- coffeelingIt's also weird because Microsoft has some excuse for wasting screen real estate - Windows is used on touchscreen devices and has to at least adapt to them. But Apple stubbornly refuses to put touchscreens on laptops, at which point what excuse do you have to not build good information density?
- One thing I dislike is that Synaptic style proper package managers are being phased out in favour of app stores.
- That's uncharitable: Stability matters, and Linux just doesn't give a fuck about breaking the environment since software is of course FOSS and can just be recompiled from sauce, right?
Meanwhile try to launch a proprietary app and have it work after some years? Lol, good luck unless you constantly update it. Windows, you can still run ancient apps because key parts of the system are stable.
- I've tried their Arc Search mobile browser, and the UX is just absolute trash unless you're specifically using it via search only workflows. It's not really a browser in the normal sense.
皮 kawa 彼 kare 波 nami
The answer to all of these are the same as everyone else. It's not like Chinese people routinely read the old classics in the original, and even then they're literally taught Classical Chinese in school as a separate language, because it is. But other countries have scholars who study the old languages and also work to translate classics into modern language for wider use - I certainly can't read Greek but have Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics sitting on the bench next to me, translated into modern English.> And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages?Creating new words happens the same as it does everywhere - people genuinely coin new concepts, they loan foreign concepts as direct loans or calques, or form compound words from existing ones. "creating new words" with Chinese characters is literally just using foreign words to form compounds, something utterly routine everywhere else. It's just not treated as a magical event elsewhere.
For example, people routinely marvel at the ability to make compound words in kanji. But, may I introduce you to German, a language written with boring old non-mysterious Latin script that's famous worldwide for its heavy use of compound words.
They're really just scribbles that point at words or morphemes of the language they're used to write, same as phonetic scripts in that regard. They do let you do some tricks that are hard otherwise, like indicating which nuance of a word you intend by your choice of character, and the common stylistic trick of writing some set of characters and then imposing completely arbitrary readings on them by writing clarifications next to the characters being abused.> From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace.For example, in Frieren, in one of the early chapters, Frieren says:
In hiragana:Zorutoraaku wa hito wo korosu mahou dewa nakunatta.
The manga writes it like this, however (furigana in parentheses after the kanji):ゾルトラーク は ひと を ころす まほう でわ なくなった。
人を殺す魔法 should be read "hito wo korosu mahou", ie. "magic that kills people", but the manga instructs us to read it first time as "Zorutoraaku", the name of the spell, and the second time properly, when Frieren's supposed to say its description out loud. There's no clarity issue here, it's just a stylistic trick.人を殺す魔法(ゾルトラーク) は 人を殺す魔法(ひと を ころす まほう) でわ なくなった。For fun, the same line from the Korean translated version:
졸트라크는 더 이상 인간을 죽이는 마법이 아니게 됐지 Jolteurakeuneun deo isang inganeul jugineun mabeobi anige dwaetji.- Korean faces the exact same problems as Japanese, though - the language structure is similar, they have a ton of Chinese loans, and have in general gone through a largely identical history of writing development. They have somewhat fewer homonyms than Japanese, sure, but they still have tons from Chinese loans (hell, "coffee" and "nosebleed" sound the same, as do "blood" and "rain" in many cases).
It's somewhat hard to believe that Japanese sits in some magic spot where a phonetic script wouldn't work just fine when Korean does it fine, and on the Sinitic side people write books in pinyin, Vietnamese is phonetic, and the Dungan people write their 3-tone Mandarin dialect with cyrillic alphabet without even notating tones.
> Maybe you're right that it's all just hard-headed stubbornness from fluent people.
It's not just hard-headed stubbornness - reading kana really is more difficult to proficient readers of today's Japanese, and change is work.
- 皮 彼 波
- It's not pedantic in that the characters themselves really are sound-based and provide a pretty decent clue. That said, it's still just a clue, and there are multiple similar pronunciations associated with any phonetic component, so it's still guesswork in the end.
- Okay. The point is, the typewriter writes 핸-style ㅎ always. Even if it could be a bit taller, but tends to leave the vowel lines bigger.
- Japan has had pro-romanization societies since the 1920's, and even during the last attempt at large-scale script reform after the war, it wasn't just the Americans pushing it: Many Japanese were enthusiastic about moving to a phonetic script because they perceived it as more efficient and modern. Likewise, not every American administrator was in favour of reforming away the kanji, far from it.
J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is a good treatise on the subject.
EDIT: Also, this was published in 1877 if I did my date conversions right: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...
- > If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.
There are mechanical hangeul typewriters that, while more complicated than Latin or katakana typewriters, are still completely usable for normal writing. The reason hangeul fonts are hard is that a hangeul syllable occupies a standard-sized block, and in eg. careful handwriting the writer would adjust the sizes and positions of the characters to be aesthetically nice. For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UenaIex_ZXY
You can see from the output in this video how the sizes of letters are very standard and somewhat disproportionate, eg. in CV type syllables the vowel lines are somewhat giant compared to the quarter-of-the-block sizeish consonants, etc.
That way you can still write by pressing alphabet buttons, with some controls as to where you want the letter to go in the block. It's a bit more complicated, but nothing compared to the nightmare that are proper Chinese character typewriters.
