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BoneKracker
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 Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 6:13 am Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | I think you'd be getting beat with a shoe even more than my cat.  |
 
i can haz explunashun pl0xkthxbai |
I'm just razzing you for going on and on about why we should be using Esperanto, only to finally say, "I know I'm not being practical".  |
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srunni
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 6:17 am Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | I think you'd be getting beat with a shoe even more than my cat. |
i can haz explunashun pl0xkthxbai |
I'm just razzing you for going on and on about why we should be using Esperanto, only to finally say, "I know I'm not being practical". |
Ah, OK. Well, I thought that the fact that it isn't practical was implied from the beginning ;/
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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BoneKracker
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 6:26 am Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | I think you'd be getting beat with a shoe even more than my cat. |
i can haz explunashun pl0xkthxbai |
I'm just razzing you for going on and on about why we should be using Esperanto, only to finally say, "I know I'm not being practical". |
Ah, OK. Well, I thought that the fact that it isn't practical was implied from the beginning ;/ |
Well, theoretically it is feasible. Through a slightly more authoritarian version of the UN, and with the agreement of all member states, everybody could agree to do it. It could become everybody's official second language. But getting them to agree to do it would be the challenge.
Plus, the day of being able to walk around with a hand-held "universal translator" and a discrete wireless plug in your ear are not far off. |
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codergeek42
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 6:38 am Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | That would be even more idiotic. Who wants to sit around memorizing all those characters? It's an enormous waste of time. |
Actually, once you start breaking down things into their component radicals and parts, it's pretty easy to remember them.
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srunni
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 6:40 am Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | Plus, the day of being able to walk around with a hand-held "universal translator" and a discrete wireless plug in your ear are not far off. |
I don't know about that. We can't even get text-based conversion correct right now. For a ``universal translator'', we'd need near-perfect speech-to-text, as well as inter-language text conversion. And then we'd need a good text-to-speech program, so that any intonations, etc., could be carried through as well.
| codergeek42 wrote: | | Actually, once you start breaking down things into their component radicals and parts, it's pretty easy to remember them. |
Well, that doesn't always work, and it seems totally pointless to use hanzi when zhuyin is available. Korean has almost completely moved to Hangul, while Japanese is increasingly using kana. Vietnamese now exclusively uses Chữ Quốc Ngữ , which is basically the Latin alphabet with diacritics specifically created for Vietnamese. All these languages used to use hanzi alone, but now none of them do. Why is Chinese still using them? Instead of creating ``simplified'' characters, they should've just chucked the whole lot out the door and started using zhuyin.
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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BoneKracker
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 6:53 am Post subject: |
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| codergeek42 wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | That would be even more idiotic. Who wants to sit around memorizing all those characters? It's an enormous waste of time. |
Actually, once you start breaking down things into their component radicals and parts, it's pretty easy to remember them. |
There are still like 2,300 characters to memorize though. I'd say they didn't simply enough. Korea simplified it (to their lanugage, Hangul), which has only has 24. I give the edge to the Koreans. |
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srunni
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 6:57 am Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | There are still like 2,300 characters to memorize though. |
Actually, I think the average educated Chinese knows 4000-5000 characters, IIRC.
| BoneKracker wrote: | | I'd say they didn't simply enough. Korea simplified it (to their lanugage, Hangul), which has only has 24. I give the edge to the Koreans. |
Well, the Koreans still have to memorize 1800 hanja (the Korean name for hanzi), 900 in junior high and 900 in senior high. However, North Korea has completely removed the use of hanja (because they don't like Chinese stuff  ) and South Korea is using it less and less. It's mainly relegated to newpaper headlines, where brevity is important, and academic literature, where you need to eliminate homophones to ensure there's no ambiguity. Also, you have to understand that the Koreans essentially cheated. Hangul is an artificial script, created by a group of scholars. The shapes of the characters even match the physical vocal patterns made by your mouth when you say the letter. The way that they squeezed multiple letters into the space of one character is very elegant as well; that's not something that accidentally comes into existence.
