Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters, part 2 | Hacker News Reader

Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters, part 2

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

81 pointsmdturnerphys14 comments

Part 1 here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43784

See the footnotes of part 2 for other related posts.

Far less serious (and not polysyllabic), but still linguistically interesting: the Chinese character for _biáng_, one of the most complex in modern usage. There are 15 variants of the character consisting of between 56 and 70 strokes, which can be recalled with various mnemonics. It is not yet included in standard Unicode, but scheduled for inclusion in March 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles

Also from Language Log: "Writing Chinese characters as a form of punishment" https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=21965

Wikipedia claims that the Chinese character with the most strokes translates to the English word 'verbose' [0, 1].

Whoever came up with that one must have been a wicked deadpan humourist. I live with regret that I will never appreciate good Chinese (written) poetry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Rare_and_co... [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%AA%9A%A5

How do these complex characters come about? Surely they could express the same meaning with a couple of smaller characters?

I feel that this is comparable to writing "Jentacular" instead of "pertaining to breakfast." It's a single word instead of 3, but who understands that (let alone write it, in Biangbiang's case)?

Can the Hk government ban these? Honest question.

Ban what exactly?

They banned cryptography in Australia recently so we can't safely assume weird characters are safe neither.

If you're asking about an electronic ban, it's irrelevant since this is a recently invented character and is not represented in Unicode, etc.

Since it's artificially crafted character, it's not part of unicode, therefore the transmission of the character will be through images, so to ban this character it's no different from banning Winnie the Pooh pictures, by using state-of-the-art deep neural networks to classify images.

To avoid the ban, one has to use the most common characters which must be statistically insignificant to computer recognition programs, like how most network apps obfuscate their traffic to https.

There is currently no censorship in Hong Kong and no laws which would require them to censor anything.

do i have to know the cantonese roots? because the 3 components are nowhere in the red and black image.

Components of each of the three characters are in the constructed character. I think it's the top two components of the first, the full second character, and the left and right components of the third. The constructed character is in calligraphic style so the components look a bit different than in the printed representations.

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