Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics 284
JoshuaInNippon writes "Those who have studied Japanese know how imposing kanji, or Chinese characters, can be in learning the language. There is an official list of 1,945 characters that one is expected to understand to graduate from a Japanese high school or be considered fluent. For the first time in 29 years, that list is set to change — increasing by nearly 10% to 2,136 characters. 196 are being added, and five deleted. The added characters are ones believed to be found commonly in life use, but are considered to be harder to write by hand and therefore overlooked in previous editions of the official list. Japanese officials seem to have recognized that with the advent and spread of computers in daily life, writing in Japanese has simplified dramatically. Changing the phonetic spelling of a word to its correct kanji only requires a couple of presses of a button, rather than memorizing an elaborate series of brush strokes. At the same time, the barrage of words that people see has increased, thereby increasing the necessity to understand them. Computers have simplified the task of writing in Japanese, but inadvertently now complicated the lives of Japanese language learners. (If you read Japanese and are interested in more details on specific changes, Slashdot.jp has some information!)"
What about Official English? (Score:4, Funny)
Have Meriam and Webster added
Noob
Leet
Haxxor
Lolcat
pwned
yet?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What about Official English? (Score:5, Informative)
Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
Re:What about Official English? (Score:4, Funny)
That is to say, it's the closest thing that they have to the English language.
Re: (Score:2)
That is to say, it's the closest thing that they have to the English language. /drumroll
I think the drum-related word you were looking for was "rimshot".
Re:What about Official English? (Score:5, Informative)
Not really, Kanji have "ON" and "KUN" readings. One is for full words, others is to mix with other kanjis and make other words. Forgot which is which, but in many cases kanji can serve the same use as kana.
Re: (Score:2)
Forgot which is which, but in many cases kanji can serve the same use as kana.
Then you forgot to much. They can not serve the same use as Kanas.
angel'o'sphere
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really, Kanji have "ON" and "KUN" readings. One is for full words, others is to mix with other kanjis and make other words. Forgot which is which, but in many cases kanji can serve the same use as kana.
Onyumi is the original pronouciation of the Chinese character. Usually used for proper names and nouns. Kunyumi is when the character retrofitted into a Japanese word, usually used as verbs. They don't really 'serve the same use as kana', Using the proper kanji instead of spelling it out with kana provides more definition, but hides the pronunciation.
Re:What about Official English? (Score:5, Informative)
"KUN" is the Japanese reading, "ON" is the Chinese reading of the kanji. Originally, all kanji came from Chinese characters. As the Japanese adopted the characters, they would often add their own reading to each character (because the sounds of the Japanese language tend to be quite different from those in Chinese). They also adjusted the use of each character, so usually a character in Japanese doesn't have the same meaning as the character it is based on in Chinese.
Usually (but now always) the Japanese "KUN" reading is used in words involving one kanji and some kana (such as atatakai where 'atata' is the kanji and 'kai' is written with hiragana). The same character, atata, could also be used in a compound word like onsen (hot spring) where 'on' is the same character as used in atatakai and 'sen' is another kanji, both using the Chinese "ON" reading.
There can also be multiple ON and KUN readings for a single kanji--the reading would depend on the word in which the kanji is used (or it can be completely arbitrary and have the same meaning with different readings, such as the different generic ways of saying 'one').
You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#On.27yomi_.28Chinese_reading.29 [wikipedia.org]
Re:What about Official English? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, depending on context, the pronunciation of a word might be the same, but the spelling could be different. For example, the word "kami" can mean "God" or "paper". Both sound the same, but each has its own kanji character. So as for your statement that spelling is unrelated to pronunciation is somewhat incorrect.
Re:What about Official English? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, depending on context, the pronunciation of a word might be the same, but the spelling could be different. For example, the word "kami" can mean "God" or "paper". Both sound the same, but each has its own kanji character. So as for your statement that spelling is unrelated to pronunciation is somewhat incorrect.
