> The Japanese Wikipedia is not a translation of the English Wikpedia.
Yeah that's the point. "猿" and "monkey" are unrelated terms that only have a little bit of overlap. Translators ignore this.
40 karma · joined September 28, 2014
Yeah that's the point. "猿" and "monkey" are unrelated terms that only have a little bit of overlap. Translators ignore this.
Because you're relying on the translator to accurately convey the meaning of words to you, which translators rarely do. Most professional translators and language instructors don't exactly have the best grasp of language themselves. They do some 1 to 1 translation of "monkey" and 猿 as if the connotation, denotation, and etymology are all the same when if you look it up, they're only kinda similar but not exactly.
English Wikipedia:
"Monkey is a common name that may refer to groups or species of mammals, in part, the simians of infraorder Simiiformes."
Japanese Wikipedia:
"日本語におけるサル（猿）とは、通俗的な意味ではサル目（霊長目）のうち、ヒト（古人類を含む）を除いたもののことである。"
Former talks about Simians whereas the latter apparently says (correct me if I'm wrong I don't know much japanese) colloquially all non-human primates. Is the translator going to know whether an orangutan or gorilla qualifies as 猿? Probably not, they're not even going to mention it.
Personally I believe people should learn a language well enough to read Wikipedia( or equivalent), and then continue only with media in the language in question from that point onwards.
Maybe GP doesn't want to get stalked by some paranoid HNer who thinks they're a Russian spy. Maybe they don't want to lose some karma dependent feature of HN on their main account. Maybe he was a lurker and this specific topic was what was important enough to finally make an account for.
Do you have any examples of this? Valve didn't lower the price for low income regions out of the kindness of their heart, they did it because otherwise nobody from those regions would buy the product at all. In cases of price discrimination like this it's the high income consumer that gets screwed over. Without it Valve has no choice but to offer the same low price, doing anything else would just reduce their revenue further.
But even then your example is far more cherry picked than mine. Translated your phrase means "is it not theirs". It doesn't have any common nouns that aren't pronouns, adjectives, or even a verb that isn't is/是/係. You also managed to do something I couldn't even and provide an example where every word had the same exact grammatical meaning and were arranged in the same order in both examples. Really helps my point about logography more. If Chinese were ideographic and not logographic those words would be written the same. They're not because of differing etymologies.
The fact that you can only find colloquial examples that are significantly different is why it's a dialect. AAVE or Appalachian English are also near incomprehensible when spoken/written colloquially. Hell, I could even make the dumb arguement that liberals/conservatives speak a seperate language with something like your example. "was he Latino"/"were they latinx?"
Here I found the following sentence on a Cantonese bbs.
"推普滅粵係中國政府堅定不移的國策"
Perfectly valid Mandarin except for 係/是. You can't claim that a bbs comment complaining about the promotion of Mandarin, written on a forum dedicated to Cantonese of all things is formal language that's "tending towards" "mandarin".
EDIT REPLY:
> I have no trouble reading books a couple hundred years old, like "Last of the Mohicans".
Because English isn't phonetic. If you try to pronounce any of the Native American words or names written in that book it would be entirely unrecognizable to any surviving speakers of those languages. Ever since around the Renaissance English orthography has been more focused on preserving etymology than phonetics. Try reading any text before that period and it becomes incomprehensible even though most of the words themselves aren't that obscure and the text is mostly legible when written with modern orthography.
> Besides, you can correctly pronounce about 90% of English phonetically. With German it's much more
This is what I'm talking about. Even you can't admit to being able to pronounce 100% of German words despite German orthography being constantly changed to fit pronounciation. It's akin to rehauling the codebase every year with some trendy framework, only to produce the same if not less functionality. Although at least you admit to not being able to pronounce certain words. I see far too many people obsessed with phonetic writing confidently mispronouncing every new word they come across.
> Good luck guessing even 5% of icons correctly that you've never seen before.
That's a strawman. Logography is not "icons". It's about making the writing system regular with morphemes not phonemes. Your rant about Steve Jobs and "icons" has nothing to do with any of that.
You can scroll down a couple posts to see people being outraged that those who stormed the Capitol had weapons and bombs with them. I wonder how cavalier your attitude remains when the guns are pointed at your face. Then again second amendment fanatics like you are already totally fine with school shootings.
