Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeonik | Hacker News Reader

In case anyone is curious, I asked ChatGPT how Japanese refer to "fish that are blue" since "blue fish" is also the word for mackerel.

Coincidentally, it's exactly how I just distinguished them in English just now.

You can read ChatGPT's replies below (I manually collated the replies, leaving my prompts out):

In Japanese, mackerel is written as 鯖 (さば).

Blue fish" in Japanese is 青い魚 (あおいうお).

The middle character in "青い魚 (あおいうお)" is い, which is a form of the auxiliary verb "to be". In this case, it indicates that the noun "fish" (魚) is in a state of being "blue" (青い).

By using the auxiliary verb "to be", the phrase "blue fish" (青い魚) can refer to any fish that is blue, as opposed to a specific type of fish like mackerel (鯖). This helps to avoid confusion and allows for a clear distinction between different types of fish.

View on HN

ChatGPT's response is full of BS.

青い魚 is あおいさかな NOT あおいうお

The middle character has nothing to do with the verb to be; it's an adjective suffix.

青い魚 is literally "blue fish". It's not a full sentence.

I think I can see the confusion about い here. Not so much うお instead of さかな though...

い adjectives are said to have a built in copula, at least in material I've read, and since な in な adjectives is from the classical Japanese copula にある, one could surmise that い is also derived from a copula. As far as I can tell that is entirely wrong, but it is the kind of thing I wondered immediately after hearing that な and だ were derived from forms of ある.

Disclaimer: very little actual understanding of Japanese.

I appreciate your call out, I would've had no idea.

Is the main idea still correct? I'm curious what technique Japanese speakers use to avoid collisions like the one referenced in the article.

No, TFA was a little vague but there's no collision. The kanji for mackerel 鯖 is a standalone word/idea, whose graphical representation happens to consist of the characters for "blue" and "fish" next to each other. But virtually all kanji are constructed this way, so native readers just see the overall word without considering the parts, similarly to how you'd read the word "notable" without mistaking it for "not able".

What collisions? You mean a kanji composed of two kanjis vs the two kanjis written separately but together?

There's no technique per se. It's just the character size.

Example:

好 vs 女子

Exactly, thanks for the information!

Chinese characters/Kanji are typically monospaced and characters are written within a box.

It's so weird. I know Japanese and I know chatGPT mostly confidently wrong. But still I wanted to believe it and give it the benefit of the doubt. I was wondering if fish had another pronounciation in addition to sakana.

うお is indeed a valid reading of 魚, just not in 青い魚. But 飛び魚 (flying fish) for example is とびうお. btw, the bit chatgpt spit out about い in 青い meaning to be is just totally wrong

Reply on news.ycombinator.com