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Comment by taway1237 | Hacker News Reader

>US "works for us must work for everyone" approach

I'm all for bashing the US, but I think this is a global ghing, not unique to the US.

The difference is that most countries don't expect the world to bow to them (culturally, technologically, etc). While I used Chinese products, I never had to learn how to spell my name with Chinese characters.

You're saying this like it was some deliberately hostile, colonial move to impose ASCII on the world. But I don't think it was quite like that, more that in the beginnings of computing people designed and built things for themselves. And it just happened to be that a lot of that early work happened in the anglosphere.

I honestly think it has more to do with culture. I've never been to the US so this might be completely wrong, but my observations from talking to people and just observing:

- if you move to the US and have a name made up of non-ASCII chars you are more likely to either drop them/substitute them with ascii chars, or use the Anglicized version of your name if it exists, or adopt an English name. And then it's kinda easy to legally change or your name. Or screw it, it's kinda easy to just show up and tell them you're Johnny Awesome and then you're Johnny Awesome.

- if you move to Germany, you can't legally change your name at all without good reason, every document ever, no matter how informal (especially at school) will probably have your full name, maybe hopefully just "First Last" and not all 7 of them, everyone of authority will refuse to call you Johnny Awesome if your name is actually Johnathan Jean-Pierre Awesome-Livingston, and so on, oh and they will also fail to not butcher your name if it's not so easy a 4y old can learn it.

We can't be the only ones leaning more towards #2. And no, I'm not making this up, my go-to example is that I've seen cases where things like officially not calling "Bill Gates" "William Gates" have met resistance. Your name is your name, and I'm still not sure how people in the spotlight are able to be called Dick, I'm not joking.

Try living in an asian country - probably you will have to choose a name in the local script which at best vaguely sounds like your given name. It's expected that if you use someone elses playground that you adapt to their rules - that goes for moving to a foreign country and to using technology primarily developed in one.

If modern computers had been invented in China and had had a decade or two headstart on the rest of the world then you may well have had to do just that.

This was an accident of history, not some deliberate plan to get the world to bow to the English speakers. And English was already well established as a major language in trade (due to it being superficially simple to learn), next to German, French and Spanish. China was pretty isolated for a long time culturally as well as geographically and the complexity of its script is another barrier to it being accepted as a common language by the rest of the world.

One of the more interesting things along this line in recent history is that with Brexit the EU no longer has an England/Wales/Scotland and a chunk of Ireland in it, but another chunk of Ireland remains. This led the French to immediately propose that French become the official language of the EU parliament but the rest of the countries wouldn't have it, and rightly so.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-franc...

> due to it being superficially simple to learn

I, however, don't think most of the people who started using one of the named languages instead of their mother tongue ever really selected English using that specific criterion.

I think that french diplomat just saw their shot, and took it. I doubt they actually forgot that there's still two english-speaking countries in the EU.

Ireland and... Malta?

> This led the French to immediately propose that French become the official language of the EU parliament but the rest of the countries wouldn't have it, and rightly so.

Didn't happen, they just said they'll use French during their council presidency (not the parliament, it's not even mentioned in your article), that's all, there are no rules against that. They would've done it regardless of Brexit.

Having French as the lingua franca, the very idea!

“Lingua Franca” historically has nothing to do with French. It was a dialect used by Italian traders.

Obviously this means the EU should run things in Venetian.

Heh, TIL, thanks. Obliquely, I was in Venice some years ago; sitting on the steps of a church I set to rolling a cigarette. A couple of small boys stopped and stared at this activity, one pointed and said "Il fabricato fumer!", I knew exactly what he was saying (although I have no Italian). So Venetian it is.

Nothing to do with French seems a bit strong. It's related. From Brittanica:

> lingua franca, (Italian: “Frankish language”) language used as a means of communication between populations speaking vernaculars that are not mutually intelligible. The term was first used during the Middle Ages to describe a French- and Italian-based jargon, or pidgin, that was developed by Crusaders and traders in the eastern Mediterranean and characterized by the invariant forms of its nouns, verbs, and adjectives. These changes have been interpreted as simplifications of the Romance languages.

China has its own problems. There are obscure family names out there consisting of characters that aren't officially recognized, so computers can't process their actual family names. So those people instead pick the closest alternative officially recognized character instead, purely for the purpose of official documents and appeasing computer systems.

As I understood family names are very old in China. So who chose the family name and "invented" a character?

I think in premodern times the Chinese character set was not as centrally regulated as it is now, and therefore there should be quite many instances of independent/local character invention.