The Japanese only have to memorize a few more; there are 1945 Jōyō kanji, which is the set of kanji you have to know to graduate from high school there. I'm learning Japanese (via Pimsleur, so no writing yet), and I'm not looking forward to memorizing the kanji. I may formally take classes in college, in which case I won't have to learn kanji until the 2nd year of Japanese.
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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BoneKracker
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:14 am Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | Also, you have to understand that the Koreans essentially cheated. Hangul is an artificial script, created by a group of scholars. The shapes of the characters even match the physical vocal patterns made by your mouth when you say the letter. The way that they squeezed multiple letters into the space of one character is very elegant as well; that's not something that accidentally comes into existence. |
How is that cheating? It sounds fucking smart to me.
And isn't the only reason they have to memorize characters is because Chinese is still around? Eventually, it will die off completely, won't it? They don't have Chinese characters on their keyboards, do they? They can live completely without it. |
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srunni
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:28 am Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | How is that cheating? It sounds fucking smart to me. |
Sure is, but comparing Hangul to other methods of writing really isn't fair. The reason why it was possible to just create a new method of writing is precisely because of how much hanja sucked. They weren't designed for Korean, and more importantly, only the elite had the time to learn it. A lot of the time, they just wrote in classical Chinese, and didn't even bother with switching the word order so it'd make sense in Korean. This meant most of the population was illiterate, and immediately started using Hangul. With Hangul, the average person could learn how to read/write in just a day or two. As expected, the elite were highly opposed to Hangul, and the next king even went so far as to ban it when people started protesting outside his palace with signs written in Hangul.
| BoneKracker wrote: | | And isn't the only reason they have to memorize characters is because Chinese is still around? |
No, it's because Korean has a ton of homophones. For example, ``sudo'' (Hangul: 수도) is an extreme example. It has the following meanings (with the hanja to the left):
修道 "spiritual discipline"
受渡 "receipt and delivery"
囚徒 "prisoner"
水都 "'city of water'"
水稻 "rice"
水道 "drain"
隧道 "tunnel"
首都 "capital (city)"
手刀 "hand-knife"
In academic literature, it is essential that this be avoided. Besides, those academics have plenty of time on their hands to sit around memorizing little squiggles
But what I'd really like to know is how anyone is able to read those characters at this font size.
| BoneKracker wrote: | | Eventually, it will die off completely, won't it? They don't have Chinese characters on their keyboards, do they? They can live completely without it. |
Well, they use an IME, just like the Chinese do. Only difference is that they probably input the Hangul (instead of Pinyin or Zhuyin) and then can trigger some code that will give them a choice of hanja to replace it with.
But typing Hangul is really nice actually. Since a string of jamo (a Hangul letter) can only be put into blocks in a particular grouping, you just type in each jamo and the software dynamically creates the character, though since the jamo sometimes get distorted to get a character of the right size, the CJK section of Unicode just has all possible characters that can be made with Hangul (~11000) precreated.
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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BoneKracker
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:40 am Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | And isn't the only reason they have to memorize characters is because Chinese is still around? |
No, it's because Korean has a ton of homophones. |
There are a lot of homographs in English, but we manage. I would think, from the list you provided, it would be pretty easy to tell which "sudo" someone meant, simply from the context.
| srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | Eventually, it will die off completely, won't it? They don't have Chinese characters on their keyboards, do they? They can live completely without it. |
Well, they use an IME, just like the Chinese do. Only difference is that they probably input the Hangul (instead of Pinyin or Zhuyin) and then can trigger some code that will give them a choice of hanja to replace it with. |
I prepared a 300-page deliverable for my client in Korea that was translated back and forth between English and Korean multiple times (which taught me how to write English for easy translation to Korean, which I also tried to adopt in my speech, for the sake of the interpreters). I don't recall seeing any hanja in it, but I might not have recognized it.
