4 ms·

> “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?

by acchow 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
reustle 8y ago
Something like リニキス　カーネル　ネットワークイング　サブシステム It's basically English pumped though a lossy algo. I hate katakana and hope it dies soon.
- nneonneo 8y ago
  I think that the proper term is "Linuxカーネルネットワークサブシステム" meaning "Linux Kernel Network Subsystem".
- snowpanda 8y ago
  What is katakana?
  - nneonneo 8y ago
    Japanese uses three distinct character sets in writing: Hiragana (a syllabary), Katakana (another syllabary) and Kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana and Kanji are usually used together to write native Japanese words, whereas Katakana is used almost exclusively for loanwords. Katakana syllables are either bare vowels, or consonant+vowel (with few exceptions), meaning that transliterated words must be contorted to fit the syllabary (the "lossy algo" referred to by the parent comment). So, something like "kernel" in English becomes kaa-ne-ru, and "subsystem" becomes "sa-bu-shi-su-te-mu".
  - elgenie 8y ago
    Katakana [1] is one of the two syllabary writing systems in Japanese, with Hiragana [2] being the other. IIRC katakana is the one where every syllable starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel, so transliterated loan words with consecutive consonants end up growing vowels in the middle. They also have kanji (characters), and various romanization systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese). It's really amazingly inefficient. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
  - Forkus 8y ago
    Why is everyone posting squares?
    - jacoblambda 8y ago
      Unicode characters probably aren't all rendering on your end due to your font.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    The Japanese first adapted writing from Chinese; this adapted system is called kanji and is highly similar to, and often homographic with, Chinese hanzi. However, Japanese and Chinese have very different phonological structure: Chinese is mostly comprised of monosyllabic words, whereas Japanese has lots of polysyllabic words. This makes it more difficult to do phonetic transcription in Japanese kanji than in Chinese hanzi. The Japanese got around this by simplifying the script into a syllabary (every character represents roughly a syllable, or more often, a consonant-vowel pair). They did this twice: one of these syllabaries is hiragana, and the other is katakana. In modern usage, katakana is used largely for phonetic transcription, such as transliteration of foreign words and names, or onomatopoeia, whereas hiragana is used for writing out Japanese words. As others have pointed out, Japanese has a rather constrained phonological system, so a word like strengths cannot be represented directly but rather more like "su-to-re-n-ge-tsu." Of course, this feature isn't limited to Japanese; it's how an island called "Christmas" gets transliterated to "Kiritimati", just like its parent "Kiribati" is the local pronunciation of "Gilbert." While people think it's annoying, it's largely because they haven't faced languages with challenging transciptions into Latin script. There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد‎" after all.
    - snowpanda 8y ago
      Thank you for explaining this to me! (And thank you to everyone else's comments too of course). This is fascinating.
    - elgenie 8y ago
      > There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد‎" after all. There's a plethora of transcriptions into (more) phonetic alphabets because there are a plethora of regionalized pronunciations [1]. And there are a plethora of pronunciations because Arabic uses an impure abjad [2]. Since the vowels are not always, exactly or uniformly specified in writing, unspecified behavior leads to varying results in each compiler. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliterations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliteratio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads
nneonneo 8y ago
In Chinese, "Linux内核网络系统", literally "Linux Kernel Network System". Unlike Japanese and Korean, the Chinese language generally uses full meaning-to-meaning translations of technical terms as much as possible, and only occasionally uses phonetic nouns (e.g. 安卓 "Anzhuo" for Android) or English words (e.g. "Linux"). Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to some very unfortunate contortions, as the Chinese language is much less suited to phonetic transcription as compared to syllabary-based languages like Korean or Japanese. There's no "one obvious way" to map a foreign name onto the Chinese sound-set, and even when you do, there's likewise no obvious way to choose the corresponding characters (and you must be cautious to avoid characters with unwanted meanings or connotations).
- smogcutter 8y ago
  Sounds like this won't be news for you, but for others in the thread, the Chinese sometimes play around a lot with puns and rhymes in transliterated names. Here's a terrific twitter thread about Chinese nicknames for NBA players: https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en An example from the thread[1]: Stephon Marbury - 马政委 "Marburyist Political Commissar" This is a pun on "Marxist Political Commissar," since in Chinese both "Marbury" and "Marx" are spelled with the same first character "ma" ("horse"). [1] https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400 https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400
- 628C6l0 8y ago
  Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not - something left implicit in English. (There are exceptions of course)
  - nneonneo 8y ago
    Although that is somewhat of a simplification, it is certainly more true of Chinese than of English. The written language is also typed to a certain degree. Almost all disease words use a common radical (e.g. 癌症 for cancer), for example. As a more extreme case, every chemical element name in Chinese incorporates a radical that reflects the chemical's basic state - liquid (water), gaseous (air), metallic (gold), or non-metallic (earth) - symbolically connecting the old elemental system with modern chemistry.
CrystalLangUser 8y ago
With phonetic systems like Japanese and Korean, terms like this regularly get represented as-is in the script. Sometimes they don't get translated, as you can see plenty of jargon in this Korean wiki page on C++. [0] One example is 'computer' -> 컴퓨터 in Hangul. It's still 'computer', just pronounced with the Korean pronunciation rules. [0]: https://namu.wiki/w/C%2B%2B https://namu.wiki/w/C%2B%2B

