knolax

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
40
Submissions
1,189
Member since
Sep 29
If you're on HackerNews then you should touch grass.
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
Every forum post I've seen mentioning 白話字 and 台羅 mentions how hard it is to read and how few Hokkien speakers can even read it. The few proponents for it seem to be holding on for religious reasons (Presbyterians).

>You can still do something similar in English where you say your name is "rainbow" but you spell it "rhaynbeau",

This is an insulting borderline racist comparison and ties to the same old western trope of treating our names like random sounds. "rhaynbeau" Isn't a word and doesn't carry any meaning.

Comment · 3 years ago
You could also write English as an abjad with no vowels but not sane person would consider it. You can aslo splel einlsgh lkie tihs and msot people colud raed it flriay esilay.[4] The fact that your type demand Chinese writing to not only be phonetic but also not have tones is pretty telling that your motivation for using phonetic writing has pretty much nothing to do with "it's easier" or "it's phonetically regular" but just from some sort of disdain for the Chinese language in general. These sorts of phonetic reforms also require writing in a style that is essentially newspeak on steroids, such as your second source, which uses no vocabulary above maybe a 2nd grade level, and yet still I couldn't figure out what some of the words were supposed to be.

Here's another quote from the source you use:

> "There is no doubt that romanized Classical Chinese would be gibberish"

Invariably these proponents of phonetic writing for Chinese are non-native speakers[1] from the west who seem to have an intense hatred for any aspect of the Chinese language that they consider "Classic Chinese" derived[3]. This of course extends to any sentence that goes beyond "where's the bathroom" and "hello my name is bob" except not even the second example because Chinese names are what these people would consider "classical derived". So you propose a system that would not be able to transcribe __names__. Go to Korean wikipedia and click on a disambiguation page[0]. Or go ask them to show you their ID card[2]. These are a people whose entire national identity is based around not using Chinese writing. A lifetime of both native chinese speakers and non-chinese alike not being able to pronounce my NAME right when rendered in Pinyin is apparently not evidence enough that it's an inadequate system.

> This is a Chinese dictionary: https://imgur.com/a/rdxVh9i

You also leave out that double digit percentages of the Dungan language comes from Arabic and Persian, Russian, Turkic etc. Not even their names are Chinese. What little Chinese is left is a fraction of the amount of Chinese morphemes a normal Chinese speaker knows. Even in your example the entry for "da" has 10 semantically, phonetically, and etymologically different entries. The PRC also tried to enforce phonetic writing on the Yi and Zhuang languages, which had their own scripts that work on the same principles as Chinese. The result was low literacy rates and a population that predominantly still used the old writing system.

I could very well turn your argument against you. Why doesn't English spell pique, peak, peek the same? Pours, pores, poors? Why did a phonetic writing system slowly evolve into what is essentially a logographic script. Why were you able to read the above example relatively easily, but sdrow eht esrever I fi ylkciuq sa ylraen ton? It's almost as if mature readers of all scripts focus primarily on morpheme clusters when reading, and whatever gains you have from supposedly phonetically regular spelling are offset by that, assuming no pronunciation differences of course. By the time you force everyone to either memorize the "proper" pronunciations or simply force them to only use your privileged dialect your orthography will already be out of date. You can reform again, but by then your lexicon will be so etymologically and semantically starved[6] that you'll probably have to construct all your technical terms from some dead language with a stable orthography anyways.

> an actual analysis whether Sinitic languages

It's called general Chinese. The only phonetic system that works for most dialects, and whose spelling requires the same amount of memorization as writing with logographic characters. Of course if your kind had your way, by the time you could force it on every Chinese speaker it would be out of date and not even regular anymore. Of course these discussions usually don't even touch on the concept of morpheme regularity.

