject is always and only が. Even if there's no が in the visible sentence.

Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?

If the topic and subject are the same, just は is used, but there are many sentences where the two differ, eg. 「映画館は人が多かった」- “there were many people in the cinema”, where “people” is the subject and “cinema” the topic. Or 「ここはパンが売れる」- “they sell bread here”, where the topic is “here” and “bread” is the subject.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#87

Post by iraldir »

w-m wrote: post #37

As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in > an introduction to how different language can be has different as It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second lang…

I definitely know it's wrong, but whether it's a pure typo, or an overcompensation which my brain somehow converted into typing, I wouldn't know. That's definitely a thing though (hilariously shown in what the fuck france: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzJWugjchhQ)

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#88

Post by davidmurdoch »

StuffMaster wrote: post #78
hsn915 wrote: post #42

Honestly this feels like "programmer circle jerk" material. I love Japanese. I love it so much that I (accidentally?) moved to Japan. But it really has nothing to do with programming. It's a natural langauge with all the idiosyncrasies of natural languages. In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology.

> In fact I'd say that English in comparison feels like a man-made language purpose built for math and technology. Do explain!

Because of its exactness. Like with words like course coarse mussel muscle altar alter idle idol very vary presents presence, etc. /s

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#89

Post by iraldir »

Adverblessly wrote: post #54
w-m wrote: post #37

As it's an article about language, I hope you don't mind me pointing out that there's an additional h in > an introduction to how different language can be has different as It's probably just a simple typo here. But in my head it immediately sounds like a French speaker overcompensating, by adding H's where there aren't any [0], as I have heard this so many times. As a French speaker learning English as a second lang…

On the subject of typos there's also a "woudl" that should have been a "would"

thanks, corrected

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#90

Post by shiomiru »

wst_ wrote: post #58
shiomiru wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if I understand this invisible が idea. Where is it in「私は牛肉を食べます」?

It's implicit, depending on context. Quite often it's "myself" when omitted and without any context. If you'd like to stick to programming examples, it would be default value. Even if not specified, it's always there. Typically you use が when expressing some new information but follow up conversation uses は. There are few other rules, too. The は vs が is a subject of never ending confusion among Japanese students.

Indeed, my interpretation is also that the subject can be expressed by any of は, が, or the context. I am having trouble understanding the "implicit が" analysis because it seems to me that in many cases adding a が would make the sentence nonsensical (like in the example.) So it just feels like retrofitting が into a role that it really doesn't have. Then again, I'm not an expert, so I may very well be wrong about this.
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