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Comment by jhgb | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's Japanese trying to push thousands of ideograms onto nations perfectly happy with just dozens of phonetic letters. Yeah, nope. F that.

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Please have an even more xenophobic, imperialistic take on this. Go right ahead.

Seriously, you maybe might want to consider the western world has been forcing american/latin standards on cultures which need far more than those to communicate, considering them second class citizens and killing some of the more peculiar / original languages because they're "not worth supporting". (= Not enough eyeballs for the ads you'd be printing)

Now you have the cojones to complain about Japanese communication features seeping into the west? Fucking PLEASE.

"Xenophobic"? "Imperialistic"? What has "xenophobia" or "imperialism" have to do with historically observed practicality of types of scripts?

> you maybe might want to consider the western world has been forcing american/latin standards on cultures which need far more than those to communicate

No, I might not. For starters I'm neither American nor Latin (whatever that you imagine to be). And second, historically, almost every civilization that had a realistic option to do so got rid of ideograms and logograms, because of their sheer impracticality, especially after the invention of movable type. Hieroglyphs went from ideograms and logograms to phonograms (see this very text). Cuneiform went from ideograms and logograms to phonograms (see Ugaritic). Some civilizations like Japanese found themselves in a cul-de-sac because of how a former adoption of a logographic script changed their language (for example with onyomi in case of Japanese) but that doesn't mean that they didn't realize the advantages of phonetic writing and haven't at least tried (onnade in the Heian period, romaji in the Meiji period).

I learned to read when I was three or four years old. In retrospect, there is no way in hell that I would have preferred growing up in a place where you become fully literate (and able to read the kinds of technical texts that I was reading by the age of ten) in your very late adolescence. So for obvious reasons I do not prefer having to re-learn reading ten times as many symbols as I need to just to be able to read some small amount of texts of ephemeral value, or having to find out how to write hundreds of symbols on my QWERTY keyboard that hasn't hampered my communication in any way so far.

> killing some of the more peculiar / original languages because they're "not worth supporting"

If you believe this to be a "western" phenomenon, then I have bad news for you -- it's universal. Sad but true.

Are you arguing that it should be the national policy of a Western government, say Norway to pass laws to enforce its companies to honour every language/script on earth?

If not, can you - precisely - explain what changes you would like to see in (say) Switzerland and swiss products with respect to the San/Khoi of Botswana?

The only change I'm currently advocating for is the one that involves GP not writing their repulsive comment.

In which world were people content about the current forms of expression? The boundaries of it were pushed since time eternal.

Excuse me but.. what?

Without emoji, understanding written communication in most languages requires knowledge of two to three dozen of symbols. With emojis suddenly you need hundreds. We invented alphabets for a very good reason.

Weird take. Alphabets let you sound words out but does nothing to help you understand. Ideograms let you understand without knowing how it sounds. Perfectly good tradeoff IMO.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but you seem to be suggesting ideograms as some sort of international written language (as opposed to proto-writing) facilitating full literary communication. I'm not aware of any successful attempt in this area. Whatever you manage to communicate with proto-writing will be extremely limited, lacking any sort of sentence structure, grammatical elements (subject vs object etc.), tenses etc., hence it will need to be complemented with regular text, and at that point you might as well just spell out your thoughts in writing. There's a reason why we use what basically amounts to proto-writing only to communicate extremely simple thoughts (warning signs, road signage etc.).

Mods, this seems to be...hate speech? How is this allowed for over 20 hours?

Ehm...you are aware of the difference between emojis and "persons or groups" (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hate-...)? There's absolutely nothing wrong with hating emojis, or in fact any other ideas.

It's what you said about Japanese people that was the problem.

People of all nations can come up with stupid ideas. In this case it was the Japanese. The possible connection to their writing system is immediately obvious. Still doesn't warrant your overreacting and jumping to conclusions.

Did you think once before you wrote that hateful comment to ask yourself "is this a good idea"? Or "how might this affect people who are Japanese who read this?"

Hm? At all?

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