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> Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by mac

> Pedantry out of the way, You could make a case that the Wikipedia is the same language and you can change the character set pretty much interchangeably by machine This is absolutely not true. Even ignoring idiomatic differences (which are comparable to UK vs US English), the conversion from Traditional -> Simplified is a one-way function. The mapping between characters is not one-to-one: there are a bunch of traditional characters that map to the same simplified character, and some words that are dropped entirely. You can't up-convert from Simplified -> Traditional without guessing. It's like saying we should just use simple.wikipedia.org for the English language and then use a thesaurus on the client side to auto-convert text to use big words for en.wikipedia.org. It ain't going to be readable.

eloisius 6y ago
Your analogy is not accurate. The Simple English Wikipedia is for ESL readers who are still learning English. The usage and grammar are different. A closer (but still imperfect) analogy is the "simplified" spelling of American English vs British where we dropped a lot of U's, or shortened "tonnes" to "tons." The mapping is not isometric in either direction. There are simplified characters that collide when mapped to traditional and vice versa. In practice this isn't a problem though, because despite what many people think, each Chinese word is not necessarily one character. It is possible to use the context from surrounding characters to accurately map them back and forth. I'm sure it's not perfect, but for the general case it works. It's not a hypothetical either, Wikipedia does this currently.
- garmaine 6y ago
  It’s extremely far from perfect, and I know of no native speakers which use that automatic mapping. It’s like trying to read something through google translate: the point gets across, but the errors distract. And it IS like the simple -> en example I gave, at times. Because there are more differences than just character usage. It also affects word choice and idioms. Even when the automatic translation picks the right character, it can still come off as... weird. That’s why native speakers don’t use these features. It puts the text into an uncanny valley that is annoying to read.

eloisius 6y ago

Your analogy is not accurate. The Simple English Wikipedia is for ESL readers who are still learning English. The usage and grammar are different. A closer (but still imperfect) analogy is the "simplified" spelling of American English vs British where we dropped a lot of U's, or shortened "tonnes" to "tons." The mapping is not isometric in either direction. There are simplified characters that collide when mapped to traditional and vice versa. In practice this isn't a problem though, because despite what many people think, each Chinese word is not necessarily one character. It is possible to use the context from surrounding characters to accurately map them back and forth. I'm sure it's not perfect, but for the general case it works. It's not a hypothetical either, Wikipedia does this currently.

garmaine 6y ago
It’s extremely far from perfect, and I know of no native speakers which use that automatic mapping. It’s like trying to read something through google translate: the point gets across, but the errors distract. And it IS like the simple -> en example I gave, at times. Because there are more differences than just character usage. It also affects word choice and idioms. Even when the automatic translation picks the right character, it can still come off as... weird. That’s why native speakers don’t use these features. It puts the text into an uncanny valley that is annoying to read.