3 ms·

Why would reversing 겁 into 벅 make sense? If I asked someone to reverse the string 예제, I'd expect 제예 and not ㅔ졩.

zyx321 7y ago
I have to admit I'm not a native Korean speaker. Are you? The issue brought up by the article is that neither makes sense. Reversing a string is not a semantically meaningful operation.
- voidumbrella 7y ago
  Yes, while 겁 is made out of ㄱ ㅓ ㅂ, native Korean speakers would expect a string reversing function to operate on precomposed syllable codepoints rather than breaking them into the components. I do agree with the overall point; just thought this specific example was a bit odd.
  - mistersquid 7y ago
    Your point is well-taken with Hangul, but what about, say, English? Does the string-reversing function receive "English" and output "hsilgnE" or "lishEng"? What if the string matches no known words (e.g. alphanumeric passphrase)? What if the string represents a single syllable (e.g. "was")? Thinking of strings as connected to vocalized syllables only makes sense with strings meant to represent syllables, sure, but even that can lead to counterintuitive results. I know you weren't defending the idea of a string-reversing function, but your objection is not exactly grounded in principle, either. That is, when you ask > Why would reversing 겁 into 벅 make sense? one could easily say, why wouldn't that literal reversal of the phoneme make sense? I understand it doesn't, but that's the problem with Unicode reversing-functions.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  Hangul is phonetic, but with letters arranged into syllabic symbols. In Spanish there's a gibberish construction where you reverse syllables ("al vesre", meaning, "al revés", which means "backwards"). Reversing text makes little sense except as an interview trick question, I guess, but if you must make sense of it, then reversing syllables makes more sense than going further. BTW, you can reverse Unicode (in any UTF), so long as you don't really care about the semantics of the result -- if all you want to do is reverse the codepoints, you could. After all, it is an interesting programming interview trick question, though admittedly then "you can't really" answer is more fun because you get to talk about glyphs and ligatures and so on, and natural language, thus demonstrating your mastery to the person who was trying to trick you.

I have to admit I'm not a native Korean speaker. Are you? The issue brought up by the article is that neither makes sense. Reversing a string is not a semantically meaningful operation.

voidumbrella 7y ago
Yes, while 겁 is made out of ㄱ ㅓ ㅂ, native Korean speakers would expect a string reversing function to operate on precomposed syllable codepoints rather than breaking them into the components. I do agree with the overall point; just thought this specific example was a bit odd.
- mistersquid 7y ago
  Your point is well-taken with Hangul, but what about, say, English? Does the string-reversing function receive "English" and output "hsilgnE" or "lishEng"? What if the string matches no known words (e.g. alphanumeric passphrase)? What if the string represents a single syllable (e.g. "was")? Thinking of strings as connected to vocalized syllables only makes sense with strings meant to represent syllables, sure, but even that can lead to counterintuitive results. I know you weren't defending the idea of a string-reversing function, but your objection is not exactly grounded in principle, either. That is, when you ask > Why would reversing 겁 into 벅 make sense? one could easily say, why wouldn't that literal reversal of the phoneme make sense? I understand it doesn't, but that's the problem with Unicode reversing-functions.
cryptonector 7y ago
Hangul is phonetic, but with letters arranged into syllabic symbols. In Spanish there's a gibberish construction where you reverse syllables ("al vesre", meaning, "al revés", which means "backwards"). Reversing text makes little sense except as an interview trick question, I guess, but if you must make sense of it, then reversing syllables makes more sense than going further. BTW, you can reverse Unicode (in any UTF), so long as you don't really care about the semantics of the result -- if all you want to do is reverse the codepoints, you could. After all, it is an interesting programming interview trick question, though admittedly then "you can't really" answer is more fun because you get to talk about glyphs and ligatures and so on, and natural language, thus demonstrating your mastery to the person who was trying to trick you.