Uh...didn't you just actually show how pronunciation is unrelated to spelling?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about Official English? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
However, each kanji can have multiple meanings and pronunciation which is only known through context or what other characters follow it.
That is not really true.
A Kanji usually only has one meaning. Only the attempt to translate it into a foreign language gives it several meanings.
However, each kanji can have multiple meanings and pronunciation which is only known through context or what other characters follow it. That is completely wrong.
Back to your Kami example. Yes, there are several Kanji which are pro
Re: (Score:2)
A Kanji usually only has one meaning. Only the attempt to translate it into a foreign language gives it several meanings.
What is the one meaning of ""?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Good job stripping out anything that isn't ASCII, Slashcode. What is this, the eighties?
Let's try the long way around.
What's the one meaning of http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%E7%B1%B3 [google.com] ?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
To be pedantic, Hiragana [wikipedia.org] and Katakana [wikipedia.org] glyphs are the equivalent of English syllables. Kana generally represent consonant-vowel pairs, with a few exceptions, such as 'n' [wikipedia.org]. For example, this is what causes the additional ending "oh" vowel on many loan-words in Japanese. Even though the consonant sound exists, it's completely unnatural for a native Japanese speaker to "stop" mid-syllable.
The syllables represented by these two syllabaries (akin to 'alphabets') are the same, with hiragana used for phonetic sp
Re:What about Official English? (Score:4, Interesting)
To be pedantic, Hiragana [wikipedia.org] and Katakana [wikipedia.org] glyphs are the equivalent of English syllables.
To be extra pedantic, they're not necessarily syllables, but morae.
For example, "o" is a one-mora syllable on it's own, whereas "oo" is also one syllable, but containing two morae (two beats to one syllable). "Oto" would then be both two morae and two syllables.
Re: (Score:2)
Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
Not entirely. For example, sensei, teacher. 'Sen' comes from the kanji for before, 'sei' comes from the kanji for birth/life. Gakusei, student. Gake comes from the kanji for 'study/learning', and again, 'sei' comes from the same kanji for life. 'Sui' is a sound associated with the kanji for water, 'hi' with the one for day, 'dai' with the one for big...it really isn't correct to say that the kanji are unrelated to their pronunciations, even though it is a bit more complicated that using kana. It's one
Re: (Score:2)
Kanji are words, they're just words whose "spelling" is entirely unrelated to their pronunciation.
It depends. Chinese characters are constructed in a number of ways, one group does contain pronunciation cues.
Also, they are NOT words. Especially not the way they are used in Japanese. It takes a combination of kanji or kanji and kana to form a word.
Hiragana or Katakana are the equivalent of English letters, and nobody's suggesting that those ever change.
Except English contains irregular spelling variations and lots more pronounceable sounds. So there are many fewer homophone and they can be differentiated in writing. This is not the case if you were to write Japanese without kanji... they can be damn c
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, that's not really true. If they were adding more characters (i.e. sounds) to the language they'd be adding kana, kanji are usually used to represent words. However, IDNSJ (I do not speak Japanese)
Re:What about Official English? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Characters do not necessarily map one-to-one to phonemes. For instance there are 12 vowels in English, but these are represented with only 5 characters.
You forgot "Y". Well, I assume you forgot "Y" 'cause it's hard to imagine you forgot one of "A", "E", "I", "O", or "U"...
Re: (Score:2)
If you do not speak the language, maybe you should not give people advice about it. Kanji do not represent words.
And even so, "characters (i.e. sounds)"? English doesn't have characters that correspond to sounds! Where did you get the insane idea that such a correspondence exists?
Re: (Score:2)
and perhaps also pointing out that people that use "However, IANAL" had to also start out at the same point before constantly confusing and forcing people to look it up.
i'll further waste people's time in defense of not wasting their time.
I expect they instead started by saying "I am not a lawyer" and then abbreviating it once the phrase was common enough to be recognizable...
Re: (Score:2)
Umm... Maybe YOU are.
WE are talking about Kanji, where a combination of WORDS make another word, and only rarely can they be used to sound out the word. (Kind of like if I said sound-emitter for stereo)
Don't be a noob.