Last edited by BoneKracker on Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:45 am; edited 1 time in total |
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srunni
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:45 am Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | There are a lot of homophones in English too, but we manage. I would think, from the list you provided, it would be pretty easy to tell which "sudo" someone meant, simply from the context. |
Not in short sentences or headlines. Another example is 가 (ka), which can have 40-50 meanings (according to a forum post by a Chinese guy, so it may be an exaggeration). The problem is that Korean has a ton of loanwords from Chinese, but Hangul doesn't account for tones. I'm guessing it's OK in most cases to be ambiguous, but in academia and legal stuff, that's probably not acceptable. Of course there is no academia or law in the DPRK, so they're good to go
| BoneKracker wrote: | | I prepared a 300-page deliverable for my client in Korea that was translated back and forth between English and Korean multiple times (which taught me how to write English for easy translation to Korean, which I also tried to adopt in my speech, for the sake of the interpreters). I don't recall seeing any hanja in it, but I might not have recognized it. |
Oh, I'm sure there would've been at least some. I'm guessing that they try to use Hangul whenever possible, though I don't know as much about that as I do about how the kana and kanji are mixed in Japanese.
An example of that is in my signature. ``作ったんだ'' is roughly tsukutanda, meaning ``made'', IIRC. Only the first character is a kanji, and it gives the word its meaning, whereas the kana conjugate it. A big problem with the kanji is that there are two readings, on (Chinese reading) and kun (Japanese reading). So the same kanji can have two different meanings, and you have to determine which one by context, if I understand it correctly. The pronounciation is also completely different, depending on which one it is. For example, ``作'' from above, which was ``tsukuru'', is ``saku'' or ``sa'' if you're using the Chinese reading. So if you see a word written with a kanji that you can't remember, you're pretty much screwed ;/
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
Last edited by srunni on Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:52 am; edited 2 times in total |
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BoneKracker
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 7:49 am Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | There are a lot of homophones in English too, but we manage. I would think, from the list you provided, it would be pretty easy to tell which "sudo" someone meant, simply from the context. |
Not in short sentences or headlines. Another example is 가 (ka), which can have 40-50 meanings (according to a forum post by a Chinese guy, so it may be an exaggeration). The problem is that Korean has a ton of loanwords from Chinese, but Hangul doesn't account for tones. I'm guessing it's OK in most cases to be ambiguous, but in academia and legal stuff, that's probably not acceptable. Of course there is no academia or law in the DPRK, so they're good to go |
I see. I meant we have a lot of "homographs" actually, but if you say they have a lot more, I'll take your word for it. I do they have a lot of short words, so that itself would tend to lend itself to this.
| srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | I prepared a 300-page deliverable for my client in Korea that was translated back and forth between English and Korean multiple times (which taught me how to write English for easy translation to Korean, which I also tried to adopt in my speech, for the sake of the interpreters). I don't recall seeing any hanja in it, but I might not have recognized it. |
Oh, I'm sure there would've been at least some. I'm guessing that they try to use Hangul whenever possible, though I don't know as much about that as I do about how the kana and kanji are mixed in Japanese. |
I did see them throw in English words for which they had no equivalent (mostly our technical words and business jargon). |
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Dralnu
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 8:00 am Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | Dralnu wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | According to one of the comments on the article (not on Digg), starting with 8.10, Ubuntu doesn't have a xorg.conf---it just configures the X settings on boot |
You're fucking joking. That would explain why I could never get a xorg.conf to work on my folks comp... |
Actually, there's not much you need to put in your xorg.conf anymore. Unless you're doing something fancy (like multiple displays or custom modes), X figures out pretty good defaults all by itself when you start it. And whether or not you have an xorg.conf, it seems like it still goes through that whole startup process (so it can warn on invalid configuration).
I haven't gutted mine, but playing around one day it dawned on me that about all I really needed to put in there was the video driver. |
My folks have a nice 22" widescreen. The thing runs at 1280x1024, which A) Isn't even close to the right ratio, and B) Can't be fixed in the xorg.conf file. I tried that, and 'buntu shit itself
RE: The language debate
Why not learn Zulu or something? It doesn't matter as long as the language is fairly simple grammatically, and is expressive enough to be used to explain complex ideas.
