Re: Nice comment, Adam! (was: beautiful scripts)

Exactly, but unfortunately there is a lot of that bad printing around.  Of
course, the same is true back in the States, but there it was English and
even if I couldn't make out all or even most of the letters I knew from
context and the general shape/length of the blob in question exactly which
word was supposed to be there.  I have to assume that percisely the same
holds for Taiwanese.  THEY know what that blob is.  It just happens to be
WAY beyong my ability to decode at my level of understanding.  But then any
where from 1/10 to 1/2 of the characters in any songs printed in the church
bulitin are a mystery to me anyhow since I've not yet learned them.  It's
really fun when we sing a song that only has one or two characters I don't
know.

Of course there are times like last week.  I walked in, picked up my
bulitin, sat down and started scanning the songs.  I found that I could read
almost all of the characters in the third song -- maybe 5 or 10 I didn't
know.  I was excited to get to that one.  Then we sang it in Taiwanese, so I
was just as lost as ever!  I have GOT to get re-enrolled in my Taiwanese
classes.  (I just keep saying that don't I.)

Oh, and I too am a traditional character fan.  I do NOT like to look at the
mangled Mao-ies.  They are so asthetically UNpleasing.  The traditional
characters (with a few jarring exceptions) have a lovely sence of balance
born of generations of refinement.  The "simplified" characters all look
like their about to fall over or colapse inward or break in half.  They'er
UGLY!

One more Chinese related question.  I was looking at a cross-dialectal data
base on Starostin's website, and there were a couple of symbols in whatever
webification of IPA he's using that I don't grok.  What does the vertical
bar denote???

Adam

So lift the cup of joy and take a big drink.
In spite of it all it's a beautiful world.
-------Suzanne Knutzen




>From: laokou <laokou@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
>Subject: Re: Nice comment, Adam! (was: beautiful scripts)
>Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 15:23:41 -0400
>
>From: "SuomenkieliMaa"
>
> > --- Adam Walker wrote:
>
> > > Which, of course, means that just like in Chinese
> > > those "denser" characters
> > > become illegible blobs with a bad printer or dirty
> > > typeface.  Sometimes
> > > reading my church bulitin can be SO intriguing . . .
> > > here a blob there a
> > > blob everywhere a blob blob eieio.  Same thing holds
> > > true for the
> > > interoffice memos at work.
>
> > Nice comment, Adam, and one that I agree with!  When I
> > look at a Japanese newspaper, I sometimes cringe
> > because of the "un-balance" of the characters.  I
> > mean, kana (katakana & hiragana) remain quite
> > well-balanced, but those darned imported pictograms &
> > other kanji -- albeit quite handy at times -- can
> > really make the page look like it's crawling with
> > spiders.  Then again, though, Japanese kanji tend to
> > be simplified (although not the simplified Mao-version
> > now on Mainland China), so I doubt they look as nasty
> > as the Chinese chars still being incorporated in
> > Taiwan!
>
>Hey, steady there -- I'm a traditional character fiend. I think the key to
>Adam's comment is "bad printer". Faxes can wreak utter havoc. Church
>bulletins, xeroxes of xeroxes, high school tests (they used a paper so
>porous, they might just have well been printing on paper towels -- even the
>o's, e's, and c's on my English tests looked like Snoopy noses), and just
>about anything printed by the Taiwan Esperanto Society are bad bets, to be
>sure. But decent mags and the daily papers had many-stroked characters
>coming out quite nicely. The "yu4" of "hu1yu4", "to call for", "to urge",
>"to appeal", is thirty-two strokes and pops up quite frequently in
>political
>articles -- never recall it being a big blob. And when I changed from
>mild-mannered high school teacher to translator and we moved from the land
>of mimeograph to ink-jet, why, a whole new world opened. :)
>
>Kou

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

Reply