Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rendello | Hacker News Reader

Japanese is my favourite written language, I love English but I'm definitely jealous of the beautiful glyphs and the vertical writing. From what I've seen, vertical writing is often poorly supported in software though, which is a shame.

View on HN

I'm partial to Mongolian.. It also has top to bottom but has an Arabic lace like cursive style which makes it flow much better than Japanese.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script

That's a very cool script! And it looks remarkably like Arabic.

At first I thought it was a descendant from Arabic, but a Wikipedia detour shows that the most common ancestor is actually Aramaic script.

Yeah. Another one I like but not quite as much is Tibetan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_script

It looks like some kind of alien runes. It's not vertical and has discrete letters but nevertheless, looks nice.

That is quite beautiful. Thanks for sharing. Are you familiar with Japanese grass script? It has quite a different feel than the Mongolian, but it's a type of Japanese cursive that flows really nicely IMHO:

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%8D%89%E6%9B%B8%E4%BD%93#/m...

which is actually a fairly legible example. Admittedly, the more flowing styles that you see in old poetry and the like effectively require specialized training to read. Beautiful, though!

It does look nice. The letters still look discrete though which is beautiful in itself but different from what attracts me to cursive style hands like Arabic.

Wow, that article makes me appreciate how far we've come in 20 years in terms of font rendering and text layout.

Good resource for Traditional (vertical) Mongolian here:

https://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writmongol/websitesinmongolb...

Example:

http://khumuunbichig.montsame.mn/index.php?home

Haha can you read Japanese though? It's beautiful for sure and it even feels a little different when reading it as if you're, in a way, sorta sounding about pictures. But man is it a pain in the butt to learn!

全く私も思います。二年前から勉強していますけどまだまだです。

まだまだ indeed…

So まだまだ。全くまだまだ。

As a Japanese-American, both languages are beautiful when used properly and ugly when used horribly.

Growing up speaking German and learning Japanese later, while spoken English, German etc can be easily as beautiful as spoken Japanese, I have to say there's a beauty in the Kanji/Hanzi writing system that just doesn't have an equivalent in our languages.

I started out learning Japanese because I liked Japanese culture like a lot of people and never was a "language guy", but at some point I just got addicted to learning kanji. When you can start to just guess what a Kanji means and you don't even know why that's such a satisfying experience.

Think of kanji not as characters but as words (because they literally are) and you will realize English and other Latin/European languages share the same trait.

You speak German and English, so you can probably appreciate that you can "generally" understand other European languages even if you don't speak them if they share a common root like Latin. Kanji is like that.

Same, kanji is also the hardest for me, I have a much easier time learning new words by sound/hearing. But, I know some people that are the complete opposite & can't learn enough kanji, ymmv

でもやはり高低アクセントはもっと苦しいと思います。あれは無理ですww

English had beautiful writing, but it was destroyed by technology. First by the printing press, then by typewriters, then by low-resolution computer monitors. All of the human character and calligraphic qualities of the script have been mechanically stripped away in order to better accommodate what are now outdated legacy technologies, but everyone is so used to the status quo that we don't even realize what we've lost, and instead just accept that English script happens to be uglier than Japanese or Arabic or Devangari. In an alternate universe, we could be reading this in a script reminiscent of, say, the Uncial script used in the Book of Kells (which is what inspired Tolkien's beautiful Tengwar script).

Not buying it. Japanese has also gone through the same tech tree.

Alternatively, we've made things a lot more legible for people from different backgrounds to understand. Deciphering modern fonts is a lot easier than deciphering cursive script, and hand-writing complicated scripts just raises the barrier of entry for people to communicate in written form

Good traditional handwriting is not less legible. You're just not as used to it, or you have only seen bad examples (like handwritten letters written by older people with shaky hands, or poor spelling, or misaligned lines). If you spend a little time with it, it's just as easy to read as the block characters we use in digital media and print.

I would argue the opposite, Japanese is suffering more than English thanks to computers.

For instance a lot of the obvious brush stroke is gone such as: うえらおや

The upper line is supposed to either look like a droplet of water or like ふ upper part

Certain details are gone: にこ no longer has the half arrow you can see exists vertically on the horizontal line.

ふ lost a lot of its details.

Still I would argue it looks better now for the most part.

Source: https://gogonihon.com/en/blog/japanese-characters/

In such an alternative tech free universe, I guess most of us would be illiterate farmers.

> I love English

Why English in particular? English uses Latin script pretty randomly.

-- sincerely your Ptoughneigh

Both English and Japanese have idiosyncratic writing systems which is fun and visually interesting to me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com