Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms • Hacker News Board

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#121

Post by EmilieTypo » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #2

The word 'sinogram' sounds a bit contrived, and is not something I see a lot of scholars on this topic use. I personally would recommend against using it. They are mostly just called 'Chinese characters' in English when referring to these logograms, or simply 'kanji' if specifically talking about the Chinese characters in use in Japanese writing. Kanji (and in Korean 'hanja') literally means Han characters after all.…

Yes indeed, I am French-speaking and "sinogrammes" is the most appropriate word in the academic world to talk about kanji. I am not sure if it is the same in the English academic world, some of the comments suggested that it is. I am going to check further about this point. (But writing my PhD in French so I will be safe anyway ^^)

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#122

Post by EmilieTypo » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 6:08 PM UTC

Clewza313 wrote: post #8

> some words that are common and were originally written in kanji are now written with hiragana (such as the word "here", ここ instead of 此処). Not really. Japanese as a spoken language predates writing systems, and words like "koko" are yamatokotoba (original Japanese), not loans from other languages. It was first written in kanji (Chinese characters) because that was the only script they had initially, hiragana and ka…

Answer of the author of the article : I will double check about 此処 now, although I am pretty sure I ran into it when I read some books from the beginning of 20th century for my research. But I definitely still see 何処 written a lot, standing for どこ. I even saw it again today in a musical show of the 1990s!

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#123

Post by solarmist » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

Clewza313 wrote: post #9

solarmist wrote: post #3

Wow. Hentaigana is not a word that has aged well.

It's a different hentai: 変体 "variant form", not 変態 "abnormal, perverse". Bukkake soba (cold noodles with a splash of sauce) also continues to exist despite English adopting a rather different meaning for the word.

Oh! Yeah, that rings a bell now.

I don’t know why my comment got flagged. It was an honest reaction. Even Japanese people would see the confusion I had. Kanji puns are the bread and butter of Japanese humor.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#124

Post by yongjik » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

tkgally wrote: post #46

mcc1ane wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese-speaking people have trouble understanding each other?

> Japanese-speaking people have trouble understanding each other? Probably no more so than speakers of other languages. What I meant is that written Japanese often conveys information that will be lost if the text is read aloud as it is written, as words written differently are often pronounced the same. English has similar cases, such as “right,” “write,” and “rite.” But Japanese has many, many more. For example, th…

> 壮観, 送還, 相姦, 相関, 相観, 挿管, 創刊, and 総監

It's not a fair comparison (because these are chosen to be homonyms in Japanese), but interestingly, all but one of them are also regular Korean words and they all sound different:

> janggwan, songhwan, sanggan, sanggwan, (unused), sapgwan, changgan, chonggam

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#125

Post by anthk » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

solarmist wrote: post #123

Clewza313 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a different hentai: 変体 "variant form", not 変態 "abnormal, perverse". Bukkake soba (cold noodles with a splash of sauce) also continues to exist despite English adopting a rather different meaning for the word.

Oh! Yeah, that rings a bell now. I don’t know why my comment got flagged. It was an honest reaction. Even Japanese people would see the confusion I had. Kanji puns are the bread and butter of Japanese humor.

I guess most DB jokes from Kaioh are lost in translation.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#126

Post by tanjtanjtanj » Thu, Mar 25, 2021, 7:31 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #118

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uppercase and lowercase are not spelt identically any more than katakana and hiragana are. q-Q, e-E, r-R, a-A, b-B and most of the rest are all completely different characters. Even m and M are not as straightforwardly connected as someone who learned a latin-character based language as their first language would think.

q-Q, e-E, a-A and b-B don't diverge a lot. Now, put Kanjis in the list and we could guess the closes to that in Spanish would be & (et) and nothing more.

Thinking that e or a look anything like E or A is entirely down to your first language using the Latin alphabet (I'm making an assumption but I can't think of any other way they would look similar).

I've done language conversation exchanges with Japanese English learners and the characters really are completely different to someone learning them for the first time.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#127

Post by earthboundkid » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

anthk wrote: post #118

tanjtanjtanj wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uppercase and lowercase are not spelt identically any more than katakana and hiragana are. q-Q, e-E, r-R, a-A, b-B and most of the rest are all completely different characters. Even m and M are not as straightforwardly connected as someone who learned a latin-character based language as their first language would think.

q-Q, e-E, a-A and b-B don't diverge a lot. Now, put Kanjis in the list and we could guess the closes to that in Spanish would be & (et) and nothing more.

へ is virtually identical to ヘ visually. Most of the katakana and hiragana pairs derive from the same kanji and share visual similarities, especially if you’re familiar with Chinese calligraphy. So what?

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#128

Post by anthk » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

earthboundkid wrote: post #76

WildParser wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When learning a bit of Japanese to me it was quite obvious that the script was most likely intentionally left (or made) complicated. By using a normal alphabet that actually fits to the structure of Japanese language it would be just another ordinary language to learn. Using a syllables-script for an ending grammar just doesn't make sense. Using 2 syllable scripts is just strange. It most likely helped the leaders th…

WE USE THREE SYLLABLE SCRIPTS ALL THE TIME IN ENGLISH. lowercase and uppercase are two divergent evolutions of the roman alphabet that got shoved together for no particular reason. 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘱𝘩𝘢𝘣𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘰𝘰. 𝕬𝖙 𝖑𝖊𝖆𝖘𝖙 𝖜𝖊 𝖉𝖔𝖓'𝖙 𝖚𝖘𝖊 𝕭𝖑𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖑𝖊𝖙𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖆𝖓𝖞𝖒𝖔𝖗𝖊.

>SYLLABE

Ahem. Not even syllabes.

Also, Gothic letters are just a representation, such as cursive, which in the end are the same letter.

You have the Sans/Serif versions of the CJK characters, too.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#129

Post by solarmist » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

anthk wrote: post #125

solarmist wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh! Yeah, that rings a bell now. I don’t know why my comment got flagged. It was an honest reaction. Even Japanese people would see the confusion I had. Kanji puns are the bread and butter of Japanese humor.

I guess most DB jokes from Kaioh are lost in translation.

Yeah, no... they're just terrible puns. I guess you would at least recognize they're jokes though.

Re: Japanese typography: Kilograms of sinograms

#130

Post by jhanschoo » Fri, Mar 26, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

piercebot wrote: post #107

> It is hard for me to read a text that is set only in hiragana (as in the Japanese version of Animal crossing on Switch for example, the characters only speaks in kana, with no spacing separating words... I'm very curious as to why Nintendo made this choice! Is it because the game is designed to be welcoming to children? In which case, why not use furigana and use it as an opportunity to learn Kanji though repetitio…

It's a genre staple. Up until recently screens were typically too low-res to properly display frequently-used kanji. If they included furigana the furigana might be still too small as well to display them in an aesthetically coherent manner.