[ExI] don't bother

Will Steinberg steinberg.will at gmail.com
Fri Aug 7 16:57:48 UTC 2020


What's wrong with hieroglyphics?  Chinese is an extreme beautiful and
parsimonious language.

Also, polite forms in Japanese aren't always completely different words,
often just a different suffix.  We have lots of polite and impolite forms
of words here too: hey, hi, hello.  &c

On Fri, Aug 7, 2020, 12:54 spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> > *On Behalf Of *John Clark via extropy-chat
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] don't bother
>
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2020 at 9:57 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> After 30 years of calling my Japanese friends amanojaku, I find out
> Amanojaku is a demon-like beast in Japanese folklore, who devours a child
> and dresses up in her skin in order to impersonate the child to fool her
> grandparents into feeding it. All this time for all those years, my sushi
> guy was saying “Greetings, horrifying demon.”  Why that sly bastard.  I
> don’t think I will use the other Japanese terms and phrases he suggested I
> say to attractive young Japanese-speaking women.*
>
>
> *Richard Feynman also tried to learn Japanese and this is what he had to
> say about it: *
>
> *>…"**While in Kyoto I tried to learn Japanese with a vengeance. …  I
> gave up. I decided that wasn't the language for me, and stopped learning
> Japanese.**"*
>
>
>
> * John K Clark*
>
>
>
> The Japanese (and to some extent the Vietnamese) recognized that the whole
> notion of using hieroglyphics as a written language was a no-go, so they
> invented a form of their language which could be transmitted on a standard
> qwerty keyboard:
>
> Iki minangka conto saka ukara Jepang.
>
>
>
> They did it right: they made the spellings strictly phonetic.
>
> The Vietnamese argued there was no possible way to play their language
> thru a qwerty keyboard any more effectively than one can play rap thru a
> trombone.  But the tried, kinda:
>
> Đây là một ví dụ về một câu tiếng Nhật.
>
>
>
> Several of those Vietnamese characters aren’t available on the standard
> keyboard as far as I know, yet all the voting literature in this town comes
> in English, Mandarin and Vietnamese.  Used to have Spanish, but they
> dropped that.
>
> Clearly Vietnamese on a keyboard is a mess.  The Mandarin and Cantonese
> didn’t even bother trying.  They just learn English.  Kinda.
>
> Since Japan recognized that they needed to go international with their
> written language, it seems like they (and other languages) could invent a
> kind of simplified subset where all those terms for the same thing are
> collapsed down to one word and forget the social subtleties, don’t expect
> the round-eyes to master all that cultural stuff (don’t worry, we won’t.)
>
> Even English can be greatly simplified (once we get over the whole
> Newspeak implications (Orwell’s Newspeak concept really shoulda been
> introduced in a different book with a happy outcome (the concept, minus the
> political angle, is one of his great ideas))) and freely recognized as a
> specialized subset of language.
>
> Example, our verb “to be.”  We can express past, present and future tense
> with it, plurality and so forth, but that gives us 8 forms: be, being,
> been, am, is, are, was, were, and I mighta missed a couple, but what if… we
> could just accept that we sound a little like a teenage basketball star and
> use be for all of it?
>
> The goal: create a simplified Newspeak-ish vocabulary which has a
> simplified and formalized grammar, strictly phonetic spelling,
> unambiguously and rigorously defined terms, even if we need to accept
> clumsy and possibly harsh-sounding translations.
>
> Then we get other languages to meet in the middle and see what happens.
>
> I would be reluctant to even try to work with Japanese, having grown
> distrustful of everything my sushi chef taught me.  I would be introduced
> to my neighbor’s granddaughter, try to say hello, young lady, and have it
> come out: Greetings, promiscuous wench.
>
> I must admit the Google translate feature does a hell of a good job.
>
> There is a point to all this, a culture thing, to follow.
>
> spike
>
>
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