Re: (Score:2)
I'll try to say this as simply as possible:
The characters *are* words.
But are they perfectly cromulent words and/or characters?
Re: (Score:2)
"But are they perfectly cromulent words and/or characters?"
Regardless, they appear to embiggen a written language already top-heavy...
Re: (Score:2)
I'll try to say this as simply as possible:
The characters *are* words.
Not exactly. They are NOT equivalent to words. they can be, and often are complex, but ambiguous in meaning, unless used in groups.
This article [wikipedia.org] provides some basic idea.
Re: (Score:2)
Do you always make that much of an effort to sound condescending when you are wrong?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
They are not.
Re: (Score:2)
So far only leet.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's nothing (Score:5, Funny)
Computer rendering required? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it just me, or is having your language based on a character set that requires computer rendering for most people to be able to communicate clearly somewhat asinine?
No disrespect to those that practice the art of cartography, but for day to day communication... wow.
-Rick
Re: (Score:3)
Kanji are asinine. Have always been. You don't know the kanji, you'll have no way to figure it out in most writing because there are no clues how to sound it out. Which is why so many manga have kana above the kanji.
Western languages have many flaws, english grammar is inconsistent and english spelling is horribly inconsistent in some cases, but Kanji is such a pain that the Chinese even thought of dropping their own system decades back in favor of pinyin (romanization).
Once you get beyond the mysticism
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I am a native Chinese speaker. The human mind has more than enough power to memorize the pronunciations of words even if the words give no clue of pronunciations. Eventually, when you look at the word the pronunciation just pops up in the mind automatically. The reverse is also true.
I can see why adults would have problems learning Chinese characters. But from my experience learning English, it also feels overwhelming even if there is some association between words and pronunciations. There are so many othe
Re: (Score:2)
Is it just me, or is having your language based on a character set that requires computer rendering for most people to be able to communicate clearly somewhat asinine?
It's even more confusing than that. Japanese use two other character sets besides Kanji, and generally wind up using 2 or 3 character sets in every sentence.
Kanji = words taken into Japanese from Chinese
the 'kana' are made up of these two:
Hiragana = native Japanese words for which they don't use kanji
Katakana = wo
Re: (Score:2)
That word does not mean what you think it means.
Uh oh. Not only do we have Grammar Nazis, now we have Malapropism Nazis! The horror!
I'm sure it was the Roman alphabet equivalent of missing a single brush stroke on a kanji.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, cartography is an excellent way to transmit electronic communications securely.
You see you take the lattitude and longitude of a city. Take those numbers and convert them into their ASCII equivalents.
However, day to day communication, doesn't work so well.
Cost along the Peninsula Northeast of Vorkuta
In the Laptev Sea directly North of Novvy-urengoy
About the islands in the Kara Sea Directly North of Murmansk
See what I mean?
Fail on my part (Score:2)
I meant to write 'calligraphy' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligraphy). Brain to finger malfunction.
-Rick
Kanji Test (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Now, if you write it or see it everyday, you shouldn't have the problem. If you're having problme, it's most likely that you're not seeing it everyday in real life but just on your book or computer screen. I find reading words from books/monitor every day give you less strong memory ab
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure what kanji test you're referring to, but if you mean the Kanji kentei ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_kentei [wikipedia.org] ), then the pre-1 level version of this test includes 3000 kanji, which probably already include all the Kanji included in the new standard.
Re: (Score:2)
UTF-8 (Score:5, Funny)
The only thing I can think when I see this story is, WTF? Why does Slashdot.jp get UTF-8, and regular Slashdot gets ISO-8859-1? I know I've tried to post foreign characters before, as others have, and they just get ignored.
I figured they were too lazy to implement it into Slashcode. Now it's obvious that they're avoiding it.
(5:erocS) tuoyal eht kaerb dluow 8-FTU (Score:5, Informative)
Why does Slashdot.jp get UTF-8, and regular Slashdot gets ISO-8859-1?
