The long, tortuous and fascinating process of creating a Chinese font

One quarter as many deaths as World War 2, all of it in southern China.

The short description of Taiping's policies [1] makes them sound like a Christian Taliban, or the society of Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Taiping_Heav...

Just to clarify for future readers, "classical" here presumably does NOT mean Classical Chinese (文言文).

The rather interesting features about this particular "embedding" is that it results in a written language that is intelligible for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers and that it also happens quite frequently in certain settings. In fact, it even comes off as "correct." That is it's not as if you're reading broken Mandarin or broken Cantonese and are able to piece together the meaning, as a speaker of a parent language of a pidgin language might feel when reading the pidgin. It's a full-fledged language that reads entirely naturally to a Mandarin speaker and just feels "Mandarinized" but otherwise "correct" to a Cantonese speaker.

The Spanish-English example you give really only is a result of Spanish's regular correspondence between spelling and pronunciation (as far as my limited Spanish knowledge allows me to understand), that allows you to unambiguously pronounce most combinations of Latin letters. For example, there's a "Spanish pronunciation" of the Quecha written Latin script, but it's basically an unintelligible mess of sounds that violates a lot of Spanish sound rules. If you use some conventions to group letters together and settle on a single pronunciation of each of those groupings, you can do the same in English with any Latin letter combinations as well.

Generally speaking, pronouncing written English as Spanish results in something that neither Spanish speakers nor English speakers understand nor accept as part of their language. While there is a subset of vocabulary (most notably -ion words) that shares the same or similar spelling between the two languages, there isn't really a cohesive subset of the written language (that is imagine writing entire sentences and paragraphs) that can be shared.

Caveat: My knowledge of Norwegian is approximately the level you would achieve with 5 hours of searching on the internet after being exposed to the Ylvisåker brothers and an armchair amateur's knowledge of Old English.

The whole story of how the various Scandinavian languages developed is actually quite interesting and has a lot of similarities to the situation among the different languages/dialects of Chinese. In particular similar questions of mutually intelligibility come up.

However, as I understand it, Bokmål in this particular case is not quite the same. It historically came from Danish, but now is a written standard for Norwegian that competes with Nynorsk (which is in itself a fascinating phenomenon; not many other languages have competing written standards). It's not really a current embedding of Danish into Norwegian so much as it is a written standard for Norwegian that historically developed from Danish.

Oh man... there's a long way to go down this rabbit hole...

Maybe I've lost touch with the current Canto-pop scene, but I seem to recall quite a lot of modern-ish Canto-pop (late 2000s) being written in Mandarin.

白话文 is sort of ill-defined. It really just means "vernacular written language" as opposed to Classical Chinese (文言文). There is a Yue vernacular (粤语白话文), Wu vernacular (吴语白话文), etc. There is also a Mandarin vernacular (which is what 白话文 usually refers to by itself in Mandarin) that you can further specify as 官话白话文 (although that term is getting quite specialized and not every native speaker is necessarily going to have heard of that), but that is exactly what it sounds like, the semi-formal written Mandarin vernacular. This is exactly the same situation as standard written English. While this is a restriction of "English" in some sense (does this include regional-specific terms such as "yous?"), it still is more or less equivalent to what most people think of when they think of "English."

咱们 is common in Northern dialects of Mandarin, but used to be a pretty strong marker for a Northern Chinese speaker. That's changed somewhat over time due to broadcast media and the primacy of some Northern Chinese accents, but you're still not going to hear a ton of older Southern Chinese speakers use 咱们 when speaking Mandarin (and when I mean south I mean essentially anyone from Jiangsu/Zhejiang on down) even if they speak pitch-perfect Standard Mandarin. They almost exclusively use 我们 instead (which is also valid Standard Mandarin, everywhere you would use 咱们 you could also use 我们 although not vice versa).

I think this is the phenomenon you're picking up on, that a lot of Northern Chinese Mandarin terms don't show up in Southern Chinese Mandarin.

More broadly, I think what you're pointing out is that "Mandarin" is really itself a fuzzy category that starts falling apart when you poke a its seams, but really that's just the nature of language. "English" starts falling apart when you poke too hard at its particular words as well.

The central point about the embedding of Mandarin though is that it reads completely fluently to a Mandarin speaker. It's not a pidgin, it's not a situation where the Mandarin speaker can understand it in bits and pieces. It reads like anything a Mandarin speaker would have written.

It's really cool how advanced the Austronesians were in maritime navigation! I like to imagine that if history went down a slightly different path, we would be talking about Austronesian imperialism!

There's certainly a ton of political baggage around the Chinese language and layered on top of that there's a crazy amount of political baggage around China and Taiwan (e.g. is it called 正体字 or 繁体字?).

I don't think that's the case here though. Plenty of Taiwanese people I've spoken to are happy to (and often do) call it Hokkien (or Taiwanese Hokkien). Taiwanese as an adjective is usually ambiguous (Taiwanese Mandarin, Hokkien, or aboriginal Taiwanese languages are all possibilities). Taiwanese as a noun is usually less ambiguous (although the confusion in this thread makes me rethink that).

Hokkien (Fujianese) is to Southern Min what Cantonese is to Yue and to some extent Shanghainese is to Wu. They are place-name terms that nominally refer to a specific subset of a dialect family that are now used in informal speech to refer to the entire dialect family. But for example Macaonese (澳门话) is still a place-name term you'll hear even though it's within the Yue family and therefore you could (and people do) call it Cantonese. Taiwanese is a similar case (place-name term) here.