I mean this is far from unique to China, see e.g. the disappearance of þ (Thorn) from the English alphabet.

many chinese characters consist of combinations of other characters. most common is a combination of two, where one component suggests the meaning, while another hints at the pronunciation.

here is one character made up of 11 others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha...

this shows that new characters can be created not by inventing new strokes, but by simply combining existing characters to convey a new meaning, much like we occasionally do create new words in english by combining existing ones, even though that process in english is not productive, unlike eg. german, where it is quite normal. the difference is that these new words only have one syllable.

with the digitalization the creation of new characters essentially ends. the creation of the simplified chinese character system also pushes against creating new, more complicated characters.

it is going to be interesting to see how that will affect language development. new "words" can still be created by using a sequence of characters, but that means that each character keeps their syllable sound. whereas new compound characters would have a single syllable. so if a new meaning emerges for a syllable, a new character can't be created for it. will this prevent new single-syllable words? or will it lead to multiple characters being pronounced with a single syllable?

Do Chinese characters always have the same pronunciation? In Japanese at least, their Kanji (which are derived from Chinese characters) are often read in entirely different ways in different contexts. For example, 二人 is read as "futari" (two people), but ニ alone is read "ni" and 人 alone is read as "hito".

that's a good question, i know that there are many characters that share one pronunciation, but i have not come across the reverse. there are different pronunciations in different dialects/languages of course, and maybe some of those get adopted by other dialects (that would make sense for food names for example) but i didn't study chinese, so i really don't know.

Mostly yes. In Mandarin, tone can be a bit different depending on context but overall pronunciation doesn't differ that much.

But a major caveat is that pronunciation can be wildly different when spoken with other dialects. Mandarin and Cantonese reading of the same text, even with same meaning, sound entirely different.

Even right now in modern day Japan I have to canonize my name in katakana (syllabary designed for foreign/loan words), and all the systems strictly expect a singular word First Name and a singular word Family Name. If you have a middle name, it effectively gets thrown out. Multi-word first and/or last names need to be smooshed or cut down.

I have encountered even worse issues digital forms that only accept kanji (Chinese characters) or hiragana (syllabary designed for native Japanese words), the latter of which usually does not support certain voices that katakana supports. Ashley Tisdale, for example, is normally rendered as アシュレイ・ティスデイル (ashurei tisudeiru) - ティ is actually te with a small -i modifier, which does not usually exist with hiragana. Forcibly converted to hiragana, it turns into あしゅれい・てぃでいる - but ぃ is not accepted by the form, even if it exists in UTF-8. Your options are either converting the ティ into ち (chi) or て (te), neither of which are ideal, and may cause mismatches to other systems that properly support the katakana version.

The problem extends further into physical paper forms, where often they provide a very limited amount of boxes for characters, because native Japanese and Chinese names can easily fit within 8 characters. Combine this with the digital systems above and you're bound to have several versions of your name floating around on official documents all mismatching each other.

Some systems that need to print onto physical cards (e.g. getting a 1/3/6 month route pass on your SUICA or PASMO contactless smart cards) are even worse and turn dakuten (diacritics for hiragana/katakana) into their own character. As an example, the character ほ (ho) can be turned into ぼ (bo) using a dakuten, or ぽ (po) using a handakuten. The system will instead render those as two separate characters: ほ゛ and ほ゜ respectively, which cuts down on the number of available characters for the already limited textbox space you're dealing with.

The world is full of presumptions about names even today.

> The problem extends further into physical paper forms, where often they provide a very limited amount of boxes for characters, because native Japanese and Chinese names can easily fit within 8 characters.

This happens in Europe quite often, even though many people have longer names.

Interesting!

Any idea if this is why, in Japanese-dubbed anime, the voice actors seriously mangle some English words/names? E.g., they often add a vowel sound to the ends of English words that should end with a percussive syllable.

I.e., do you think it comes from those words/names being written in katakana or hiragana in the dialog scripts, and those systems just can't express the correct pronunciation of such English words/names?

> Any idea if this is why, in Japanese-dubbed anime, the voice actors seriously mangle some English words/names? E.g., they often add a vowel sound to the ends of English words that should end with a percussive syllable.

I don't know anything about anime, and little about Japanese, but I think Japanese (and Chinese) have a fairly strict consonant-vowel form for all their syllables. That makes foreign words that have runs of consonants or do not end it a vowel hard to pronounce, so speakers of those languages have a tendency to insert extra vowels to make pronunciation easier for themselves.

It's kind of like how English speakers will usually change the Pinyin "X" (as in Xi Jinping) into an English S or SH sound when they try to speak it, because the actual sound doesn't exist in English.

Actually, it's probably a simpler reason than that. The Japanese language is largely a CV syllable string (consisting of a consonant and vowels); consonant clusters do not exist, and the only final consonant permitted is 'n'. English, by contrast, is a much more phonotactically complex language--consonants can pretty freely appear both before and after vowels in a syllable, and English also has several consonant clusters. Imagine trying to pronounce the word "strengths" if your native language lacks consonant clusters--it's like an English person trying to pronounce the Czech phrase "Strč prst skrz krk". On top of that, Japan is not great at English proficiency (it's definitely weaker than any other rich country, see https://www.ef.com/wwen/epi/).