One old crapflooding technique was to use characters intended for use with right-to-left scripts (Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Thaana) to spoof moderation and distort the layout of other comments to the article. See my earlier post on the topic [slashdot.org], as well as Encyclopedia Dramatica's [encycloped...matica.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Nice. The Encyclopedia Dramatica page renders backwards. :)
Re:(5:erocS) tuoyal eht kaerb dluow 8-FTU (Score:5, Interesting)
And it is an epic fail, that this retarded excuse is used.
The characters that cause such things are a well-known set. Like the control (<32) characters in ASCII.
If you filter them, you’re good.
And if you are smart, you can even check for RTL/LTR/etc characters, and add a character to the end that fixes it. Or do it like a pro, and just force LTR via CSS for the element surrounding UTF-8 user input. So people can comment in RTL languages too.
There. Done.
That lame excuse only works on non-professionals. If you can’t handle UTF-8 you’re not one.
Set of control characters is not so closed (Score:3, Interesting)
The characters that cause such things are a well-known set.
The set could be extended in a future version of Unicode.
Like the control (<32) characters in ASCII.
And like an additional block of control characters (0x80-0x9F) was added in the ISO 8859 encodings.
Re:UTF-8 (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly this is an unsatisfying answer. Or rather an unsatisfying solution. It seems like it wouldn't take that long for a developer to go through some of the unicode set and build a whitelist and/or blacklist that was comprehensive enough to allow us geeks to use useful symbols (currency, micro, greek letters, etc.) without allowing damaging characters.
It seems like many of Slashdot's anti-trolling features (e.g. trying to prevent allcaps or ASCII art) are somewhat misguided. Nowadays the moderation is pretty good, such that troll comments are basically buried. You may as well let regular posters with good karma post in caps or use ASCII art if that's what their post requires (e.g. posting some calculations that uses lots of symbols and few words ends up being flagged unnecessarily).
All that to say that Slashdot could presumably fix these things, but apparently they have little interest in doing so.
Re: (Score:2)
The usual explanation given is that people were injecting unicode characters as part of trolling attempts to break Slashdot's layout. So trolls were doing things like using right-to-left control characters to spoof their comment score. See this comment [slashdot.org], which explains the situation and links to some examples. Slashdot reacted by blocking anything not in the basic character set. Frankly this is an unsatisfying answer. Or rather an unsatisfying solution. It seems like it wouldn't take that long for a developer to go through some of the unicode set and build a whitelist and/or blacklist that was comprehensive enough to allow us geeks to use useful symbols (currency, micro, greek letters, etc.) without allowing damaging characters. It seems like many of Slashdot's anti-trolling features (e.g. trying to prevent allcaps or ASCII art) are somewhat misguided. Nowadays the moderation is pretty good, such that troll comments are basically buried. You may as well let regular posters with good karma post in caps or use ASCII art if that's what their post requires (e.g. posting some calculations that uses lots of symbols and few words ends up being flagged unnecessarily). All that to say that Slashdot could presumably fix these things, but apparently they have little interest in doing so.
This is very good insight on the problems that plague /. and reasonable suggestions on how to fix them. The idea to whitelist/blacklist specific strings of unicode is really the best idea I've heard in a while. Then, as /. editors come across further unicode exploits they could refine their lists. Again, great post. I agree with everything wrote. I hope this gets read and enlightens some editor/slashcoder to bring about a better /. for us all.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There's absolutely no reason to not allow every single printable character, perhaps excluding RTL or combining chars if you're paranoid. A white/blacklist made by hand would be counterproductive, character classification functions are there for a reason.
It's all Greek to me. (Score:2)
I checked out the Slashdot.jp article, and got absolutely nothing out of it.
Why would those who read a roman alphabet be directed to a site in Japanese for more information?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or we're slightly crazy. I'm working on learning my 5th language. But I found Japanese unbelievably daunting, even moreso then Mandarin.
