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.
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.
This happens in Europe quite often, even though many people have longer 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.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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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...
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.
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.
Obviously this means the EU should run things in Venetian.
> 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.
- 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.
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.
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?
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.