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Japanese explained to programmers

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Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#341

Post by midoridensha »

antiterra wrote: post #191

I recognize that one can’t expect English speakers to consistently pluralize foreign words in ways that match the origin language, and that it is not objectively incorrect when people just add an s. However, in my opinion, an article purporting to inform about Japanese in a programmatic way really should avoid using “hiraganas,” “kanjis” and “katakanas” as pluralization of thise terms.

Those are just plain wrong. It's like talking about "English alphabets". There's only one. What they mean is "hiragana characters", etc.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#342

Post by getoj »

justusw wrote: post #328
ickoonite wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.

Yeah, 読込 is a common way of saying importing too. The particular offender I am using here is called 会計王22 ;) Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services. One…

支払手数料 is “fees paid” rather than “payment fees” - compare 支払利息 and 支払報酬. I’ve never noticed the ambiguity but your confusion is natural.

I agree that it’s very strange that professional services fall under 手数料 instead of 報酬, but taxes are weird in every language.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#343

Post by detrites »

ickoonite wrote: post #273
detrites wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outside of very limited contexts, furigana Sarcasm aside, I only take issue with this. The context here is learning Japanese, ie a beginner. A typical way to do that with any language is to use the enormous wealth of resources aimed at either kids or learners. Including in this case many popular manga. It's a context within which, of course, Furigana is widely available, as it's one of the ways Japanese themselves…

OK, but you’re moving the goalposts. A written form of the language curated specifically for the purpose of learning is not really relevant to a discussion of the language, just as would be the case for any other language. That is not the language used in daily life. There are no furigana in a newspaper or on the Internet (technological assistance notwithstanding). Magazines, business communication…anything useful is…

You think the goalposts have been "moved" because you've misinterpreted the context of this discussion.

The original post we are all commenting on is an introduction to some basic concepts of Japanese, aimed at programmers.

After learning several languages to a basic conversational level, Japanese was by far the most logical, simple, and had the least "gotcha's" or exceptions. On the whole it was a breath of fresh air compared to others.

My comments regarding the relative ease Japanese can be learned to a basic, useful level versus same attempted in other languages stand. Attempts to reframe them as regarding a level of complete mastery won't alter that.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#344

Post by ickoonite »

justusw wrote: post #328
ickoonite wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.

Yeah, 読込 is a common way of saying importing too. The particular offender I am using here is called 会計王22 ;) Although using an app released in 2022 in Windows Shift_JIS compatibility mode is giving me less than regal feelings. /s Accounting Japanese is another whole weird world of unusual Japanese, such as 支払手数料 (payment fees) suddenly applying to all kinds of non-fee things as well such as professional services. One…

支払手数料 a fine example of how messy the language can become. What looks like a run of 漢語 actually contains a mix of on-yomi and kun-yomi and “you just have to know”.

That there would be Japanese software houses still using Shift JIS in 2022 does not surprise me in the slightest. Presumably they still deliver you software updates by floppy disk, notification of which comes by fax…?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#345

Post by ickoonite »

agalunar wrote: post #340
stoppingin wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very fun example. However I'm a native English speaker, and I can't imagine actually writing a sentence like that. It's technically grammatically correct, but no one speaks like this. You would say "She must have been watched" , alternatively "She had been watched" .

Mm, I think it could come up quite naturally as "she must have been being watched" in something like: Two detectives are watching security film. DETECTIVE 1 And then from 9:07 to 9:14 she started acting very cautiously, but – Detective 1 rewinds the tape by a few seconds and gestures at the screen. DETECTIVE 1 – from this angle you can tell that she's making an effort to not seem suspicious. I wonder why? DETECTIVE 2…

I have read the “must have had been being” over and over again and as a native English speaker, I still can’t understand what it means. I hesitate to call it ungrammatical, but instead throw down a challenge: can you actually use it?

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#346

Post by Tor3 »

ksenzee wrote: post #320
ickoonite wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of…

I think they meant the encoding is more efficient, so you can encode more information with fewer characters.

If you think of Japanese writing as a whole (kanji, hiragana, katakana where needed) then indeed you can encode more information in less space. Which is easy to see if you compare the Japanese sections with the English sections of dual-language user manuals (those who actually include exactly the same amount of information of course). The Japanese sections are about 30% shorter than their English (or any other language written with Latin letters). One manual I looked at was 60 pages in Japanese, 90 in English, including illustrations (same on both).