Re: (Score:2)
I found Japanese unbelievably daunting, even more so then Mandarin
That would be because Mandarin is a fairly easy language to learn (the hard bit is the characters), while Japanese is insanely difficult to learn (the easy bit is the characters).
Parsed the title wrong (Score:2)
Alas, it was not to be.
WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this have to do with socioeconomic shifts? (Score:2, Offtopic)
The Japanese language is well-known for absorbing foreign words and language concepts into its own domestic use, especially from cultures / societies it deems powerful or dominant. It was Chinese during the Ming dynasty, Portuguese/Spanish during the 1600s, German during the 1800s, English from WW2 onwards.
Now that China is a relative economic superpower, maybe the trend is now to absorb Chinese words again?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
but how many new characters are being created
Practically none. In Chinese, usually two (the most common case), three, or more characters form a word, which is equivalent to an English word. Chinese words are still being created by combining different characters. But new characters themselves are extremely rare nowadays as existing characters are already much more than necessary.
Oh Boo-Hoo (Score:2)
So to be fluent, a high-school student must know about 2,000 characters?!
I'm a Chinese minor (in the US at a university), and we only learn the most basic of topics (sports, food, family, transportation). My list of "you better know these" is about 5,000 characters long. And I use traditional characters too, because I prefer a 1:1 mapping of meaning to character.
So a 10% increase shouldn't be a big deal if you're already (somewhat) used to writing them out.
Re:Oh Boo-Hoo (Score:5, Informative)
In Japanese most characters have a Sino reading and a Japanese reading. The Sino reading can sometimes be deduced from the structure of the character however the Japanese reading is completely arbitrary and often changes completely based on the phonetic characters that follow it or even simply based on context.
For example the Japanese word for "to go" is "iku" and the Japanese word for "to hold" (a party, event
The worst by far though is names. Often Japanee people themselves can't read names correctly without knowing beforehand what the place is called. A favourite example of mine is the place name "Kasuga". It's written with the characters for spring and day. Now the Japanese words for spring and day are "haru" and "hi" respectively. So you would think when combined they would be read "haruhi" (And when used for people's names they are read "haruhi" when combined). If not "haruhi" another logical reading would be "shunjitsu" (using the Chinese readings of the character) and indeed there is a noun in Japanese read "Shunjitsu" which means spring day. However in place names for whatever reason when those two characters combine their reading changes to the completely arbitrary "Kasuga".
Now try learning that for several thousand characters and that's not to count the 1000 odd characters which aren't on the list but you need to know anyway if you want to be literate.
Lies, lies, and mistruth. (Score:5, Informative)
People forgetting how to write kanji due to always using cell phones or computers IS a problem, but unrelated to the update to the Joyo Kanji.
This doesn't complicate anything for learners (Score:3, Informative)
Government agencies might choose to avoid using kanji not on it. However they often ignore it. Some newspapers now days pay attention to it and replace characters not on it with katakana. For example 'hatan' is often written in newspapers with the character for 'yaburu' (i.e. 'ha') followed by tan written in katakana. Although even government agencies and newspapers use some characters which aren't on it. Everyone else just ignores it and uses whatever characters they see fit.
It was never designed to assist Japanese learners and (at least previously) contained some extremely rare characters which you seldom see used which omitting extremely common characters that you'd expect even a 8 year old to be able to read. (An 8 year old Japanese kid that is obviously)
P.s. According to the comments on the slashdot.jp article the characters mentioned there are a hidden reference to some dating sims titles (Or however you want to translate eroge).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or you could just, you know, use English to utterly butcher the representation of any foreign word
I think the Scot's are worse for it. Have you ever heard them say Edinburgh?
Re: (Score:2)
Okay then, please tell me.. how do you personally pronounce "through?"?
(yes I'm a Scotsman, and no Edinburgh was not originally an English word).
On a side note, I tried slashdot.jp with google translate and it's awesome! This is from their poll about preferred compression formats:
Compressed format (scores of: 4, Funny funny)
Anonymous Coward : 14:30 Jun 07, 2010 (# 1775906)
What good is both breast and chest compression in a leotard swimsuit that is compressed with school?
