ickoonite

8 ms·

1.
by ickoonite 4y ago
The remote! How could I forget the remote!
2.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Gosh, the first screenshot took me back. The MIDI player was part of a set of apps that came with the SoundBlaster 16 that stacked together like hifi separates. There was a CD player and a WAV player as well. Haven't seen them in, oooh
3.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Deployment in particular, in my (limited) experience. We had to deploy Slack and I was amazed that there was no way of configuring it via Group Policy or such. It had to be done manually on each machine. Madness. Then Microsoft foisted Team
4.
by ickoonite 4y ago
The stereotype of Japan as technologically advanced persists in the West despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Japan still uses floppy disks and fax machines. They prefer to pay in cash and will go to the bank to get crisp, fresh notes
5.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Oh my. You have got yourself in quite a pickle. “Must have had been” is simply wrong; in your examples, it should always be “must have been”.
6.
by ickoonite 4y ago
No, this is just wrong. You are conflating two tenses. Must can be present (be) or perfect (have). In the example above, you would say: “She must have been being watched.”
7.
by ickoonite 4y ago
If you can explain the logic by which 臭, composed of 自 (self) and 大 (big), can come to mean “smelly”, or 義, composed of 𦍌/羊 (ram, sheep) and 我 (I, we, our), can come to mean “justice” or “meaning”, then you have found the Sinitic Holy
8.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Korean has the same problem. I believe they occasionally put the kanji in brackets after a word to disambiguate.
9.
by ickoonite 4y ago
I remember a Spanish colleague expressing his exasperation at “cucumber”. I had not noticed its inconsistency until that point. (The Japanese equivalent that springs to mind is the word for Sunday, 日曜日, pronounced nichiyōbi. It includes the
10.
by ickoonite 4y ago
This was the point I made at the top of this thread: that Japanese manages to combine the complexity of written Chinese with the inconsistency of English spelling. Does any other language expect quite so much of its users?
11.
by ickoonite 4y ago
> Anyway, you know it's completely wild when their official help site points you to switch to Shift-JIS compatiblity mode on a fresh install of Windows 11 :) Oh dear. I just skimmed that. The bit where it tells you to turn off the b
12.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Precisely. A couple more: 隼人 (hayato), 盗人 (nusutto). Or we could enumerate the pronunciations of 日: 日々、日曜日 (which is top-tier insane), 日本、春日、本日、明日、明後日、今日 (take your pick which one I mean), 昨日 (ditto), 一日 (ditto), 二日、十四日〜十五日、二十日〜二十一日｡｡｡ One
13.
by ickoonite 4y ago
In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.
14.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Absolutely. Japanese Twitter is another great example. I’ve often liked to describe kanji as a form of compression: the problem is the encoding and decoding are done in your head rather than by a computer.
15.
by ickoonite 4y ago
I suppose it depends what you consider efficient: I would counter that using a mere 26 letters to encode all the varying sounds of English is wonderfully parsimonious, an incredibly efficient use of those characters. Such an efficient enc
16.
by ickoonite 4y ago
I have read the “must have had been being” over and over again and as a native English speaker, I still can’t understand what it means. I hesitate to call it ungrammatical, but instead throw down a challenge: can you actually use it?
17.
by ickoonite 4y ago
支払手数料 a fine example of how messy the language can become. What looks like a run of 漢語 actually contains a mix of on-yomi and kun-yomi and “you just have to know”. That there would be Japanese software houses still using Shift JIS in 2022 d
18.
by ickoonite 4y ago
読み込む is probably more common for “import” (and 書き出す for “export”). But differences abound. Windows uses 印刷 for print (or did last time I checked); the Mac has long used プリント。And for connoisseurs of truly subtle differences, ウィンドウ on Windows
19.
by ickoonite 4y ago
> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet
20.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Thank you. This was the counter-citation I could not be bothered to produce.
21.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Outside of Chinese (where it is standard), I’ve not seen 苹果 before, but the Japanese input on iOS suggests it after a bit of scrolling. It’s in the dictionary on there as well, where the pronunciation is given as ひょうか or へいか, which is fairl
22.
by ickoonite 4y ago
becauseitsbasicallylikewritinglikethissoquitehardtoparse
23.
by ickoonite 4y ago
They actually tried to do a second round in the 1970s. It was felt that they had gone too far so it was abandoned, but not before some people had changed their surnames to use the new simplifications (e.g. 傅 became 付). Some never changed ba
24.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Precisely. The feeling I am getting from this discussion is there are quite a few people who have dabbled in the spoken language without having to grapple with its intractable writing system but consider themselves experts regardless. Anyon
25.
by ickoonite 4y ago
Yes, this is quite common in subtitles. I seem to remember that in GoldenEye, Xenia Onatopp was subtitled 女上, glossed with furigana オナトップ。 (I will try to dig out a relevant song lyric.)
26.
by ickoonite 4y ago
OK, but you’re moving the goalposts. A written form of the language curated specifically for the purpose of learning is not really relevant to a discussion of the language, just as would be the case for any other language. That is not the
27.
by ickoonite 4y ago
There is no one particular subset of English you can exclude to simplify its spelling. I don’t really know what you classify as Old English, but whatever Simplified English is, it is highly unlikely it excludes Old English as traditionally
28.
by ickoonite 4y ago
> there’s no limit on how many readings a kanji can get, people can randomly add new readings and popularize them. Precisely! It is insane. Song lyrics are a case in point. It is the height of erudition to contrive a novel way to write s
29.
by ickoonite 4y ago
The Glaswegians would like a word…
30.
by ickoonite 4y ago
> I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger. Everyone says this about their mother tongue. True mastery of a language is comfortably being able to call someone a c**t in it in the he

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