https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/03/furigana-dots-bout...
However, there is no easy way to enter or display these online, hence hacks like spacing.
data:text/html,<div style="font:16px monospace; text-emphasis:red filled circle">Hello World
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be supported in Chrome yet.
data:text/html, <textarea style="font-size: 1.5em; width: 100%; height: 100%; border: none; outline: none; font-family:monospace" autofocus />
mostly useless but I like it
When you land on a site with a delayed paywall, you can copy out the content just before the popup, and then paste it into <body contenteditable> to view at your own leisure.
Hey Unicode Consortium, where you at?
It would still be a problem of IME and font support.
On input, there's already so many shortcuts and hacks (e.g. SHIFT/CAPS is already taken to force switch from hiragana to katakana) that it's hard to imagine some natural combination that could be memorized.
On the font side, there's already the battle raging for having proper jp fonts in smarphones instead of the chinese ones, so additional support for marginal features is an uphill battle to say the least.
So suggest something that isn't emoji and it'll likely be accepted and added to the next version.
Anyway, my point was only that if someone is unhappy that emojis are being added, then proposing new non-emojis doesn't really solve their problem.
Saying "they didn't have capitals so they used spaces" would sound odd to an alien, who would wonder why capitals were necessary in the first place.
It's fun to hear how it's done in scripts that doesn't support our (as in the average HN reader) default way of doing it (which would be caps or italics/bold).
> Japanese alphabets (kana) doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases [...] so they can't be used to express anger.
It reads to me a bit like "the natural way to expess anger is uppercase, but they didn't have that, so they did the other thing instead".
Would you find a sentence like "English didn't have dots so they used uppercase to express anger" equally natural?
The comment is premised by how in japanese there are "two" sets of "letters" with slightly different uses but differently from lowercase/uppercase the difference does not translate in emphasis.
Uppercase letters are linguistically related to emphasis independently form net-speak (proper names, I, beginning of sentences), so to me it reads as "the thing that naturally works here is impossible there, so they have a different solution to the problem".
It is fine to take the perspective of your own cultural situation.
They contain vowels that go beyond the basic 5 "aeiou" of the English language (eg. see [0]). These suffice to let the speaker know how exactly to say the word unlike in English where it has to be learned case by case based on whatever is popular or acceptable pronunciation.
A subset of of these languages are tonal languages which also have special characters to additionally allow the speaker to set the pitch of the word correctly which then changes the meaning of the words [1].
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/hindi/guide/alphabet.sh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
This is more due to how widespread English is, and how vowels/pronunciation have shifted over time. For example, The Great Vowel Shift. [0]
Korean has exactly the same issues, albeit to a smaller degree. There are plenty of words that aren't pronounced like how they're spelled, due to grammatical rules. 종로 as an example. Or cases where words sound exactly the same and you just need to know the context/spelling- 쫗다, 쫒다, 쫃다, 쫏다, 쫓다.
Then there's regional slang/pronunciation/dialect. Busan dialect is fairly different from 표준어, or the "official" standard language. This phenomenon is not unique to English in any way. Any language scaled up will develop these issues over time.
At least you can try to pronounce "cough" or "종로", instead of not being able to pronounce "願" at all because you don't already know the pronunciation.
I'd go so far as to say that english is now spoken by so many people in so many different regions, all of whom can now be heard by each other on a reasonably frequent basis, that it has forced english speakers to become so adept at vowel-reconstruction that one could pronounce words with completely arbitrary vowels and still be understood.
This was still occurring before people were able to widely hear other regions' speakers, though.
However things like cough, plough, although, thorough, etc having different, -correct- pronunciations are due to English taking in words from other languages.
You can have three things:
1. A spoken language that evolves over time.
2. A writing system that accurately describes pronunciation.
3. A writing system that indicates history and etymology.
But you only get to pick two. English went with 1 and 3, which is arguably the optimal choice.
1. Because it's more important to know what words mean than it is to know how they sound.
My daughter reads a ton and learns a lot of words from reading. Fairly often, she mispronounces them, and that's OK. What's more valuable is that she can often infer the correct meaning of the word both from the surrounding context and from the parts that the word is made of. If we normalize spelling to match pronunciation, much of the latter gets lost.
It's easier to see that "mean" and "meant" are related than "meen" and "ment". "History" and "story" versus "histery" and "story".
2. Because pronunciation changes over time. If we continuously change spelling to match, it means older printed works get harder to read. In the worst case, they can appear to be saying different words than they intended.
3. Because pronunciation isn't uniform across regions.
Should "lawyer" be spelled "loyer" or "lawyer"? Is "crayon" spelled "crayon", "crayawn", "cran", or "crown"? Is it "caramel" or "carmel"?
Even English itself has vowels that go beyond the basic "aeiou" of "the English language".
* the letter Y
* vowel pairs, like ‘ou’
* accents, like in ‘précis’
Is that what you mean?
But, you say, that's 20 lexical sets, not 13–15? Well, no dialect distinguishes all 20. My idiolect (a slight variant of General American) realizes TRAP and BATH as [æ], PALM and LOT as [a], CLOTH and THOUGHT as [ɔ], KIT as [ɪ], DRESS as [ɛ], STRUT as [ʌ], FOOT as [ʊ], FACE as [ei], GOAT as [ʌu], FLEECE and HAPPY as [i], GOOSE as [u], PRICE as [ai], CHOICE as [ɔi], MOUTH as [æu], and COMMA as [ə]. That's 15, or 12 if you leave out PRICE, CHOICE, and MOUTH, which are diphthongs made of vowels that also occur isolated. (GOAT is debatable, usually analyzed as [oʊ] or [ou].)
Different dialects draw the boundaries in different places; for example, dialects with the "trap–bath split", such as RP, famously realize TRAP and BATH differently ([æ] and [a] in RP). Some dialects have fewer vowels; if we consider Indian English to be a single dialect, it may have more speakers than even GA, and most varieties of Indian English have fewer vowels than 12. I haven't found a good phonological analysis, but if you know any Indian English speakers and also know phonology, you know what I mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_differences_and_diale... goes into some detail.
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† The historical gap might be much larger than this. Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs date back about 5300 years, and they provide evidence that spoken language was considered to be universal among humans at the time—there is no suggestion of tribes that lacked language anywhere in the written record. Today there are still peoples without written language, and a few who only acquired written language within the last generation. So we have good evidence that it has taken at least 5300 years. But Homo sapiens has been around for sixty times that long, over 300 millennia, and stone tools date back 2 million years. It strains credibility to imagine that the authors of the Lascaux cave paintings or the Denisovans who invented sewing were so unlike us as to lack speech; the origin of spoken language is usually dated to before 40kya. Unfortunately, no tape recorders have yet been found from that epoch, so the uncertainty of the antiquity of spoken language ranges over nearly a factor of 100. Maybe spoken language is a million years older than written language, or five million. Probably not ten million, though, or we'd be studying chimpanzee folklore.
Maybe it seems so odd to me because there are so many licenses, contracts, or government forms that use ALL CAPS as emphasis. I don't know.
It just doesn't translate to shouty in reading mental voice.
To me (and probably most others), license texts and such absolutely look like they are shouting. I do not understand whence the convention of having them in ALL CAPS, and can only assume it's in itself some sort of a cultural association between ALL CAPS and IMPORTANCE. I have only seen it in English legal texts, anyway – is it even used in other languages? It looks to me like ALL CAPS was originally used to emphasize key points, and then an inevitable race to the bottom happened until EVERYTHING WAS IMPORTANT which really means that nothing is important.
When it comes to typography, nearly every type of emphasis employed in Western text except italics (and sᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘs, which see too little use these days methinks) only exist due to technological limitations, particularly the extremely limited typographic options available to typewriters and, later, 7- or 8-bit text terminals. This includes ALL CAPS, s p a c i n g, and u͟n͟d͟e͟r͟l͟i͟n͟e͟d͟, never mind ASCII crutches like /pseudoitalics/, _pseudounderlined_, and ∗pseudoboldface∗.
Honestly I'm a little surprised that people who've likely seen their share of BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME would still read that as shouting.
我！太！满！足！了！
[1] In this case, Japanese そうですね "I see" written in Hangul.
- normal: It's a fine day, isn't it.
- vaporwave: Ｉｔ＇ｓ ａ ｆｉｎｅ ｄａｙ， ｉｓｎ＇ｔ ｉｔ．
Not. funny.
Writing word in katakana that usually written in kanji is also works as emphasis with a bit different meaning. It tend to be used as stereotype. For example, 福島(Fukushima) / 広島(Hiroshima) is just a name of prefecture, but sometimes written フクシマ / ヒロシマ that refers nuclear plant accident / nuke bomb event. (I really dislike this usage).
They can be used to convey tones in text similarly to how italics, caps, symbols and other decorations work in general, I think that’s what they meant to say by emphasis.
There are an incredible amount of other ways to add emphasis in Chinese though, so it's not lacking anything, and I imagine the same is true of the other languages.
I have a book published in the 1920s with a forward by Stanley Morison, by an author who attempted to enhance the Hebrew alphabet by introducing upper and lower case letterforms to it as well as to bring the letter forms more in line with the styles of the Latin-Greek-Cyrillic alphabets. It's—odd.
Before the eventual standardization of Hangul around early 20th century there were numerous attempts to "linearize" Hangul's characteristic syllabic blocks ("풀어쓰기" [1]). Many of them were influenced by Western alphabets and had two cases, and none were successful. And yes, they are also odd.
The way we write modern text is more modern than most people realize, I think. The letter 'j' wasn't really used as a separate letter indicating a separate sound until sometime around the 16th century I think! Case is older, but not ancient. I've seen some Greek on 3rd/4th century middle eastern ruins and I struggle to read the "all upper case with no spaces" writing sometimes, but that's just how it was! No "lower case" until much later...
This was never a goal; look at B ϴ O P Φ Ψ Ω, or on the Latin end C G Q R S.
Inscriptions are very formal; you carve the letters you have no matter what they look like. There was never any difficulty carving curves.
Handwriting is informal; you write whatever you find easiest.
กาก -> fail
ก า ก ก ก ก ก -> FAIL!!!!!11!
this is also used in English but for a mocking tone.
Is there a place where I could learn more things like this one?
Japanese alphabets (kana) doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases. There are two different types of kanas (round ones and square ones) but they are kind of equal in terms of strength/stress so they can't be used to express anger.
People on 2-Channel forum (Japan's 4chan, basically) came up with a brilliant idea, which is to insert a space between each letter so that it looks a bit wider and has an extra oomph.
Example:
- normal: 今日はいい天気だね。 (it's a fine day, isn't it.)
- angry: 今 日 は い い 天 気 だ ね 。 (IT'S A F*KING NICE DAY ISN'T IT)