> “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?

by acchow 8y ago

> “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

reustle 8y ago

Something like リニキス　カーネル　ネットワークイング　サブシステム It's basically English pumped though a lossy algo. I hate katakana and hope it dies soon.

nneonneo 8y ago
I think that the proper term is "Linuxカーネルネットワークサブシステム" meaning "Linux Kernel Network Subsystem".
snowpanda 8y ago
What is katakana?
- nneonneo 8y ago
  Japanese uses three distinct character sets in writing: Hiragana (a syllabary), Katakana (another syllabary) and Kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana and Kanji are usually used together to write native Japanese words, whereas Katakana is used almost exclusively for loanwords. Katakana syllables are either bare vowels, or consonant+vowel (with few exceptions), meaning that transliterated words must be contorted to fit the syllabary (the "lossy algo" referred to by the parent comment). So, something like "kernel" in English becomes kaa-ne-ru, and "subsystem" becomes "sa-bu-shi-su-te-mu".
- elgenie 8y ago
  Katakana [1] is one of the two syllabary writing systems in Japanese, with Hiragana [2] being the other. IIRC katakana is the one where every syllable starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel, so transliterated loan words with consecutive consonants end up growing vowels in the middle. They also have kanji (characters), and various romanization systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese). It's really amazingly inefficient. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
- Forkus 8y ago
  Why is everyone posting squares?
  - jacoblambda 8y ago
    Unicode characters probably aren't all rendering on your end due to your font.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  The Japanese first adapted writing from Chinese; this adapted system is called kanji and is highly similar to, and often homographic with, Chinese hanzi. However, Japanese and Chinese have very different phonological structure: Chinese is mostly comprised of monosyllabic words, whereas Japanese has lots of polysyllabic words. This makes it more difficult to do phonetic transcription in Japanese kanji than in Chinese hanzi. The Japanese got around this by simplifying the script into a syllabary (every character represents roughly a syllable, or more often, a consonant-vowel pair). They did this twice: one of these syllabaries is hiragana, and the other is katakana. In modern usage, katakana is used largely for phonetic transcription, such as transliteration of foreign words and names, or onomatopoeia, whereas hiragana is used for writing out Japanese words. As others have pointed out, Japanese has a rather constrained phonological system, so a word like strengths cannot be represented directly but rather more like "su-to-re-n-ge-tsu." Of course, this feature isn't limited to Japanese; it's how an island called "Christmas" gets transliterated to "Kiritimati", just like its parent "Kiribati" is the local pronunciation of "Gilbert." While people think it's annoying, it's largely because they haven't faced languages with challenging transciptions into Latin script. There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد‎" after all.
  - snowpanda 8y ago
    Thank you for explaining this to me! (And thank you to everyone else's comments too of course). This is fascinating.
  - elgenie 8y ago
    > There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد‎" after all. There's a plethora of transcriptions into (more) phonetic alphabets because there are a plethora of regionalized pronunciations [1]. And there are a plethora of pronunciations because Arabic uses an impure abjad [2]. Since the vowels are not always, exactly or uniformly specified in writing, unspecified behavior leads to varying results in each compiler. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliterations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliteratio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads

nneonneo 8y ago

In Chinese, "Linux内核网络系统", literally "Linux Kernel Network System". Unlike Japanese and Korean, the Chinese language generally uses full meaning-to-meaning translations of technical terms as much as possible, and only occasionally uses phonetic nouns (e.g. 安卓 "Anzhuo" for Android) or English words (e.g. "Linux"). Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to some very unfortunate contortions, as the Chinese language is much less suited to phonetic transcription as compared to syllabary-based languages like Korean or Japanese. There's no "one obvious way" to map a foreign name onto the Chinese sound-set, and even when you do, there's likewise no obvious way to choose the corresponding characters (and you must be cautious to avoid characters with unwanted meanings or connotations).

smogcutter 8y ago
Sounds like this won't be news for you, but for others in the thread, the Chinese sometimes play around a lot with puns and rhymes in transliterated names. Here's a terrific twitter thread about Chinese nicknames for NBA players: https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en An example from the thread[1]: Stephon Marbury - 马政委 "Marburyist Political Commissar" This is a pun on "Marxist Political Commissar," since in Chinese both "Marbury" and "Marx" are spelled with the same first character "ma" ("horse"). [1] https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400 https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400
628C6l0 8y ago
Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not - something left implicit in English. (There are exceptions of course)
- nneonneo 8y ago
  Although that is somewhat of a simplification, it is certainly more true of Chinese than of English. The written language is also typed to a certain degree. Almost all disease words use a common radical (e.g. 癌症 for cancer), for example. As a more extreme case, every chemical element name in Chinese incorporates a radical that reflects the chemical's basic state - liquid (water), gaseous (air), metallic (gold), or non-metallic (earth) - symbolically connecting the old elemental system with modern chemistry.

CrystalLangUser 8y ago

With phonetic systems like Japanese and Korean, terms like this regularly get represented as-is in the script. Sometimes they don't get translated, as you can see plenty of jargon in this Korean wiki page on C++. [0] One example is 'computer' -> 컴퓨터 in Hangul. It's still 'computer', just pronounced with the Korean pronunciation rules. [0]: https://namu.wiki/w/C%2B%2B https://namu.wiki/w/C%2B%2B