It's not really that the written language makes the names hard for them to pronounce, it's that the spoken language doesn't make it easy, and there's probably not enough care to try to pronounce them. Where the written language does make it hard, it's usually when people try to localize Japanese media into foreign languages, and the intended references in names are lost because of the mangling process of transcription into katakana.

As an English speaker who has traveled to Japan without learning much of the Japanese language, I agree generally but I also noticed that there are some cases where a vowel is written but not pronounced. For example, "gosaimasu" is mostly pronounced without the "u" (creating a counterpoint against final consonant other than "n" being forbidden) and "gozaimashita" is mostly pronounced without the second "i" (creating a counterpoint against consonant clusters such as "sht" being forbidden). It gives me the impression that these rules exist more in written Japanese than spoken Japanese, at which point it becomes less clear why adding a vowel to the end of foreign/imported words is so common. Maybe it's just my English perception that the sounds /s/ and /sh/ consist of pronouncing only a consonant, when in reality the fact that those sounds have duration (not just a moment) actually means it's more of a vowel even when totally unvoiced!

As I think on this further, even these voiceless /s/ and /sh/ sounds involve putting the lips into either an /u/ or an /i/ shape based on the following vowel even if that is also voiceless, creating that which is not a syllable in English, but perhaps is for this purpose in Japanese. The C-V cadence and final vowel (given lack of final -n) rules are satisfied...

There's a finite and relatively small number of possible syllables in several Asian languages, including Japanese.

I think it's more that Japanese speakers just don't have those types of sounds in their phonetic repertoire. Some may be able to pronounce them, but most will not (and may not even notice the difference).

Every person has a certain limited set of consonants, vowels, diphtongs, triphtongs, tones, and even syllables that they are able to recognize and reproduce. This is something you can train to recognize more, but you will probably never be able to pronounce or even distinguish the totality of all those used in all languages, even just the living languages on Earth.

Even if you did, there is an added complication that some languages actually used multiple sounds interchangeably, and explicitly distinguishing them may actually confuse you. For example, most European languages recognize various consonants as the same "R" sound, even though they are vastly different (French R is a back of the throat trill, Italian R is a trill near the palate, and English R is articulated next to the palate without any trill). If you come from a language where these are distinct sounds, you may have trouble understanding that two people who use different R sounds are pronouncing the same word.

There is also the R/L problem, A sound that to me, a native english speaker, is fairly distinct. However these are the same sound in Japanese. Because of this I think that it is very hard for Japanese speakers to figure out which one to use and they get switched all the time.

First, that is not because of writing system specifically, but because of the rhythmic structure of Japanese language, see, for example, this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_HLY0Rss-g

Second, in Japanese dubs these words are not usually actual English words, but Japanese words originated as borrowings from English language, so voice actors don't actually mangle them, the same way as English speaking people don't mangle the word "coffee" as they usually pronounce it, despite it being different from how Italians pronounce "caffè".

you haven't been in china long enough. i have had a few situations where the system was unable to write my name in latin characters. i even had to get a notarized transliteration of my name into chinese so that the resulting chinese version could be used on some official documents.

> expect the world to bow to them (culturally, technologically, etc).

I mean, I don't expect you to bow to me.

But at the same time, the software I produce at work is usually entirely consumed by americans who speak english (ok, well, there's one canadian customer that I'm aware of). Because that's who pays for it, and none of those customers is particularly looking to pay for translation.

And the software I produce during my off hours is generally meant for me and my friends to consume. I'll put that on github/gitlab/source hut and you can use it if you want, but I definitely don't have the budget for translation either.

true it's not that uncommon

but it's especially stereotypical for mainly the US, China and I think Japan.

Which are all countries where to due to various reasons (size, culture/nationalism) there are a lot of people doing technical decisions which: 1st only speak the countries language, 2nd have little interaction with very different cultures

(in the US it's complicated, they have a lot of mixing other cultures into them, but do so in a very very US specific way with a lot of unaware cultural appropriation (and I don't mean this in the "bad/evil" way it's often used today but the cultural normal way) and the US is so large that there is little reason to make a trip to a country which is very different, and even if they do so, it's often in a form which is very touristy. This leads to situation where e.g. US citizens claim they are Spanish because of some ancestors and claim to practice Spanish culture but they are 0% clueless about actual Spain even after having traveled there twice or so. Contrast this with the EU where e.g. spending on study semester in another country which does have a completely different language and culture isn't rare, and non touristy holiday trips to other countries are common too (I mean in some cases it's just a few hours by care) and it's very easy, to have people which just don't know better.)

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