- J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this.
There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system.
This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.
- In the real world nobody is masochistic enough to not adopt spaces if writing without kanji.
Old Japanese videogames couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations. They wrote in all kana but used spaces to make the text easier to read.
Modern Japanese children's books and eg. even Pokemon games still? Same thing, kana and spaces.
When Korean transitioned away from Japanese-style mixed script to purely alphabetic writing, what did they do? They adopted spacing.
The only time "but Japanese doesn't have spaces" comes up, ever, is when people argue against the removal of kanji. It's not a realistic scenario, in light of very recent history and current practice.
- It doesn't even need to do that. Korean and Vietnamese are easy examples where all the writing is phonetic despite Korean having basically the same structure and problems with Chinese loans as Japanese, and Vietnamese having a ton of Sinitic loans and general properties that are basically the same as Chinese. Yet phonetic writing just works.
- It's mostly about lack of practice, frankly. The chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together.
Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.
Similar arguments used to be made in Korea, yet if you look at Koreans today they have no difficulty in reading hangeul - they have spaces so the words have form, and they have mass exposure to the hangeul forms of words. Ergo, their shortcuts are for the phonetic forms and those are what feels natural, solid, meaningful and easy to read. Same as both of us in English or me in say, Finnish or Swedish or French.
- You didn't even try to do it the way Koreans did it, though. When Koreans dropped hanja in favour of a hangeul-only script, they adopted spacing because spaced text is much easier to understand than unspaced text. Likewise, products like old Japanese videogames which couldn't use kanji due to technical limitations used spaced kana because it's just much better and no one's masochistic enough to not use them if they don't have access to kanji. The Japanese mixed script doesn't use spaces largely because kanji already serve as word dividers. If you remove that function, everyone sane will use spaces, and pro-kanji arguers will leave them out to make the proposition seem mad.
Importantly, spaces also make it much easier to recognize the shapes of the words.
It's the chief reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from. No one actually reads these English posts by vocalizing letter by letter to slowly build the words together.
Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.
Meme sentences designed to be hard to read that you'd never see in real life aren't an actual point. By that token, the Buffalo buffalo sentence argues for the urgent adoption of kanji in English.
Likewise, in my native Finnish:
ie.- Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon. - Koko kokkoko? - Koko kokko.
It's perfectly readable despite the meme value.- Kokko, assemble the bonfire. - The entire bonfire? - The entire bonfireSimilarily, "kuusi palaa" can mean:
Do we need to urgently adopt kanji in order to avoid homophony?kuusi palaa = the spruce is on fire kuusi palaa = the spruce returns kuusi palaa = the number six is on fire kuusi palaa = the number six returns kuusi palaa = six (of them, or six pieces of something) are on fire kuusi palaa = six (as above) return kuusi palaa = your moon is on fire kuusi palaa = your moon returns kuusi palaa = six pieces
Curiously, it's possible to write books entirely in pinyin: https://pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html> Chinese and Japanese have too many homephones to use a spelling system like Korean.Similarily, I highly doubt people would've printed the Roumaji Zasshi if they believed it to be incomprehensible: https://archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko17/bunko17_d0035...
J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this. There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system. This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.> Third time: After World War II, General MacArthur commissioned a team of American education specialists to work with Japanese experts to discuss whether to abolish kanji entirely, and to consider the possibility of fully romanizing the Japanese language. Yet, they decided to keep Japanese. - > Chinese is written using ideograms ('kanji' in Japanese), which convey a meaning but not a pronounciation. So when you encounter a new character you cannot pronounce it.
This isn't quite true - about 80% of Chinese characters are so-called phonosemantic compounds, where people originally started using the character for one thing for another thing whose word sounded similar (say, emoji for "can", as in able to) and then adding a semantic component to differentiate the character from other similar-sounding ones. In Chinese, they smushed the two components into the space of one character, but in eg. Egypt, they simply wrote whe semantic clarifier and the phonetic hint side by side, full size.
That is, the majority of the characters are primarily sound-based, it's just that the connection between a character and its sound is shoddy, even in Chinese languages.
Japanese kun readings for native words do divorce the characters pretty completely from their sound.
- A lot of Japanese learners do hate katakana (personally, a lot of fonts could stand to be clearer about ツシンソ ), because most writing is in kanji+hiragana so they have less practice with katakana. But kana ability is really just exposure. Use it to get used to it.
Same reason people say kana-only writing (like in old videogames for example) is hard to read: People competent at reading any language don't spell things out in detail, even when we subvocalize we first recognize the shape of the scribbles and our brain has a shortcut from a certain set of scribbles to certain morphemes/words, where the solid feeling of meaning comes from.
Every competent reader of Japanese is first and foremost used to the kanji-hiragana mixed script, and has shortcuts for the kanji forms of words and the sounds of those words. The hiragana only forms? Not so much. So when they complain about hiragana only being hard to read, they're not lying. It really is harder. But it's not harder due to any inherent defect in a hiragana-only script, it's just about a lack of exposure to form those shortcuts that make reading feel easy.
- How do you lose the ability to handwrite in Korean? That sounds weird to me.