More drivel by someone who likely can't speak or read any dialect of Chinese and has no idea of history. Rome has been dead for millennia. The last emperor of the Qing dynasty died in 1967.
The Romance "languages" are only considered languages because the Latin alphabet has no way of dealing with natural drifts in pronounciation. Most differences between them are superficial at best. The language spoken in Northern Italy is functionally identical to that spoken in Southern France. It is only because every province sized country in Europe insists on creating their own orthography that they seem different. If you don't believe me just look at Catalan or Cantonese Wikipedia. Despite best efforts by the people writing the articles, they still appear almost identical to standard Spanish and Chinese.
Even if we take your claims about language for granted, The city that Cantonese is named after is on the Mainland, and mainlander Cantonese far outnumber those in Hong Kong. By your logic an independent Hong Kong is as natural as Brooklyn being independent from the rest of New York.
EDIT: You don't have a point and the claims you've made are egregiously wrong. Here's a hint, 1967 >>>>> 395.
EDIT In Response because of comment limits:
> My first point is that Hong Kongers of course should have had the right to vote on the handover back to China. They were not offered that and we can't go back.
In the 60s the Hong Kongese held mass riots against the British in support of reunification.[0] Linguistically and culturally the Hong Kongese they are no different from their fellow Cantonese in the mainland. Most of its residents are only a couple generations removed from the Mainland. This tactic of constantly trying to make some arbitrary strategic region of China seem like it's some cultural enclave is as ridiculous as claiming that maybe "San Francisco isn't preordained to be American". If you think there's some drastic cultural difference the burden of proof lies on you.
> You literally didn't contradict anything I said linguistically or culturally (i.e. that China is _not_ some singular linguistical/cultural area), which was my point. So no I _do_ have a point and you yourself agreed with it.
I am making the point that the linguistic differences between Romance language speakers are exaggerated and nonexistent in practice, not agreeing with you that the linguistic differences in China are significant.
> You made another point that the fact that China was unified more recently as an empire than Rome means they are somehow more legitimate.
You acted as if China was some newly formed entity, and used it to imply that it isn't natural for it to be unified. The amount of times China has been unified far outstrips the amount of times when a single city that's not even self sufficient infrastructurally has been independent.
> I’ve never heard someone claim otherwise.
How many Hong Kongese and Cantonese have you met? I doubt the number is more than a dozen. You keep doing this unbacked argument that "maybe X isn't shouldn't be a part of China because maybe they have a different culture" without any evidence they have a different culture, likely because you've never encountered their culture in person. The burden of proof lies on you when X has been a part of China for millennial longer than it's ever been indepedent.
You then act as if the Hong Kongese had no say during the handover when they were clearly much more violently in favor of reunification at the time. The scale of the present protests are not nearly as great as the ones in '67.
> So you agree that there is no natural cultural-linguestic reason for China to be unified in its current form
Jesus Christ how many times do I have to point out that China is linguistically unified and that the Hong Kongese have no significant cultural differences to justify independence. The burden of proof lies on you to disprove me. Countries don't stay unified for centuries without a linguistic and cultural common ground.
> I can't follow this anymore. Post replies like a normal person and I'll respond. If not, okay that's fine too. I think we've mostly explained our respective beliefs
And I can't reply to your comments because of rate limiting on HackerNews. No need to be extremely passive aggressive about it. I don't think you've understood my beliefs and I don't think you intend to. This entire time you've been putting words in ny mouth.
> Anyway I'll stop this discussion here so that you can focus on all the other posts you're apparently making. Maybe the extra bandwidth will allow you to post normally in the other conversations at least.
There's no way you don't have enough self awareness to notice how passive aggressive this sounds. Besides, you've posted 6 comments in the past hour. I posted 7 in the past day.
Pointing out that the Hong Kongese speak the second most common dialect in China, are only a couple generations removed from the mainland, spent most of their history not seeking independece from the rest of China, and obviously felt enough kinship to the rest of China to violently attempt reunification is enough justification that they are reasonably culturally unified with the rest of the country. You, on the other hand have provided no evidence to the contrary, and seem outraged that I even ask you for proof.
How would you feel if I advocated for arming communist rebels in your country? It's disturbing how normalized calls to violence are on HN when the violence happens far away.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2008/09/18/2...
From the comments in this thread it seems the context is that the ACM started requiring an ethics section on papers. Hardly has anything to do with cancelling itself if you ask me.