Re:Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a ...
by yongjik on Thursday May 12, 2016 @05:36PM
(#11686949)
Twist: When you see a pair of complex-looking Chinese character strings, but if one of them looks somewhat "simpler", then chances are that it's Chinese and the other is Japanese. Because Mainland Chinese people use simplified characters.
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Re:Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a ...
by thaumasiotes on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:18PM
(#11687245)
来 and 学, from the original example, are both simplified characters (the traditionals being 來 and 學). I was a little bemused to see them in an example of Japanese text, but it turns out they are the common Japanese characters as well. Japanese has its own set of simplifications ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai ), often overlapping with the Maoist simplifications.
In a different pattern, mainland China simplified 龍 to 龙 while Japan simplified it to 竜. Despite being a "simplified" form, 竜 is actually the oldest of those three characters.
>> For those who don't know Japanese, only following my rule, can you identify the Japanese characters in the sentence above?
I would technically meet that requirement, but knowledge of Chinese makes the question pretty easy regardless of knowing Japanese. ;)
Re:Identify Any Language Written in the Roman Alphabet at a ...
by Nadya on Thursday May 12, 2016 @06:33PM
(#11687340)
>I would technically meet that requirement, but knowledge of Chinese makes the question pretty easy regardless of knowing Japanese. ;)
Found the loophole in my requirements! Haha :) Had a good laugh when you pointed that out, thank you. Showed a quirk in my reasoning.
You also did a wonderful job explaining the simplified/traditional characters and the overlap between them and I learned a bit of trivia!