ickoonite's comments

The remote! How could I forget the remote!

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, 25 years.

http://calmira.net/screenshots/andrew.htm

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 Teams on us and we had to waste time finding ways to disable it.

In the end, I’m not sure which I hate more. Slack is also a dog-slow JavaScript app, so at least in that sense, they are one as bad as the other.

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 - to give old notes would be disrespectful. Banking in Japan - indeed, experience with any kind of bureaucracy at all there - makes the US DMV, or indeed any Western bureaucracy, look like the vanguard of efficiency.

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”.

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.”

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 Grail that people have spent at least a couple of millennia searching for.

Some characters are moderately logical. A tree, 木, begets a wood, 林, and a forest, 森。日, sun, in triplicate, 晶, is a crystal or glittering. But these are very much the exceptions. By what logic would you create a character for a whale (鯨) as distinct from a salmon (鮭), or for abstract concepts like government (政) or crime (罪)?

Korean has the same problem. I believe they occasionally put the kanji in brackets after a word to disambiguate.

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 same Chinese character pronounced two completely different ways within the same word.)

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?

> 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 beta UTF-8 support made me particularly sad.

(A good part of the blame lies with Microsoft of course - why are these legacy locale and encoding settings still system-wide?)

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 can marvel at its complexity - relish it even - but one cannot deny it.

In the first round of simplifications, 義 became 义, which is perhaps one of the most egregious ones that has stuck.

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.

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 encoding does however, as you point out, make decoding more cumbersome, as it requires memorisation of the specific pronunciations of strings of letters up to and including whole words. In that sense, however, it is very similar to the Japanese (ab)use of kanji, which - as I pointed out at the very top of this thread - has the same problem. For a given kanji, you need to see it in context to be able to have a reasonable chance of pronouncing it correctly (and sometimes even that isn’t enough).

What I’m slightly puzzled by is your apparent confusion as to what a syllabary is: as I gently tried to hint in my reply (and someone else has now more explicitly pointed out), hiragana and katakana are syllabaries; kanji is not, even if it is occasionally used that way (当て字). I’m not sure to what extent that undermines what you were trying to say.

But, to engage with the substance of your point on the efficiency of Japanese syllabaries, we first have to put aside the fact that they retain two distinct systems to encode the same sounds (a baroque inefficiency surely without peer in any other language). It is true that modern kana allow for efficient decoding - there is almost no ambiguity in the sounds, は for ha/wa excepted. That reliable decoding does, however, impose a fairly hard limit on the number of sounds they can express, so I am not sure what you mean when you say “[y]ou can use them to encode anything as well”.

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?

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 does not surprise me in the slightest. Presumably they still deliver you software updates by floppy disk, notification of which comes by fax…?

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 contrasts with ウインドウ on the Mac.

> 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. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of sounds while only having 26 distinct letters.

Thank you. This was the counter-citation I could not be bothered to produce.