OR, we could just start talking in equations, since thats already pretty much universal
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codergeek42
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 8:28 am Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | An example of that is in my signature. ``作ったんだ'' is roughly tsukutanda, meaning ``made'', IIRC. |
Actually it should be "tsukuttanda" as Rõmaji. The small "tsu" character (っ or ッ in Katakana) is called a "sokuon" (促音) which indicates a germinate consonant (glottal stop), romanized by doubling the following consonant.
| srunni wrote: | | [...] So the same kanji can have two different meanings, and you have to determine which one by context, if I understand it correctly. |
More or less, but just to be clear: the kanji character would have the same meaning, just a different pronunciation based on its context, and how that meaning is being conveyed.
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energyman76b
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 12:24 pm Post subject: |
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| BoneKracker wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | BoneKracker wrote: | | I think you'd be getting beat with a shoe even more than my cat. |
i can haz explunashun pl0xkthxbai |
I'm just razzing you for going on and on about why we should be using Esperanto, only to finally say, "I know I'm not being practical". |
Ah, OK. Well, I thought that the fact that it isn't practical was implied from the beginning ;/ |
Well, theoretically it is feasible. Through a slightly more authoritarian version of the UN, and with the agreement of all member states, everybody could agree to do it. It could become everybody's official second language. But getting them to agree to do it would be the challenge.
Plus, the day of being able to walk around with a hand-held "universal translator" and a discrete wireless plug in your ear are not far off. |
why esperanto? it is latin centric culture-imperialism at its worth. Culture is also defined by the language used. Replace a language and you destroy culture.
Everybody who is seriously porposing esperanto or any other artifical language, is a close minded culture destroying freak.
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| AidanJT wrote: |
Libertardian denial of reality is wholly unimpressive and unconvincing, and simply serves to demonstrate what a bunch of delusional fools they all are.
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genstorm
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 12:30 pm Post subject: |
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Babel fish. I want one.
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srunni
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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| codergeek42 wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | An example of that is in my signature. ``作ったんだ'' is roughly tsukutanda, meaning ``made'', IIRC. |
Actually it should be "tsukuttanda" as Rõmaji. The small "tsu" character (っ or ッ in Katakana) is called a "sokuon" (促音) which indicates a germinate consonant (glottal stop), romanized by doubling the following consonant. |
Yes, that's what showed up in the romanizer (http://romaji.org/), but I was too lazy to include the extra ``t'' ;/
| codergeek42 wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | [...] So the same kanji can have two different meanings, and you have to determine which one by context, if I understand it correctly. |
More or less, but just to be clear: the kanji character would have the same meaning, just a different pronunciation based on its context, and how that meaning is being conveyed. |
Ah OK, I get it now.
| energyman76b wrote: | why esperanto? it is latin centric culture-imperialism at its worth. Culture is also defined by the language used. Replace a language and you destroy culture.
Everybody who is seriously porposing esperanto or any other artifical language, is a close minded culture destroying freak. |
Someone's language is feeling a little threatened. Don't worry, they will add some Germanic words to Esperanto to stop your endless whining.
_________________
| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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genstorm
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 2:10 pm Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | Someone's language is feeling a little threatened. Don't worry, they will add some Germanic words to Esperanto to stop your endless whining. |
German is inferior anyway.
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BoneKracker
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 2:18 pm Post subject: |
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| genstorm wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | Someone's language is feeling a little threatened. Don't worry, they will add some Germanic words to Esperanto to stop your endless whining. |
German is inferior anyway. |
No way. German is the Uberfunkenspeakwritebestlanguagesystem. |
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energyman76b
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 3:56 pm Post subject: |
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as people who don't even speak one real language, you should be very carefull (english is not a language. It was a language, ca 500 years ago. What is left is the rump of a language with some additional grunts).
