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Comment by audunw | Hacker News Reader

Japanese is Subject-Object-Verb order, so it was probably "My Ruby (is) terrible". But I don't know Japanese so I can't tell you for sure.

Chinese would also drop the verb in this case, so I'm assuming they might do that in Japanese as well.

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Ruby is the subject in that sentence, not sure why gtranslate injects an "I". I'd translate it as "Ruby is scary, isn't it?"

Could also be 'surprising'. With the context of the sentence before it is basically, "I thought this would be hard to write. Ruby is surprising."

Also, the author is a contributor to ruby on github, so I doubt he is negative towards the language.

http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E6%81%90%E3%82%8D%E3%81%97%E3%81...

Yes it's one of those "funny" words in Japanese that is highly context sensitive, so you're probably right.

Yeah.. 恐ろしい is kind of a "Wondrous and terrifying" blend

Chinese and Japanese grammar have very little relation to each other - about as much as Chinese and English. (The alphabets are, of course, very similar, as the Japanese adopted Chinese characters.)

The Japanese use Chinese characters. The Japanese also have alphabets. (At least two.) But Chinese characters aren't exactly an alphabet and the Japanese don't use Chinese characters directly as an alphabet, though many characters are based on Chinese ones.

Since we're being technical, Japanese does not have any alphabet as such; an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Japanese uses syllabaries ('kana' in Japanese), where almost all characters represent more than 1 sound. Hiragana is typically used to write Japanese words and grammatical particles, while katakana is typically used to write foreign words and for special emphasis, roughly analogous to how boldface type is used in English. Both of these kana are derived from Chinese characters, greatly simplified, though the relationship is somewhat distant.

Japanese also uses a third writing system called kanji, also not an alphabet, whose name literally means "Han [Chinese] characters" in Japanese. Kanji are logographs, where one character represents one entire word or concept rather than sounds.

Most kanji are identical or very similar to modern Chinese characters and are readily intelligible to a Chinese reader, at least in a general sense, though some have diverged a bit.

Grammar is another matter entirely. Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. (Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted.) Chinese and Japanese are not grammatically related at all, and any similarity between their syntaxes is coincidental.

> an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound.

Do any languages have an alphabet according to this definition?

Korean?

IIRC Hangul has some weird pronunciation quirks depending on where some letters are in a syllable.

At the least, Korean has voiced-versus-non-voiced-depending-on-word-position changes, and IIRC there are other similar rules (about changing pronunciation in certain contexts) as well.

Cyrillic-using languages generally do.

The 'o' in Russian is pronounced 'a' half of the time (non-scientific estimate). :(

Finnish almost does. There are minor exceptions, though.

>a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound.

While you're correct that the Japanese writing system is not an alphabet, I feel like your definition here is so vague it almost contradicts your point. After all, each kana character has a much closer correspondence with a particular "sound" than many actual alphabets.

So to clarify, the characters of an alphabet (notionally) correspond to particular phonemes.

> Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted

When using some strict definition of "related" (e.g. "neither language is a strict descendent of the other"), that may be true, but anybody that's studied both languages has probably noticed that there's an eery similarity between the two, even if it's merely the result of many centuries of cross-pollenization....

My own experience is not so great, I've only studied Korean a bit, but I did study it in Japanese (which I know fairly well), and the similarity made it a lot easier, because so many things corresponded 1-to-1... However Korean friends that are fluent in Japanese constantly rave about how easy it was for them to learn, not just because of the huge amount of shared Chinese-derivative vocabulary (many words are completely identical, with formulaic changes in pronunciation), but because the whole structure of grammar, sentence/conversation-planning, idioms, etc, is so similar that a huge proportion of their Korean instincts pretty much just work as-is in Japanese.

Continuing on,

Spoken Japanese and Chinese have little to no relation, except for Chinese words imported into Japanese.

Hiragana, however, is derived from Chinese characters thousands of years ago. The Chinese characters were used in Japanese writing to write words phonetically.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hiragana_origin.svg

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