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Hong Kong protesters messing with the characters, part 2
- ggg3 7y agodo i have to know the cantonese roots? because the 3 components are nowhere in the red and black image.
- mdturnerphys 7y agoComponents of each of the three characters are in the constructed character. I think it's the top two components of the first, the full second character, and the left and right components of the third. The constructed character is in calligraphic style so the components look a bit different than in the printed representations.
- ggg3 7y agoah. today i learned i also cant read calligraphic style. thanks.
- Lucadg 7y agoCan the Hk government ban these? Honest question.
- Leary 7y agono
- dmix 7y agoBan what exactly?
- Lucadg 7y agoThey banned cryptography in Australia recently so we can't safely assume weird characters are safe neither.
- mdturnerphys 7y agoIf you're asking about an electronic ban, it's irrelevant since this is a recently invented character and is not represented in Unicode, etc.
- est 7y agoSince it's artificially crafted character, it's not part of unicode, therefore the transmission of the character will be through images, so to ban this character it's no different from banning Winnie the Pooh pictures, by using state-of-the-art deep neural networks to classify images. To avoid the ban, one has to use the most common characters which must be statistically insignificant to computer recognition programs, like how most network apps obfuscate their traffic to https.
- throwaway1997 7y agoThere is currently no censorship in Hong Kong and no laws which would require them to censor anything.
- bjornsteffanson 7y agoFar less serious (and not polysyllabic), but still linguistically interesting: the Chinese character for _biáng_, one of the most complex in modern usage. There are 15 variants of the character consisting of between 56 and 70 strokes, which can be recalled with various mnemonics. It is not yet included in standard Unicode, but scheduled for inclusion in March 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles
- mdturnerphys 7y agoAlso from Language Log: "Writing Chinese characters as a form of punishment" https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=21965 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=21965
- roenxi 7y agoWikipedia claims that the Chinese character with the most strokes translates to the English word 'verbose' [0, 1]. Whoever came up with that one must have been a wicked deadpan humourist. I live with regret that I will never appreciate good Chinese (written) poetry. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Rare_and_complex_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Rare_and_co... [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%AA%9A%A5 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%AA%9A%A5
- why-oh-why 7y agoHow do these complex characters come about? Surely they could express the same meaning with a couple of smaller characters? I feel that this is comparable to writing "Jentacular" instead of "pertaining to breakfast." It's a single word instead of 3, but who understands that (let alone write it, in Biangbiang's case)?
- mdturnerphys 7y agoPart 1 here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43784 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=43784 See the footnotes of part 2 for other related posts.