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#347

Post by ickoonite »

culi wrote: post #324
ickoonite wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of…

Hmm I'm not sure you're completely clear on how syllabaries (including katakana, hiragana, kanji, etc) work. You can use them to encode anything as well Orthographic English is probably the best example to show the inefficiencies alphabets sometimes bring. The English language has ~24 constants which are often well-represented, but then you have things like "ng" or "sh" which is actually a single phoneme that we lack…

I suppose it depends what you consider efficient: I would counter that using a mere 26 letters to encode all the varying sounds of English is wonderfully parsimonious, an incredibly efficient use of those characters. Such an efficient encoding does however, as you point out, make decoding more cumbersome, as it requires memorisation of the specific pronunciations of strings of letters up to and including whole words. In that sense, however, it is very similar to the Japanese (ab)use of kanji, which - as I pointed out at the very top of this thread - has the same problem. For a given kanji, you need to see it in context to be able to have a reasonable chance of pronouncing it correctly (and sometimes even that isn’t enough).

What I’m slightly puzzled by is your apparent confusion as to what a syllabary is: as I gently tried to hint in my reply (and someone else has now more explicitly pointed out), hiragana and katakana are syllabaries; kanji is not, even if it is occasionally used that way (当て字). I’m not sure to what extent that undermines what you were trying to say.

But, to engage with the substance of your point on the efficiency of Japanese syllabaries, we first have to put aside the fact that they retain two distinct systems to encode the same sounds (a baroque inefficiency surely without peer in any other language). It is true that modern kana allow for efficient decoding - there is almost no ambiguity in the sounds, は for ha/wa excepted. That reliable decoding does, however, impose a fairly hard limit on the number of sounds they can express, so I am not sure what you mean when you say “[y]ou can use them to encode anything as well”.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#348

Post by ickoonite »

Tor3 wrote: post #346
ksenzee wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they meant the encoding is more efficient, so you can encode more information with fewer characters.

If you think of Japanese writing as a whole (kanji, hiragana, katakana where needed) then indeed you can encode more information in less space . Which is easy to see if you compare the Japanese sections with the English sections of dual-language user manuals (those who actually include exactly the same amount of information of course). The Japanese sections are about 30% shorter than their English (or any other langu…

Absolutely. Japanese Twitter is another great example.

I’ve often liked to describe kanji as a form of compression: the problem is the encoding and decoding are done in your head rather than by a computer.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#349

Post by ickoonite »

hinkley wrote: post #315
ickoonite wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the new simplifications (e.g. 傅 became 付). Some never changed back.

I love how ` basically becomes 'yadda yadda yadda' for the entire middle of 傅

In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.

Re: Japanese explained to programmers

#350

Post by Tor3 »

ickoonite wrote: post #153
Tor3 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a person who is fully fluent (I should write "proficient") in Japanese, he has lived in Japan for decades. Built a successful career. But he can't write Japanese. He doesn't read Kanji. Sounds almost incomprehensible to me, because I learn languages by reading (which is where Japanese has given me some trouble). As for English.. "I is to town goes". Mess it up in every possible way and the meaning is still the…

This is not uncommon for the children of Japanese people living in the West, particularly when they have married non-Japanese. They pick up the spoken language via osmosis but the written language…not so much. It is, as I said, very hard and cannot be mastered without extensive study. Many of these hafu , as the Japanese refer to them, nonetheless enjoy successful careers in Japan, presumably usually in environments…

What you say about children of Japanese people living outside Japan - yes, I've seen exactly that. Every day, in fact.

As for my English example.. it's grammatically a mess, the word order is wrong etc, but if you hear that sentence, how would you interpret it? There's really only one possible way of understanding it. I hear a lot of that kind of English, though not usually as messed up as that.. but sometimes pretty close. And it's still comprehensible, as in usually not ambiguous in practice. When comparing languages like this, of course it's about a low level understanding of the language. With English you can go a long way with very little knowledge of the language, with, for example, Italian you at least have to learn the verb forms because they substitute for pronouns as well.

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