51–60 of 133 posts
English, your rules for deciding how to hyphen words are JUST HORRIBLY BROKEN! Hyphenation should at most depend on the word to be hyphenated, not on the semantics of the whole sentence.
In either case, by the early 20th century, English (and most Latin based writing systems) were in pretty good shape for computerization, and the limited capacity of computing systems were kind of built around English orthography.
Nevertheless, most of these complaints would be true of English as well if we had carried through with our traditional system of writing. One can almost think of Hangul as a 100% ligature based writing system...there's fairly complex rules about what letters can be typed next to what other letters and produce a valid character.
In Asia, it took longer for general purpose computing to catch on because of both memory and high-resolution display requirements. 7-bit characters being displayed in an 8x8 on-screen block weren't going to cut it. It took several generations of advancement before computers that could handle general purpose Japanese properly went on sale. For Japan, a culture that prizes tradition in many ways, the idea of just throwing away 2 of the 3 written systems in order to cram writing into barely functional computing systems, and then adopting that convention culture wide, would be unthinkable. Japan instead went full-tilt on a paper-based system and computerization was focused on scanning and transmission: fax machines, scanners, high speed telecommunications, etc. Even today, the typical Japanese office is a paper-filled minefield full of paper handling devices the typical American office haven't seen since the early 1980s. More importantly, there are reasons the Japanese use three (really four if you count romaji) scripts. Something written in katakana gives it an elements of "foreignness", a bit of semantic hinting about it's origin and how it should be considered. Imagine you're 11 years old about to play the role of a Western Knight in a video game, the game asks you to input your name, but only offers you katakana, this feels to you more immersive. We have ways of trying to do the same in English, but it's far more limited.
Before computing took off, handling Asian languages was always a chore. When telegraphs were common, Chinese was encoded using a complex telegraph code [2]. This code was so useful that it's still used today in some places. During the cultural revolution, China had a moment where they could have introduced a simpler orthography, Zhuyin Fuhao, that's easy to learn to read and write (only slightly more complicated than Korean) and has full tonal representation. But it does a poor job disambiguating the tremendous number of homophones in the highly monosyllabic dialects of Chinese. It also doesn't provide a unified representation for words across dialects (the names "Wu" and "Ng" might be the same Chinese characters, but would be written differently in Zhuyin Fuhao). This would reverse thousands of years of cultural unification via written scripts previously enjoyed by China's many ethnicities and dialect speakers. (Fun fact, Christianity was first spread to Korea through Korean diplomatic missions to China, where Korean scholars communicated with Chinese converts through writing only as they didn't speak each other's language). These tradeoffs were simply unacceptable and instead China simply tried to reduce the number of strokes and characters in their writing reform.
So does all this suck for computing? Yeah sure. But there's lots of weight in the semantics providing the why things are the way they are. China can't just adopt a simple to compute writing system any more easily than English Speakers could adopt a complex logography. Or for English Speakers to adopt a sane spelling system (the reasons for why our spelling is so horrible are similar to many of the historic reasons Asian languages have hung on to their overly complex orthographies).
If he's complaining about these things and pointing to English as an island of relative sanity, he should be glad he doesn't have to support older versions of the English language and orthography!
HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum, þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_ligature 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code
The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first." This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.
What nonsense, the article says the complete opposite of that. All of the article deals with examples of why other writing systems (misnamed "languages") have specific properties that make it hard to deal with on computers. Latin and Cyrillic alphabets just so happen to be easier because of their regular properties, not because they were the first to be implemented. Lucky us.
Summarizing the article as being rooted in politically incorrectness is disingenious. Or do you really want to suggest the Chinese would have had an easy time implementing their writing system on computers if only they had invented them first?
The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first." This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.
It's a language. No one can help what language they learned when they were a child. It wasn't up to them. Of course some of them are going to suck overall more than others, and of course there are different reasons for the suckage, and of course all languages suck in different ways.
It seems like if someone is getting offended about someone else saying their language sucks, they're probably going to get offended about pretty much anything.
The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first." This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.
How would those issues with the languages be dealt with if, say, one of the worst offending Asian languages(according to the author) had developed computing machinery first? English+ASCII is simple because the rules are simple, not because the US invented the standard first.
Nobody studding sociology has came out and claimed they couldn't do it only because of their language, but nearly nobody questions that the language was an important factor, and they were very diverse groups, with little else in common.
Also, Russian, the other language listed in addition to English and Georgian as "not-broken", has many irregular noun declensions ("unstable" cases in the writer's unusual terminology), which was one of his indicators for "broken" languages. In fact, 99% of all languages with a noun case system have at least some irregular cases. I'd say 100%, but then I'm sure someone will point to some language spoken by 10 people in a remote village in the Caucasus mountains that features strictly regular noun declensions.
This article is interesting in that, while it's not the intention of the writer, it seems to point out some technical underpinnings for how language might impact culture. If a computer's handling of a language can vary so drastically, imagine how the human brain must deal with expressing or receiving complex thoughts through these. I recall reading some discussion of this concept in the field of International Relatio…
Orthography and language are not the same thing. Having a complex orthography has no bearing on processing complexity. If a language has a complex orthography, it may be hard to read and write, which are learned skills, but it won't be hard to speak and listen (which are naturally acquired skills given exposure to a language in the critical period).
As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alpha…
So how does Finnish compare up? Do you not have silent letters?
In Dutch we have some useless things like combined letters: "c" and "h" are both used (like in "cake" or "hotel") but when combined to "ch" they sound like a "g". There are even duplicate ones: "au" and "ou" are both the same sound, and "ij" and "ei" too. You can't mix them though, "ijs" is ice and "eis" is a demand even though they sound 100% the same. I'm not sure about silent letters though, the "h" is audible even if only slightly.
Clearly tongue-in-cheek, and informative. So nice somehow. But still: the fact that English phonology and orthography are only lightly related, and hardly anyone is willing to do the effort to fix this, should give the author second thoughts on complaining about others' artifacts and not complaining about the ones in English. Many languages have pure or nearly-pure phonetic orthographies, which are a pleasure to use.…
One of my favorites is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin's_phonetic_a...
This makes me wonder what effect printing had on English. English used to be chock full of ligatures and special forms for letters (s and ſ for example). I can only imagine as a typesetter and type maker this was all very annoying and people simply started to drop them. However, WP claims [1] ligatures made typesetting easier and it was the introduction of Sans serif fonts in the 20th century that finally drove them…