Re: compression format (Score: 3, great insight.)
Tomo_Aquarius (22 511) : 57 minutes June 07, 2010 14:00 (# 1775928) Journal
Smaller size is better even without compression.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the Scot's are worse for it. Have you ever heard them say Edinburgh?
Last time I checked Edinburgh was a scottish town. so if anyone is right in how to call it, they are.
angel'o'sphere
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, pinyin romanisation rules don't even vaguely resemble the meaning letters have in ANY language that uses the Latin script. On the other hand, Wade-Giles is based on English. Thus, it's the PRC spelling what's abuse of Latin letters, not the old version.
Re: (Score:2)
That's because a portion of pinyin evolved first from the use of the Cyrillic alphabet. "zh" is an example of that.
Re: (Score:2)
As a non-Japanese-speaking-person-who-watches-anime-and-stuff I've always wondered why they have both (well, several) writing systems. They have katakana, and Kanji, and sometimes Kanji with furigana to help with pronunciation. Is it just because it takes less space to write in Kanji? Kind of like how we abbreviate things?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As a non-Japanese-speaking-person-who-watches-anime-and-stuff I've always wondered why they have both (well, several) writing systems. They have katakana, and Kanji, and sometimes Kanji with furigana to help with pronunciation. Is it just because it takes less space to write in Kanji? Kind of like how we abbreviate things?
Actually, 3 systems:
IMO, Kanji are used partly due to the fact that Japanese has a limited set of pronounceable sounds (~70) which creates many ambiguous situations. Writing the kanji root out instead
Re: (Score:2)
A good number of east Asian societies used Chinese characters exclusively in the past. (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc.). To varying degrees, they've switched to their separate writing systems which are either based on Chinese characters (albeit much more simplified versions of), or artificial ones from scratch (like Korean Hangul), or completely Latinized versions of the native language (like Vietnamese), or slightly simplifying Chinese characters (like mainland China).
Re: (Score:2)
They're not adding new kanji for electronics, they're saying that some kanji are becoming more commonly used because using them when writing electronically removes the difficulty of actually writing those characters.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see whats Ironic about it. Whats your definition of irony?
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Funny)
Question the definition of "ironic", and you get.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see whats Ironic about it. Whats your definition of irony?
You know, it's like rain, on your wedding day. Things like that.
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Informative)
Boy, this is really going to blow your mind when you realize that the English alphabet you're typing in is a modified form of the Latin alphabet, which was a borrowed and changed form of the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans had of course borrowed and modified the Greek alphabet (get it, Alpha Beta??). The Greeks had taken the Phoenician Alphabet, "bastardized" and "basically copied" and "changed it at it's [sic] will." The Phoenicians were uncreative hacks as well, and starting from Egyptian hieroglyphics just changed it without any respect to the original creators.
Now we're talking about 3000+ years of bastardization, copying, and changing at will (irony? no), so the evidence is a little shaky, but who knows who the Egyptians shamelessly copied from? Probably the Sumerians. Awful.
Some information for you...truly independent creations of writing systems have been rather rare worldwide. Take for instance Mongolian script. It looks pretty unusual right? Pretty geographically isolated area, far from e.g. the Middle East. Possibly unique? Nope. The Mongols (an Altaic language) borrowed from the Uyghurs (a Turkic language) who borrowed from the Sogdians (an Indo-European language) who borrowed from Syriac (Semitic language) and Aramaic. And so on, further and further back.
That process of bastardization, copying, and changing at will is how knowledge and language and culture throughout history has progressed. The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:5, Funny)
That's why we need strong Intellectual Property protection.
Just think of the real true thing, hieroglyphs, provided by the clergy of Amon, available through scribes for Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory fees. Don't accept counterfeit alphabets!
Patent protection would have to be extended to 3000 years, but we're getting there.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The total vast majority of people on the planet write their native language in a script that can be traced back to Phoenician or Chinese characters.
