6 ms·

Thank God it didn’t happen.

by alexlur 2y ago

wolfgangbabad 2y ago
Vietnamese is relatively OK.
- acwan93 2y ago
  Relatively. The amount of diacritics on Vietnamese surpasses European languages so text rendering becomes a challenge if a naive developer doesn't test with Vietnamese.
  - numpad0 2y ago
    Is bringing back Chu Nom script going to simplify Vietnamese support on computers by a lot? It's unintelligible to CJK users, but as far as text rendering goes, it seems just simple Kanji/Hanzi.
- alexlur 2y ago
  Chữ Nôm is a borrowed writing system and not native to Vietnamese, which isn’t even a Sino-Tibetan language to begin with.
  - gumby 2y ago
    Latin is a borrowed writing system not native to English, German, Polish and many others which aren’t even Romance languages to begin with and must resort to di- and trigraphs plus non-Latin characters like J, V, ß, ł or å, among others (not to mention diacritics).
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      Alphabets are much more flexible than the Chinese characters. An alphabet can be adapted to basically any language. You just have to map the letters to the sounds, and you're pretty much done. By contrast, the Chinese writing system is adapted very specifically to the properties of Chinese language. Every syllable in Chinese has a meaning (or set of meanings), so every character represents one meaning (or a few). English does not have that structure: words can have very arbitrary syllables that don't have any meaning on their own. Chinese characters encode a meaning plus a sound, which is often reflected in how they're composed (i.e., a character will often be composed of two simpler characters, one of which has the correct meaning and one of which has the correct sound). Chinese words do not change form: there's no conjugation, no plural form, etc. As a consequence, the writing system has no way to deal with things like conjugation. I have no idea how one would even begin trying to adapt Chinese characters to write English. On the other hand, it's relatively easy to come up with a way to write Chinese in any alphabet.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      "Å" is just "O" stacked on top of "A" though. And "V" is in fact the OG Latin form ("U" is the newly introduced one). But yeah, the whole notion is kinda silly. Most writing systems in the world are developed from very few originals. E.g. for most of Eurasia, the source is either Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Shang Oracle bone script.
asdasdsddd 2y ago
pinyin is the best thing that happened to the language after simplification. Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but it added a phonetic component to the language
- ande-mnoc 2y ago
  Again, this is a very mainland-centric view. Hong Kong has never simplified their writing system or even developed a proper romanization, and yet has consistently one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Guess what helped literacy? Post-war socioeconomic development like poverty reduction, mass education and industrialization. > it added a phonetic component to the language Fanqie has been a thing since the 2nd century. Zhuyin was invented in 1913.
  - charlieyu1 2y ago
    Agreed. I have seen kids from mainland China spending lots of time learning pinyin while kids from Hong Kong at the same age can already write some characters and pronounce the words accurately
- vunderba 2y ago
  Uh... no. Bopomofo which is used in Taiwan is a phonetic script that is used as a popular IME. And simplification's only "arguable merit" is that it saves a fortune in ink at the expense of losing its historical roots. But guess what? We mostly use computers now. So great job Mao, now we have two competing standards. (Nod to XKCD). Unrelated but to those of us who started with 繁體字, simplified just looks ugly. (龙 vs 龍)
  - rjh29 2y ago
    I feel like Japanese strikes the right balance, no ugly oversimplified characters but making common kanji easier to write for children (國→国、櫻→桜） For example 竜 is a fairly common simplification of 龍 and imo not nearly as ugly
    - 2y ago
z2 2y ago
Much of the simplification adopted shorthand already in common use, which is why Japanese shinjitai simplification independently arrived at many similar characters and patterns. The second simplification round was an abysmal newspeak-esque failure, and thank goodness _that_ wasn't adopted either.
publicola1990 2y ago
The Vietnamese romanized their writing, they seems to be doing fine.
- alexlur 2y ago
  This isn’t factually correct. The French colonial administration romanized their writing and enforced chữ Quốc ngữ.

