I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure.
With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it.
With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.)
It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge.
I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.
I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.
It’s not a Microsoft problem at all: it’s that the web platform simply doesn’t support getting this type of scrolljacking right. It’s just not possible due to how scrolling is handled in the browser, how wheel events work, and the platform’s propensity to asynchrony (so that not only is it not supported, it can never be supported). The best you can achieve is to detect OS and browser and guess at how it’s going to behave, and emulate its functionality. And quite apart from how such things change over time, that’s not guaranteed to work at any particular time: such configuration is flexible per OS, and hardware (which you can’t detect reliably) can influences how it will do things as well. Inertia is a particularly good example of that: it varies in all of these ways, by hardware, by OS, by browser and by configuration in all three of these places. Now I don’t have macOS handy, so I can’t see how it handles the scrolling there. Perhaps that site’s developers (or some library they use) has done that emulation and tuned it for macOS, but not elsewhere.
The right fix is to ensure that the major browsers (and editors) handle this properly so that there is no urge to hijack scrolling. Mongolian is not the only vertical script.
> And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right
Amen.
Obviously it shouldn't interfere with touch scrolling, which is sometimes also done on laptop device screens (which typically conform to the desktop experience by default).
The closest I've worked with is a booking website for an international parcel delivery company. We offered the application in idk, dozens? of languages. Hebrew was one of them, it's a right-to-left language and our whole website became right-to-left when switching to that, so the main menu was on the right instead of the left, things like that. Great work by our CSS people.
This is incorrect. They originated in the LTR writing systems of India, which is why the full name is Hindu-Arabic Numeral System.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals
If you read Arabic, this is clear because the numbers are written in the opposite direction as the words.
> they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right.
Only the ones and tens place are read from the right - which many languages do, including English in the 'teens' words:
thir-teen == three and ten
four-teen == four and ten
fif-teen == five and ten
In modern Arabic, the hundreds and above are read left to right.
For example:
42: ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)
142: maa'a (100) wa (and) ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)
I don't know if the original Hindu system read from most significant left digit first, but if it did then the historical transmission into Europe may have entailed two flips of numeric endianness.
The Sanskrit language (exemplifying the "Hindu system") had the same pattern as English for the teens, i.e:
11: ekadaśa = eka (1) + daśa (10)
12: dvadaśa = dva (2) + daśa (10)
13: tridaśa = tri (3) + daśa (10)
etc ..
In Sanskrit this pattern (least significant non-zero digit spoken first) continues through to larger numbers. so:
20: vimśati
21: ekavimśati
120: vimśati-śatam
1121: ekavimśati-śatam-sahasra
etc.
But it's important to remember that the spoken rendering of numbers in all these languages precedes the written representation by millenia. People have been counting much longer than they have been writing. Of course later ways of speaking the numbers may have been influenced by writing systems, but the spoken rendering of basic smaller numbers tend to be relatively stable over time.
And one of our most common mistakes when speaking English is saying the number wrong. For example, 85 is pronounced fünfundachtzig, five and eighty, but it would not be uncommon for a German to misspeak in English and say fifty-eight.
I wonder if this has anything to do with what you wrote?
But I thought they originated in India, where left-to-right scripts were in use, which is why Arabic is bidirectional with the digits written left-to-right.
I found that surprisingly interesting.
Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.
This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
No, actually there was two pushes in modern times. One advocating the use of romaji (or even French) which did not succeed.
Then there was a set a post-WWII reforms that aimed to simplify the script by: standardizing kanji use (eg 言う instead of 言う or 云う), standardization of kanji readings (当用漢字), kanji stroke simplification (新字体), dropping the old kana usage (旧仮名遣), standardization of kanas themselves to get rid of 変体仮名. The convention also shifted from using katakana everywhere where kanji are not used to the mix of kanji/hiragana/katakana of today. So yes, the Japanese script changed quite a lot recently.
If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, there are many exceptions to that, but the mix of scripts has benefits for parsing text.
Obviously, the Japanese writing system is not a single constructed system like Hangul, but I don't see any reason why it is inefficient (aside from, perhaps, the time required to learn kanji for school children).
I think it was linked to dyslexia and languages with spelling and maybe japanese, and how china simplified it's characters led to higher literacy, although that might have a few confounding variables.
There is also an advantage that most foreigners do not realise. The mix of Kanji, Katakana, Hiragana create natural delimiters in the sentence and make spacing useless.
Reading Japanese fully written in Hiragana is currently much harder due to the lack of delimiters between words. The mix of hiragana, katakana and Kanji allow a very high density per character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
Its history will also tell you what it meant for Chinese characters to be adopted by China's neighbors.
Not so quick, there are design decisions that deliberately carry over certain fundamental features from Chinese:
1. The script is not linear at its unit of writing, but fills a square with its base components from left to right, top to bottom (「한글」, not 「ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ」; analogue 「韓字」, not 「十早韋宀子」). 2. One unit represents precisely one syllable. 3. Vertical writing retains the orientation of units (not rotating 90°).
Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in the 15th century by King Sejong.
However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today, usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong), but in newspapers it may be written as 大統領, which are the matching Chinese characters.
Also, most Korean parents choose Chinese characters to write for their children's names, which read (more or less, as Korean does not have tones) the same as the Korean characters.
I navigate from time to time to Korean website, very few occasion they actually uses Chinese characters, except:
1. Some countries names. 中(China)/美(US)/日(Japan)/北(North Korea)
2. Blue House (think of it as Korean's White House, representing the headquarters of the administration), sometimes referred as 青(Blue).
3. The president's surname, sometimes referred as 文(Moon)
Except for those very limited cases, I don't think Korean people are actually using Hanja anymore, it almost feel like some sort of emoji for then, that they probably can't read it, just comprehend the meaning.
As to Korean names, yes I think they still have a Chinese name registered somewhere, but no longer required and not shown on their government ID card.
But Turkish seems to fit a latin script quite well, and the previous Arabic/Persian wasn't a "native" script for a Turkic language either, I think.
Aa Ăă Ââ Ee Êê Ii Oo Ôô Ơơ Uu Ưư Yy
On each of which you can add 5 different tone marks: https://vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/
Plus there are diphthongs and triphthongs (look at the zero coda and off glide coda columns): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#ref_Notes
Disclaimer: I know stuff all about Tiếng Việt, but it seemed really hard to learn how to hear and say the sounds when I tried for a few days with private lessons. Using so many diacritics modifies the Latin alphabet so much that it becomes something else...
The Khmer alphabet seems to have 33 consonant letters, 15 vowels, 16 "dependent vowels" (which look to attach like an accent to a consonant), and 12 diacritics.
Since I don't have any knowledge of either language, I don't know if this is better.
A speaker of French, Polish, German, Hungarian or Turkish can muddle through trying to pronounce another European language using the Latin script and get 95% of it but will have no idea of how to read Vietnamese.
If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.
Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ...
Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ...
Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“