You're correct when it comes to script in europe, however chinese characters don't influence any other written languages languages, they are incorporated as they are to specify a specific meaning of a term.
I am by no means an expert on East Asian languages, but my understanding is that your statement is basically flat out wrong.
For instance in this story, (AFAIK) Japanese kanji do not always have identical or the same meanings to the original Chinese characters. Seeing as how Kanji and other earlier scripts used Chinese characters to encode Japanese words and grammar, I think this is an important distinction. Secondly and far more to the point, the other two Japanese writing systems--Katakana and Hiragana--a
Re: (Score:2)
Something developed in China is being bastardized by a foreign country who basically copied it and is changing it at its will?
Well, that has been going on with the Chinese character set in various other countries for some time - but this is not an example of that. This isn't about them changing the characters in use, they're just changing their officially recognized selection of what characters are part of the "standard" set which (according to the government) all Japanese should know. People can still use characters outside of that set.
Re: (Score:2)
Irony is the Americans won the war of independence and annexed ownership of the English language and adjusted pronunciations and spellings and informed everyone else that American English is correct.
Fixed that for you.
Re: (Score:2)
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Actually, being able to not speak and speak the Queen's (or King's) English at the same time shows innovation.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Irony is the Americans claiming they won the war of independence yet still speaking the queens English and then raping the hell out of it and telling everyone else their spelling is the correct one.
Call it a war of independence, revolution, whatever, the semantics tend to be irrelevant as the fledgling United States DID win.
Is it perhaps ironic that you claim post-revolutionary American's kept speaking the "queens English" and yet "raped" the hell out of it? Perhaps that should tell you something? It's called linguistic evolution! It happens to everyone, even you.
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Besides... who _exactly_ "tells everyone else their spelling is the correct one" ?
apparently anyone with a keyboard on slashdot.
English language (Score:2)
Is written with Roman characters, taken from the Greeks, taken from probably the Phoenicians.
Re: (Score:2)
Is written with Roman characters, taken from the Greeks, taken from probably the Phoenicians.
Would help to check wikipedia before claiming such nonsense.
Roman: ABCDEFGHIJKLMOPQRXYZ
Modern Greek:
Considering that there are several greek alphabets. ... I did not bother to place all chars her as /. refuses a few. Looking at the grand picture you will see that some have similar or the same shape like romans have. But a few mean something different. E.G. the roman/german/english "looks like a P"
( 2 different e's)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Really, why have three sets of script/alphabet/glyphs?
The main usage is kanji for roots of words, then kana for inflectional endings, like the -s ending of English plurals. Some words are spelled phonetically in kana. Some company names are spelled in katakana (e.g. Toyota, Suzuki), while others are spelled in kanji (e.g. Mitsubishi).
...laura
Re: (Score:2)
The main usage is kanji for roots of words, then kana for inflectional endings, like the -s ending of English plurals.
That is wrong.
Japanese has no plural nor gender. Kanji words have no "endings" that need to be reflected in hiragana.
angel'o'sphere
Re: (Score:2)
Historically Japanese took Chinese characters (Kanji) for its writing system, as it had none of its own. It wasn't a perfect fit, as the languages were different. Chinese characters are pictoral/conceptual, not phonetic. The Japanese characters that were adapted were based mostly on meaning, so reading a character in Japanese would sound different than the same character in Chinese, but some were based on similar sounds too. This was all done more than a thousand years ago, so some associations no longe
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Really, why have three sets of script/alphabet/glyphs?
Says the the person typing in a language using at least 4 sets. {capital, lower case}x{printed, cursive}
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't you add a set for every god damn fonts while you are it, Mr. Einstein?
Because, dufus, while a different font only offer a variation of the same set of basic shapes, a different case actually is a very different shape. Then the cursive is yet another very different set. This may not be obvious for those who learned the letters very young and have not yet started teaching their young ones, but it's very obvious to those who learned English later on in life of are observing young children learning the alphabet.