Of course all this text is useless because you probably don't speak Chinese well enough to evaluate any primary source, and the motivation for all this is less rational and more a personal vendetta you non-native speakers hold against Chinese being "too hard to learn"[5]. What's funny is it's the same sentiment you expats have for Vietnamese and Korean, Arabic or even Dutch. Even if we lobotomize our language for your sake you'll simply demand we all adopt English anyways.

[0] https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%88%98%EB%8F%84_(%EB%8F%99%...

[1] or some sort of deranged newspeak proponent, usually diaspora

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en- us/answers/questions/815368/acceptable-types-of-identification-%28az-900-test%29?orderby=newest

[3] Usually the argument against 施氏食獅史, somehow a several sentence long story every native chinese reader would understand being rendered as gibbereished shi shi shi shi shi shi, or maybe shi Shi shi shi shi if you're generous, is a totally reasonable reform in your eyes.

[4] https://www.ddginc-usa.com/can-you-read-this.htm

[5] Not limited to language apparently, no cultural differences can be tolerated by you globalists types. Even chopsticks compel your type to proclaim > "Really? A fork and a spoon is far more superior. It shocks me that chopsticks are still used and that people like using them" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877051

[6] > Romanticized bullshit views built around Chinese characters.

Leads to Oxymoronic statements where Refusing To "Romanize" is because of "Romanticism". How absurdity like this is supposed to be easy for non-native learners and native children to grasp is beyond me.

Comment · 3 years ago
Trying to learn pronunciation through some sort of visual language annotation is one the most counterproductive ways you could approach it. Pronunciation varies subtly from person to person and even from situation to situation, all this information can only really be conveyed from actually listening to people speak, where as most systems for transcribing pronunciation have to optimize for regularity. The end result is that it only conveys the minimum amount of phonetic information needed to distinguish between morphemes. If you add more information then the categories become more and more subjective and harder to distinguish. For example try to do some IPA transcriptions for a language you do speak, or listen to trained linguists try to pronounce words in non-native language.

Think of it as trying to compress several kilobytes of information down to several bytes of information and then trying to reconstruct the original data all in the CPU when you have dedicated hardware several orders of magnitude more powerful and which uses a non-compatible black box compression scheme.

Comment · 3 years ago
India has full on communist guerilla groups fighting the modi government with no 2nd amendment. In the past 200 odd years of "gun rights", Americans have never been able to overthrow the same ruling that founded this country despite multiple attempts with both legitimate and illegitimate grievances.
Comment · 3 years ago
You live in a democracy. If you hate your government organize against it. Siding with foreign agitators only makes you look like a neoliberal pawn and delegitimizes your position.
Comment · 3 years ago
It's foreign state media that's been caught falsifying footage and known to have intelligence assets from both the UK and US working there. Even British people occasionally complain about partisanship. You can call me as many names and grandstand about their nonexistent "journalistic integrity". Doesn't change the facts.
Comment · 3 years ago
The BBC is accusing Modi of committing genocide in an incident that started with the other side burning 59 pilgrims to death. India is right to block what is a naked piece of propaganda made a foreign state.
Comment · 3 years ago
Ban me if you want but this is the dumbest comment reply I have ever seen. Chatbots regularly display more intelligence than this. I feel bad for anybody who has to interact with you in real life.
Comment · 3 years ago
> But for the sake of the argument, let's replace all class="...", id="..", and data-event-name=".." with strings of the same length consisting of "回". That grows the filesize from 118K to 151

You're missing the point entirely, the amount of characters you used is enough for 2 or 3 sentences. This was not an example constructed in good faith.

Comment · 3 years ago
And the mainland is full of Russians pretending to be Chinese like you used to say? You yourself have a massive personal chip on your shoulder against both Taiwan and the mainland. Your anecdote means very little.
Comment · 3 years ago
Isn't this the forced IP transfer that I used to see so many complaints about.
Comment · 3 years ago
Your argument uses a website whose code was written by English speakers. There would still be ASCII but verbose element names like "vector-page-toolbar-container" would definitely be shorter both in utf-8 and in utf-16 if they weren't written in English

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton