1,219 karma · joined August 28, 2009
> If you actually wanted one chopstick, you'd say 一只筷子.
Traditional Chinese script versions of Simplified 只 and 双 actually make this more apparent, where they would be 隻 and 雙, which are pictograms illustrating one and two birds in a hand, respectively.
In order to make use of OpenStruct, `require 'ostruct'` first needs to be declared. Our code neglected to make that declaration, and we saw failures when it was deployed. This code, however, passed all of our tests. We discovered it was because our testing framework included rspec-expectations, which has a dependency on diff-lcs[1], and diff-lcs itself declares `require 'ostruct'`[2]. Because of this, ostruct was loaded globally before our code was tested, which silently masked the underlying issue.
This being said, I do understand the sentiment that this feature seems superfluous and may introduce unnecessary complication, especially from a Rubyist's point of view. The underlying mental model of Ruby dependency management is different from many other languages, and it's something to keep in mind when coming from other languages that do have scope for declared dependencies.
[1] https://github.com/rspec/rspec-expectations/blob/v3.13.3/rsp... [2] https://github.com/halostatue/diff-lcs/blob/v1.5.1/lib/diff/...
<marquee><blink>Indeed</blink></marquee>> It can't pluralize anything, but it can pluralize anything that refers to people and it is actively used in novel ways. I've seen someone refer to 美国的妈妈们; metonymy is not involved there.
It is productive in a limited sense in that way, but not as a general plural marker as you're arguing, and it's limited because 美国的妈妈们 means "American mothers" in that it necessarily refers to them as a collective group (which I argue is an instance of metonymy) rather than a set of more than one "American mother". For instance you cannot say *三个美国的妈妈们 to mean "three American mothers"; you must instead say 三个美国的妈妈 because 美国的妈妈们 can only ever refer to the entire collective group.
> I should note that this argument doesn't entirely hang together. You can make "the White House" explicitly plural in English by giving it a plural verb
This is a feature of UK English where collective nouns agree with plural forms of verbs. US English on the other hand, requires the singular form[3][4]. This has no bearing on how we analyze Chinese.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural
[3] https://victoryediting.com/collective-nouns/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Examples_of_me...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_(linguistics) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
It seems like a very befitting word for the eponymous "hacker" ethos of this site.
While the word 綠 to mean green has been attested as far back as 1000 BC, the idea that it was a separate color rather than describing a shade of 青 is relatively more recent. Wikipedia[0] indicates that it was adopted in the early 20th century in Chinese (as part of vernacular language reforms) and after WWII in Japanese, though these claims are currently marked with [citation needed]. While both are relatively recent, the usage in Chinese did have a longer period of time to take hold.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
Explained here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...
> In early 1995, a border war broke out between Peru and Ecuador and the Peruvian government complained to Microsoft that the border was incorrectly placed. Of course, if we complied and moved the border northward, we’d get an equally angry letter from the Ecuadorian government demanding that we move it back. So we removed the feature altogether.
> The time zone map met a similar fate. The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map. (Any map that depicts an unfavorable border must bear a government stamp warning the end-user that the borders are incorrect. You can’t stamp software.) We had to make a special version of Windows 95 for them.
> Translate "please give me his book" to Cantonese.
> > "請俾我佢嘅書" is the Cantonese translation for "please give me his book".
This appears generally fine though stylistically not as colloquial. Using 請 for "please" is considered more formal since it's usually more written than spoken. In addition, it uses the Cantonese genitive particle 嘅, though I think most speakers would prefer to use the measure word 本 in this context, but this is still perfectly grammatical. Lastly, it still retains the same word order for direct and indirect objects as Standard Written Chinese, which while not completely colloquial, is still considered acceptable when spoken.
BTW, since written Cantonese isn't standardized, 畀 can often be seen written as 俾, but they refer to the same word.
> Translate "唔該你畀佢本書我" to English.
> > The Cantonese phrase "唔該你畀佢本書我" translates to "Please give me his book" in English.
Exactly correct.
"Please give me his book" is translated to: 請把他的書畀我。 While it does use the usual Cantonese word for "give" (畀), the rest of the sentence still mostly uses Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, notably the 把 construction, the third-person pronoun 他, and the use of the 的 genitive particle, which aren't typically used in spoken Cantonese.
Conversely, 唔該你畀佢本書我 is translated to: "Please give him this book me." This seems to indicate that it doesn't understand Cantonese's ability to use measure words (such as 本) as genitive particles, nor does it understand that the word order of the direct and indirect objects in the sentence are switched compared to the usual order in Standard Written Chinese.
> Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.)
Indeed, because of the way Dungan is written, it ended up evolving differently with respect to how new vocabulary is derived, often borrowing words phonetically from Russian instead of constructing them from Chinese morphemes that might otherwise be considered ambiguous when used individually.
As an example, this is the sentence "Please give me his book" written in Standard Written Chinese using "Chinese Traditional" characters: 請你給我他的書。
If you use "Chinese Simplified" characters[2] instead, it would still be the same words, but some of the characters have simpler forms: 请你给我他的书。
However, both of those renderings still follow Mandarin vocabulary and grammar. Even though Cantonese speakers generally read and write Standard Written Chinese (in either Traditional or Simplified characters), if they were to actually convey that sentence in spoken Cantonese, it would actually be quite different. Written Cantonese[3] is generally only used in informal contexts, but a rendering of the sentence in Cantonese would instead be: 唔該你畀佢本書我。 (Traditional) 唔该你畀佢本书我。 (Simplified)
The written Cantonese version uses vocabulary and grammatical constructions that are not part of Standard Written Chinese, and Google Translate is currently not able to translate to written Cantonese. I've found that over time though, Google Translate has been getting better at translating from written Cantonese to English (however, for the example I just gave, it appears it still completely botches the translation; it currently thinks it translates to "You shouldn't have let her book me").
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese
Both languages descended from a common ancestor, so you can't necessarily say that one is newer than the other. However, it is the case that Cantonese preserves several features that Mandarin has lost, in particular the complete inventory of final consonants and all of the tone categories of Middle Chinese, which makes it seem better suited for reciting 1000+ year old Tang dynasty poetry where rhyming and tones were especially important.
On the other hand, Cantonese has lost other features that Mandarin has preserved (such as medial vowels and the three-way distinction of initial sibilant consonants), but these features aren't as critical with respect to reciting Tang poetry. For this reason, Cantonese may seem "older" than Mandarin, even though in reality, it's simply that they each have preserved different features and the features that Cantonese preserved happened to make it better for reciting old poetry.
> Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend.
All languages change and will continue to change over time, and while laziness may drive changes in some features of a language, often times other parts of the language become more complex to compensate. This process is called grammaticalization, and is thought to occur in cycles: http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycl...
> For Chinese, modern songs in Mandarin and Cantonese exhibit very different behaviour with respect to the extent to which the melodies affect the lexical tones. In modern Mandarin songs, the melodies dominate, so that the original tones on the lyrics seem to be completely ignored. In Cantonese songs, however, the melodies typically take the lexical tones into consideration and attempt to preserve their pitch contours and relative pitch heights.
[1] https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php...
Tone sandhi is phonologically motivated, i.e., the tone changes arise from the pronunciation of the surrounding words, and are thus largely predictable. Cantonese changed tones, however, are generally lexically motivated, i.e., the changed tone is part of the realization of the word itself. Cantonese changed tones are thus more akin to Mandarin's erhua phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua), which is also seemingly as random with regard to the words to which it applies.
> For Cantonese and Jyutping specifically, the tone sandhi is marked as, e.g., «faan4*2»
Note that the Jyutping standard actually doesn't specify how tone changes are marked. I believe the * convention originated at https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ to facilitate Cantonese learning. Wiktionary has adopted a similar convention but using a hyphen (-) instead (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese/Cant...).
It was previously featured on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22213406
[1] https://visual-fonts.com/#jp-carousel-1092 [2] https://wy-lang.org/
I have an old Quora answer here that goes into more detail: https://qr.ae/pyNupi
Another large class class comes from vestiges of derivational morphology in Old Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese For instance, the character 度 in modern Mandarin can be pronounced dù (when used as a noun) or duó (when used as a verb), both of which derived from Old Chinese /daːɡs/ and /daːɡ/, respectively.
With Simplified Chinese characters, some of them come from the merger of originally different words that had similar, but not exactly the same pronunciations. For instance, both 髮 (fà) and 發 (fā) were merged into 发.