But hey, attacking someone is easy, I know that.
Fact is language = culture
If you remove/replace people's language, you destroy their culture. And that is what we need, right? Culture - who needs that? Cultural diversity? That is scary.
And esperanto is especially bad. No, it is not easy. It is easy for speakers of latin based languages. Everybody else is screwed. But it is very fitting that proponents of esperanto and equally idiotic artificial languages don't see that. If they would see the problems with the latin-based cultural imperialism, they would see the inherent WRONG of their idea.
There are mostly two kinds of people pushing esperanto:
idiots
cultural imperialists who deserve to be shot
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| AidanJT wrote: |
Libertardian denial of reality is wholly unimpressive and unconvincing, and simply serves to demonstrate what a bunch of delusional fools they all are.
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Satan's got perfectly toned abs and rocks a c-cup. |
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runningwithscissors
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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Do the two of you know some japanese/korean or is it one of those "self-teaching myself japanese because I like anime ^_^" things?
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aidanjt
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 4:11 pm Post subject: |
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Culture is grossly overrated. And I speak from a country that has bags of it. And cultural diversity is a relatively new phenominon, where you toss 6 billion people onto a marble ball who speak over 110 distict languages, with thousands of different dialects, and laugh as they attempt to communicate but end up killing each other instead. Aka, stupid.
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| juniper wrote: | | you experience political reality dilation when travelling at american political speeds. it's in einstein's formulas. it's not their fault. |
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srunni
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 4:41 pm Post subject: |
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| AidanJT wrote: | | Culture is grossly overrated. And I speak from a country that has bags of it. And cultural diversity is a relatively new phenominon, where you toss 6 billion people onto a marble ball who speak over 110 distict languages, with thousands of different dialects, and laugh as they attempt to communicate but end up killing each other instead. Aka, stupid. |
++
Culture is disappearing these days, as the world continues to globalize. People need to be able to communicate to each other. If people like energyman want to cling to their ``culture'', they can do so while the rest of the world moves on.
| energyman76b wrote: | | as people who don't even speak one real language, you should be very carefull (english is not a language. It was a language, ca 500 years ago. What is left is the rump of a language with some additional grunts). |
If English isn't a language, I don't even want to think about what German is. English is grunting? Grunting is all I hear when I listen to German
| runningwithscissors wrote: | | Do the two of you know some japanese/korean or is it one of those "self-teaching myself japanese because I like anime ^_^" things? |
1. Self-taught so far, but will probably take classes.
2. Do like anime, but learning Japanese mainly for the challenge. It is supposed to be the most difficult language for native English speakers to learn as adults, though I'm finding spoken Japanese to be fairly easy. The main difference is that the word order in a sentence is completely backwards compared to English. Another factor is how tacit spoken Japanese is; that's also the exact opposite of English.
3. I don't see how teaching yourself doesn't allow you to actually know it. I already know quite a bit of basic Japanese.
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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cokehabit
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 5:03 pm Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | If English isn't a language, I don't even want to think about what German is. |
it's how you talk if you want to order someone around. Their love songs must be funny
| Blackadder the Third - Amy and Amiability wrote: | | she's [Caroline of Brunswick] famous for having the worst personality in Germany... and as you can imagine, that's up against some pretty stiff competition! |
| Blackadder Goes Forth - Private Plane wrote: | Baldrick: I've heard what these Germans will do, Sir. They'll have their wicked way with anything of woman-born.
Edmund: Well, in that case, Baldrick, you're quite safe. However, the Teutonic reputation for brutality is well-founded: their operas last three or four days; and they have no word for `fluffy'. |
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srunni
Guru
Joined: 26 Dec 2007
Posts: 365
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| Posted: Tue Nov 25, 2008 5:46 pm Post subject: |
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| cokehabit wrote: | | Their love songs must be funny |
A German love song? That sounds like an oxymoron to me
The only kind of music that I can imagine being sung in German is angry metal.
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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Off the Wall
