September 14, 2004

• Oops, please excuse the poor grammar in the title.
• Oh man, there seem to be way too many posts recently. I would humbly request our enlightened administrator to cull out some of the less interesting ones, like this post.
• Wow, that was really, really neat. Nobody has ever succeded in explaining this stuff to me until now. This is a really clever way of explaining Chinese writing to English speakers.
• Interesting article. It teaches you something by making you think, rather than stating facts.
• The author would make a terrific teacher, if they're not already.
• While, as Dreadnought pointed out, this is a great way to learn what is up with Chinese, I must confess that my head went owie after the fourth line. And I find it funny that in order to use chinese in computers, you have to learn some basic english romanizations in order to hunt and peck for the right characters. Which, of course, is much easier then to write it longhand, which is why kids are having so much trouble actually WRITING chinese when pressed to. I imagine that a few generations from now it's possible that increasily impatient kids will cut out the characters altogether, and we'll be left with some weird mish mash romanization replacement, with traditional characters reserved for artsy or historic moments.
• LarismadaME: you have described Korean in a nutshell.
• I read this last week, and my first thought was, "now see, that's why China will never be a *real* world power: its effed-up, doesn't-make-sense language."
• LarimdaME, there are actually several different methods of inputting Chinese; the most common one for Westerners is based on the Pinyin of each character, but there are a bunch of other methods, based on anything from a character's strokes to its radicals. The Wubi method looks like it might be the most efficient one, but the Five Stroke method hasn't been too hard to pick up for me. Both of these come with OS X, fortunately.
• Gah! Forgot to mention: the names for "Wubi method" and "Five Stroke method" under OS X are "Wubi Xing" and "Wubi Hua," respectively. I wonder if a one-handed input method for English based on the strokes of the handwritten letters would be feasible...
• Didn't Palm Computing (formerly the Newton group at Apple) come up with one?
• Well, there's Graffiti, which may or may not be still used, but was first on the Newton, IIRC. Anyway, what I meant by a one-handed (or, I guess, three-fingered) method was not one with a pen, but rather with a keyboard. The Five Stroke method only uses five (or, in OS X's case, six) keys on the number pad, one for each type of stroke: 1 for rightward, 2 for downward, 3 for down-left, 4 for dot or down-right, and 5 for anything else, more or less. (The 6 is a "wildcard stroke," as "." is to regular expressions.) What I was thinking of was maybe doing something with the Latin alphabet: 1 is horizontal, 2 is vertical, 3 is a circle or arc, 4 is down-left, 5 is down-right, and 6 is other, or something like that. In that vein, A = 451, B = 233, C = 3, etc. I'm realizing now that there are some problems with this approach, though. How would one disambiguate between C and O (3), or between J and P (23)? Why is E, the most common letter, four numbers (2111), while J, the third least common, is only two (23)? Maybe E should just be 1, since 1 would be just a dash otherwise, but then you introduce unnecessary memorization, etc. Maybe looking at the lowercase letters would be better, but you run into even more ambiguities there: a = d = q (32). There's no doubt that the same ambiguity exists in the Five Stroke method, but there, at least, it's justified; there are so many Chinese characters that the 3,905 possible strings of five or fewer digits from 1 to 5 couldn't possibly establish a one-to-one mapping, and the Chinese character set is so huge anyway that any alternate input system is worth investigating (and, in fact, there to this day exists no "standard" input system). The Latin alphabet, however, only has 26 characters, and a one-handed input system can be as simple as adjusting the standard QWERTY layout for one-handed use (like the half-QWERTY keyboard); what's the use of coming up with something new and unnecessarily complicated?
• I had a professor who swore by typing by stroke - he wrote an entire book in Chinese that way.
• My Chinese friends just input Pinyin into their little electronic dictionaries. Seems to work a treat. Also, I don't see anything wrong with the grammar in the title. Were I Chinese, however ...
• Also, I don't see anything wrong with the grammar in the title. Interesting. As a non-native speaker of English my intuition is more that of a trained combatist than a born streetfighter. I used the subjunctive 'were' because I deemed 'English written as Chinese' a counterfactual. The author of the article, who probably learnt his English on his mother's knee, used the possibility-conditional 'was'. As a non-native speaker I have to prima facie accept his choice as more natural. If I were a gung-ho descriptivist (hippie!), I might claim that speakers don't see a difference in this case--that 'if I was king' really has the same meaning as 'if I were king'--but I cannot tell you which one a native speaker would select. (One of the first criticisms I received on MoFi was that I sounded illiterate. While I disagreed with that assessment, it didn't surprise me at all.)
• I have nothing really to add here, other than to say: Thanks for this fuyugare, it is extremely interesting. And now, back to work...
• I think the subjunctive was correct, but the subjunctive seems to be disappearing from English (and I think other European languages). As an educated man (heh!) I have always used the polite subjunctive when, say asking for things in shops - "could I have one of those?". Twenty years ago, the response, in England, would have been to hand you one in silence. Now, typically, people reply "Of course you can." as though I were (heh!) seeking information rather than the merchandise in question. At the moment, they still hand it over, but I foresee that in another twenty years, the standard response will be: "Sure. Do you want one, then?"
• One of the first criticisms I received on MoFi was that I sounded illiterate. WTF? Feel free to name and shame.
• Unless it was me - in which case fuck you ;)
• Finally! You don't know how long I've been waiting for that 'fuck you', Quid. *removes tie, loosens belt a couple notches, looks for a beer*
• *hands fuyugare a beer and a cigar, performs lap-dance*