That was cool. Interesting enough, you can come to the same conclusion with emojis.
Exactly. Although the Japanese realized that the emoji are moji a long time ago.
Japanese writing system basics
51–60 of 347 posts
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#52I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?
It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…
It's probably because it's a Japanese website and 食 does make sense to represent 'eat' in Japanese.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#53Ok, thats a fun hack.
A hack for learning Japanese, or a hack for getting inadvertent upvotes? :) I seem to recall there were books that used that style of progressive foreign language learning, where they started out replacing a single word and then kept replacing more and more until, at the end, the entire story was written in the foreign language.
A meta HN post composed entirely of previous HN posts.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thus proving that symbolic meaning applied at the glyph level is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires pure memorization of all possible combinations of glyphs and conjugations thereof.
Thus proving that the alphabet is too cumbersome to be practical because it requires the pure memorization of all possible combinations of letters, with the lengths of such combinations becoming longer and longer as words are added to vocabulary.
Eh.
It's a "leaky abstraction". Makes things easier, until it doesn't. Much lik3 "I before E, except after C"
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#55That was fun. Will there be a second lesson?
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#56I liked the beginning and expected the next word after "mouth" to look almost the same, with a subtle change, which would be a logical extension. But it was quite a jump from a simple square (口) to god-knows-what (食). Also, why 食 is translated as "Eclipse" in Google?
It's not a very good choice to use "食” to represent "eat" here. In modern Chinese we say "吃", and you can see that "吃" has a square part, which is exactly "口". And "食" also means "food", but "吃" doesn't. Also, since ancient Chinese people thought eclipse was caused by a "dog in the sky" eating the moon, it's reasonable for them to use "食" to describe it. But modern Chinese almost always say "月食", meaning eclipse of t…
When I was younger and took chinese lessons, there was a push to use more "official" chinese. We'd be told that in official use "吃" is a verb used by ghosts (which is to say, it's impolite to use 吃, and "食" was to be used by humans. So... eh YMMV.
I personally find that elitist though, but then again, in chinese history there was always a distinction between what the commoner spoke (白话文) and what the intellectual elites wrote (文言文) so I'm not surprised that this mentality has continued on
EDIT:
I'd also like to add that 食物 is food, which translates literally to "eat" and "thing". Put together it means "edible thing", i.e. food. The original meaning of 食 still means, "eat", not "food". It's a modern contraction that "食" means food
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#57This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.
It's not exactly a rectangle though, the two downward strokes extend slightly past the bottom horizontal stroke.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#58This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.
I agree. And I'm an Australian in Japan learning Japanese. (I was expecting it to be a rant about insufficient unicode usage.)
Doesn't help that at least for me it gets rendered differently in the title on HN and the actual article.
That said, I expected something Japanese related, given that it's Candy Japan, but you'd think common fonts would have different looking characters for “no glyph” and the kanji for mouth.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#59This was an interesting symbol to choose for an internet explanation. It took me a while to realise that the rectangle is actually the symbol that I'm supposed to see, rather than a missing glyph.
It has the added bonus of being almost correct even if the symbol is missing.
Re: Japanese writing system basics
#60Sometimes I wonder if all these people that criticize or that think that a Latin alphabet can be adapted seamlessly to all languages have tried to study past a beginner level any logographic language.
I think the debate is more Logographic vs. Alphabet, rather than Logographic vs. the Latin Alphabet.
There are pros and cons. A big con with Alphabets is that words lose their meaning over times. I find reading Old English (1500 years old) to be less comprehensible than "modern" Latin, despite being a native english speaker, and only knowing a little latin.
I find reading even Early Modern English (400 years old) an effort initially before I get reacquainted with it (Shakespeare).
In 300 years time I hate to think what English speakers will think of our texts.
That said, if I had to choose another language to learn, it would be one with an Alphabet, which seems far easier to me to learn, and type, than memorizing 1000s of symbols.