Re: complexity of scripts
| From: | Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Friday, November 30, 2001, 16:19 |
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>From: Anton Sherwood <bronto@...>
>Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 20:35:29 -0800
>
>I always wondered whether Chinese fantasy writers invent characters ...
>
I can't say fro absolute certain, but I very much doubt it. It would most
likely make their works unpublishable since it would add expense to the
publishers end and Chinese businesses don't do that sort of thing. At least
not here in Taiwan. I have a Taiwanese friend sturggling to find a
publisher for a textbook he has written. He's only looking at the large,
reputable ones, mind you, and he keeps getting hit with the idea that he
should pay part of the publishing cost since its his first book and "a big
risk" for the publisher.
>I've heard that if you know the shape and sequence of the strokes, you
>can uniquely(?) identify a kanji, because of the sequence rules; that
>implies that you could thus encode a corpus of kanji, and use a Markov
>process to generate new ones. Has it been done?
>
Well, I don't know how many other odd balls may have done it, but *I*'ve
invented a few characters. One of them is great fun. I have an on-going
project to collect all the names of Chinese mythological beasts (I've got
well over 100 now) so that means I've got some very obscure characters.
Every now and then I'll write out a dozen or so of them to ask a Chinese
friend what he or she knows about this or that beastie. They'll usually
give me a pronunciation followed by "I don't know. Some kind of bird."
That's when I'll slip in one of my creations it has the "bird" radical on
the right side and the "dragon" on the left side. Everyone I've shown it to
in that context, save one Chinese lit teacher, has instantly pronounced it
long2 and suggested that it is some kind of bird that perhaps looks like a
dragon. (The Chinese lit teacher insisted it was a wrong character ;)
A couple of other characters I invented were for the sake of torturing a
student who insisted that a phonologically impossible string of letters was
his "English" name. I drew this horrifying monstrosity with "turtle" on top
and "spirit" on bottom followed by a dreadful collection of radicals on the
board and informed him that this was my new "Chinese" name and I expected
him to use it every time he spoke to me in class. He quicky chose Kurt.
Adam
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