Not really, many Taiwan residents conduct business in Standard Mandarin, but speak in Taiwanese Hokkien at home. It's called Taiwanese because it has since drifted from mainland Hokkien, and sociolinguists consider Taiwanese a prestige dialect of Hokkien due to its cultural output and Japanisms.

I don't think we are in contradiction. Taiwanese Hokkien is a variety of Min, which is a dialect that shares ancient roots with the Mandarin dialect. My maternal grandmother speaks Teochew, an offshoot of the more common standard Hokkien in the area where I live.

Unlike Mandarin, most dialects have not undergone the same nationalist push to write their spoken language, so literature in the spoken language is few and far between. However, Christian proselytizers are often very determined to translate the Bible into local spoken languages, and are often one of the first significant works in any spoken language/dialect's literature. Hence I am not surprised that it is the Bible that top-commenter found digitally-disadvantaged Chinese characters not encountered in literature outside of Taiwanese Hokkien. You may be right in a sense that these same characters may be encountered in other Min dialects, but they would still be pronounced differently.

Yep!

食 is still being used everyday in Cantonese as a verb. Granted there are some who classifies Cantonese as a different language from Mandarin, as there are many differences between the two such as this example.

Apparently there is a use for 吃 in Japanese, 吃 is a sound used to represent a tile being discarded in a game, in compounds such as 吃驚, to be surprised. I think this compound is also used in Mandarin with the same meaning. Quick check of my Chinese dictionary indicates yes, they are a shared character compound / meaning.

Edit: fixing up my Japanese

Japanese does use it, but it's rare: 吃（ども）る to stutter

> Makes more sense in Chinese

Can you clarify what it means? I'm guessing something like "sassy" or "hot" but it's really unclear without knowing the cultural connotations.

And Hangul was also developed long time ago. And Korean(s) has way less users than Chinese.

Hangul was possible because it explicitly targeted a single unified language (Korean was politically unified since circa 900 and the language was stuck).

Yup, this is a demonstration of Zipf's Law, which affects all human languages: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Moser has been discussed to death in the past, his article is pretty exaggerated to say the least.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that for most of history, Chinese referred to a writing system that was shared between many different languages, each with different pronunciations, coming from different places (what is now modern China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan), so the writing system was a script designed around semantic meaning, not sound. This also lets it get used in Kanji where words may have multiple readings (let's not even get into how crazy that is).

Now that mandarin is de-facto "Chinese", the writing system no longer serves its purpose, and in fact a lot of the character simplifications made in the 20th century make radical substitutions based on sound, further complicating things.

Seems like he's trying to make a point just for the sake of it. For a start yeah as a German I don't understand the example headline he's giving there even though I started learning English some 20 years ago. So what does that tell us? Apparently English is even harder than Chinese.. Or maybe that you'll eventually stumble upon an unknown word every now and then and can quickly look it up.

Reading a Chinese newspaper knowing 2000 characters is absolutely possible. You can either just rely on good old guessing from context since, you know, the headline is usually followed by an article, or you just look that word up. It's really not like you will stumble at ever other character since like that guy even admits 95% are already covered by the 2000 you know. Imagine reading the sports section for the first time. You might find a dozen characters or words you don't know, but after a week or two you'll eventually know enough Chinese terms regarding soccer. Same for any specific topic in any foreign language. As for the character combos, first of all while learning it's not like you memorize each character separately, you're usually given some examples of such combinations using characters you already learned, phrases to go along with it etc. For many combinations its even pretty easy to guess what they mean.

> When is the last time a letter was added or removed from the standard English alphabet?

To be a bit pedantic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s you can still find newspaper articles in Google's archive that use back in the mid 1800s.

Amen to that stupid poem. I'm a USA born white girl, and that poem broke me. I tried to read it aloud and got part way through before my tongue / brain made me give up. It's evil.

Can you say squirrel? My trick with this word is to use different words. Start with the word "whirl". Repeat this word a couple of times to get your mouth around it. Then say the "sch" from the word "school". "Sch"... + ..."Whirl", "Sch".. + .."Whirl", "Sch". + ."Whirl", "Sch" + "Whirl", "Sch" "Whirl", "Sch-Whirl", ""SchWhirl". Looks horrible typed but it works on the tongue. Just need to get that sound glide exiting "sch" into "whirl". If you end the "sch" with your lips pursed in anticipation for the "oo" sounds in school, it sets you up for the "wh".

And there's also:

* Bough

* Thorough

Five separate words - with five different ways to pronounce "ough"! Spelling in English is a complete disaster. I pity those people who have to learn it as a second language.

So what you're saying is Chinese speakers generally use two languages/registers: one for spoken language and another for written. Which is another way of saying the writing system is not actually a good match for the spoken language in the first place and mostly exists for ceremonial reasons.

I would suggest someone figure out a sane way to capture spoken Chinese in a modern (i.e. easy to digitise) writing system but I doubt it would gain any traction because of the cultural implications of the script. Most Westerners see their writing system as a simple fact of life, the Chinese seem to see it as a sacred traditional craft in the same vein as forging steel.

How did you scrape using applescript?

What's your blog?

If I may make a suggestion, the part that's of interest to me is what went into the making. I also wouldn't have taken special note of the old submission, because it doesn't tell me anything about how it works or how it came to be, and I have no actual need to translate to or from Chinese. It seems you've been very thoughtful and done a lot of work, which I think would be of interest to people, should you feel the inclination to describe it. All the best :)

I've sent you an email about reposting it.

We're always looking for good submissions that didn't get much interest, so if anyone knows of others, please email links to hn@ycombinator.com and we'll take a look.

Sounds fascinating! I guess you might not have gotten up votes because between the title and the front page of the link, as an English speaker I didn't know what I was looking at or why it was interesting.