Thank God it didn’t happen.

wolfgangbabad 2y ago

Vietnamese is relatively OK.

acwan93 2y ago
Relatively. The amount of diacritics on Vietnamese surpasses European languages so text rendering becomes a challenge if a naive developer doesn't test with Vietnamese.
- numpad0 2y ago
  Is bringing back Chu Nom script going to simplify Vietnamese support on computers by a lot? It's unintelligible to CJK users, but as far as text rendering goes, it seems just simple Kanji/Hanzi.
alexlur 2y ago
Chữ Nôm is a borrowed writing system and not native to Vietnamese, which isn’t even a Sino-Tibetan language to begin with.
- gumby 2y ago
  Latin is a borrowed writing system not native to English, German, Polish and many others which aren’t even Romance languages to begin with and must resort to di- and trigraphs plus non-Latin characters like J, V, ß, ł or å, among others (not to mention diacritics).
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    Alphabets are much more flexible than the Chinese characters. An alphabet can be adapted to basically any language. You just have to map the letters to the sounds, and you're pretty much done. By contrast, the Chinese writing system is adapted very specifically to the properties of Chinese language. Every syllable in Chinese has a meaning (or set of meanings), so every character represents one meaning (or a few). English does not have that structure: words can have very arbitrary syllables that don't have any meaning on their own. Chinese characters encode a meaning plus a sound, which is often reflected in how they're composed (i.e., a character will often be composed of two simpler characters, one of which has the correct meaning and one of which has the correct sound). Chinese words do not change form: there's no conjugation, no plural form, etc. As a consequence, the writing system has no way to deal with things like conjugation. I have no idea how one would even begin trying to adapt Chinese characters to write English. On the other hand, it's relatively easy to come up with a way to write Chinese in any alphabet.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    "Å" is just "O" stacked on top of "A" though. And "V" is in fact the OG Latin form ("U" is the newly introduced one). But yeah, the whole notion is kinda silly. Most writing systems in the world are developed from very few originals. E.g. for most of Eurasia, the source is either Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Shang Oracle bone script.

asdasdsddd 2y ago

pinyin is the best thing that happened to the language after simplification. Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but it added a phonetic component to the language

ande-mnoc 2y ago
Again, this is a very mainland-centric view. Hong Kong has never simplified their writing system or even developed a proper romanization, and yet has consistently one of the highest literacy rates in the world. Guess what helped literacy? Post-war socioeconomic development like poverty reduction, mass education and industrialization. > it added a phonetic component to the language Fanqie has been a thing since the 2nd century. Zhuyin was invented in 1913.
- charlieyu1 2y ago
  Agreed. I have seen kids from mainland China spending lots of time learning pinyin while kids from Hong Kong at the same age can already write some characters and pronounce the words accurately
vunderba 2y ago
Uh... no. Bopomofo which is used in Taiwan is a phonetic script that is used as a popular IME. And simplification's only "arguable merit" is that it saves a fortune in ink at the expense of losing its historical roots. But guess what? We mostly use computers now. So great job Mao, now we have two competing standards. (Nod to XKCD). Unrelated but to those of us who started with 繁體字, simplified just looks ugly. (龙 vs 龍)
- rjh29 2y ago
  I feel like Japanese strikes the right balance, no ugly oversimplified characters but making common kanji easier to write for children (國→国、櫻→桜） For example 竜 is a fairly common simplification of 龍 and imo not nearly as ugly
  - 2y ago

z2 2y ago

Much of the simplification adopted shorthand already in common use, which is why Japanese shinjitai simplification independently arrived at many similar characters and patterns. The second simplification round was an abysmal newspeak-esque failure, and thank goodness _that_ wasn't adopted either.

publicola1990 2y ago

The Vietnamese romanized their writing, they seems to be doing fine.

alexlur 2y ago
This isn’t factually correct. The French colonial administration romanized their writing and enforced chữ Quốc ngữ.