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Comment by asciimike | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of a blog post that I can no longer remember that discusses how Chinese is a lot of arranging several related kanji into a single character to express a new idea (please link it if you can find it).

I would love to see unicode characters to allow for arbitrary combinations beyond those defined using just ZWJ to allow more flexibility (e.g. blizzard could be created by adding like "slowflake x 5" which creates a single character with five snowflakes, without having to create an entirely new character representing blizzard from snowflake + ZWJ + snowflake).

As an aside, my favorite ZWJ magic is black flag + ZWJ + skull and crossbones = pirate flag.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols for more symbol language fun.

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The notion that Chinese characters describe ideas that are formed from smaller characters that also describe ideas is a nice story, but it's not really the case for the majority of Chinese characters. See the Wikipedia page, Principles of formation section[0].

Many Chinese characters are constructed with two parts of smaller characters, one of which can indicate a general concept while the other provides a vague pronunciation hint. This isn't really good enough to provide you with enough information to guess at either the meaning or the pronunciation if you don't already know the word, but if you do already know the word from spoken language, then the hints might be enough to recognize the character when you read it too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Principles_...

If you'd like to decompose Chinese characters (e.g. if you're trying to use handwriting recognition and it's /almost/ right), try the Pingtype keyboard. Enter the character into the lower text box, and click Search. It'll decompose, and recompose characters based on the parts. I agree that the meaning is often hard to grasp from the glyphs, and can even be misleading.

https://pingtype.github.io/

Right, but there are still some nice examples, like:

木 = tree

森林 = forest

And:

田 = field

力 = strength

男 = man (because he labours in the fields)

This breaks down very quickly as you get more abstract.

人 = person "rén"

门 = gate "mén"

们 = plurality marker "mėn"

也 = also "yé"

他 = he "tā"

他们 = them "tāmėn"

One can come up with a story for why person + gate is plural, but the inclusion of gate in the character for plurality is really more about the sound of gate.

This is even more interesting because prior to the 1920s 他 was a gender neutral third person pronoun. And in ancient Chinese 也 was probably pronounced differently to today's yě, perhaps more like the ā of tā. A great resource for looking up the history of individual characters is Wiktionary:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BB%96

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9F

Wiktionary is neat because it also shows you pronunciations in several different Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Minnan, Hakka etc) and the relationship to Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, if it's there.

I think 他 is still gender neural, I put down "he" out of laziness, since the feminine-only form is 她... but you make good points.

Yes totally. I wasn't contradicting GP. The pattern where part of the character indicates the sound is so common that it helps me a great deal when reading Chinese. My speaking/hearing is better than my reading. I might not know how to write a particular character but, if I can guess the sound, then that plus the surrounding context are enough for me to know what the word is.

I think you mean this article on “Yingzi”: http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

Yes! Thanks for the link :D

For the next Unicode emoji extension, we might as well just take a word vector model and PCA project it into the Unicode 1 dimensional space. Somebody who is better at linear algebra should comment and tell me how wrong I am.

It's brilliant, but horrible, since you need somewhere between 300 and 1000 dimensions of floating point word vector semantic space to get good separation. Maybe it's shrunk since I last checked.

Even with less granularity, that's still like 256 bytes per grapheme.

I think this would be great for machine translation though.

SignWriting, a writing system for Signed Languages, would need something like this, because rotation and location of the graphemes matter. Imagine the letter a being rotated by 45 degrees and moved to the upper left corner of the drawing area. How would you encode this?

There's a symbol for the torso, for the fist, for touch and for the strongness of touch. If you hit your own shoulder with a fist with the knuckles facing upwards, you rotate the symbol for the fist, paint the torso and the fist next to each other and put the touch symbol approximately where the shoulder would be.

https://signwriting.org/

It's also similar to forming words from multiple kanji. E.g. like Chinese "penguin" is combined from "business" and "goose" (not completely accurate translation).

Imagine poor kids 100 years from now having to memorize all those emojis and their combinations at school. Or having to know 3000 basic emojis in order to be able to read news.

>Imagine poor kids 100 years from now having to memorize all those emojis and their combinations at school.

I mean, we all know what a "polar bear" is, right? If those kids know how to say "penguin", and they know how to write the parts, then they know how to write "penguin" in Chinese.

Meanwhile, the parts in "penguin" aren't used in any other word. The "pen" isn't a writing utensil. And what's a "guin"? If you didn't learn how to spell beforehand and were suddenly asked to write "penguin", maybe you'd write "pengwin" or "pengwen", or mishear it as "pengwing" (because birds have wings so it makes sense, right?) English writing is brute-force memorization of spelling with some patterns that often don't hold, just like Chinese is brute force memorization with some patterns regarding sound or meaning that often don't hold.

And we can see that all English speakers still struggle to spell some words that they don't encounter often, and some even struggle to spell words they do use often.

No, the "pen" in "penguin" means "head" - it's from Welsh. English spelling is a lot easier if you know the languages it was derived from or influenced by.

An advantage of non-phonetic spelling is that it doesn't privilege any one accent over any other, so allowing a polycentric acrolect with each variety picking up accent and vocabulary from the local dialect, but maintaining mutual comprehension in writing.

It’s still debated if that is the correct etymology. A different hypothesis has “penguin” deriving from the Latin “pinguis” (fat).

Certainly in Czech the two are related:

tučňák = noun, penguin

tučný = adjective, fat

I don't know if that helps determine the origin of the English word, but it's definitely funny to think that there’s a nation which calls penguins “fatties” :D

>English spelling is a lot easier if you know the languages it was derived from or influenced by.

Knowing a bunch of languages in order to have a proper context for English spelling is surely a higher threshold than memorizing the characters in your own language.

The Chinese character "企" has multiple meanings. One is "to stand on tiptoe".[1] So "企鹅 (penguin)" means "standing goose".

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BC%81

The character 企 also looks like a penguin by itself.

I wish it was that simple. Though some characters are, the majority have evolved through usage along with pronunciation. This makes similar characters mean very different things and are pronounced differently. Mastering Chinese is about memorizing the 2000-3000 most used characters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_description_... ?

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