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Comment by the_third_wave | Hacker News Reader

> Also communication with less educated people (in my company internal docs and code are riddled with mistakes in both languages)

...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors. How does this work for ideographic scripts like Japanese Kanji or Chinese? When people make the sort of mistakes made by those less educated people mentioned above does their writing end up similarly readable, i.e. are ideographic scripts similarly robust in the face of transmission errors?

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As a native Chinese speaker, I know that many older and less educated people in China do write with errors or using some non-canonical simplified characters, but usually it's not a problem for us. In most cases, the meaning of the word with the character missing or corrupted can be deduced from the context.

For example, it's common to see people in mainland China that cannot write 餐 (can1, meal) correctly, but I never experienced any issue with that in real life.

In addition, I read and write simplified Chinese natively, but I can read traditional Chinese with little difficulty, and even a little bit of Japanese with high kanji density. The characters have evolved significantly, but the remaining similarity is still enough for me to parse the text.

We were once in Japan, my wife (mainland Chinese) was able to read about 1 in 4 characters without any practice. (Admittedly, it's possible some were wrong, but if so they were uncommon as everything she identified as being what we wanted turned out to be right.)

> How does this work for ideographic scripts like Japanese Kanji or Chinese?

For Chinese, it’s usually not difficult. If a stroke or two is off, or if it’s the wrong radical, you can usually figure out pretty quickly with a similar effort to a misspelled word what they meant from context. If they incorrectly used a homonym, you likewise can tell pretty quickly, like “queue” vs. “cue”.

In Chinese this partly happens because you don’t just memorize individual characters, you also memorize pairs/clusters of characters as the actual semantic units.

>...but you are still able to make out the meaning without all that much difficulty and without much of a chance of misinterpretation, i.e. these language are quite robust in the face of transmission errors

Well, sometimes. There are plenty of single-character errors in English that could change meaning though: Presence of absence of a comma, asymptomatic vs symptomatic, bat vs bet, etc.

Look no further than the US constitution, particularly its second amendment, to see how much a single punctuation mark can matter.

Also sentences like: "the Google party featured two strippers, Larry and Sergei." Are the founders of Google the two aforementioned strippers or VIP guests?

Neither of those examples really hinge on the punctuation. The latter is a constructed absurdity based on violating information structure soft constraints (i.e. the way it's phrased is deliberately unhelpful).

For more serious examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

The one I chose was a tongue-in-cheek absurdity. There are other cases where there actually is ambiguity.

Nominally, sure. In practice, almost all instances are resolved by context, modulo motivated reasoning.

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