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Fun fact (not fabricated BECAUSE IT'S APRIL 2ND OVER HERE): Japanese alphabets (kana) doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases. There are two different type
by euske 6y ago
Fun fact (not fabricated BECAUSE IT'S APRIL 2ND OVER HERE):
Japanese alphabets (kana) doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases. There are two different types of kanas (round ones and square ones) but they are kind of equal in terms of strength/stress so they can't be used to express anger.
People on 2-Channel forum (Japan's 4chan, basically) came up with a brilliant idea, which is to insert a space between each letter so that it looks a bit wider and has an extra oomph.
Example:
- normal: 今日はいい天気だね。 (it's a fine day, isn't it.)
- angry: 今 日 は い い 天 気 だ ね 。 (IT'S A F*KING NICE DAY ISN'T IT)
- xmprt 6y agoThe only difference I see is in the kerning of the letters.
- jagged-chisel 6y agoyes. that's pretty much what GP said.
- wpearse 6y agoLet’s be honest... that’s exactly what GP said ;)
- totetsu 6y agokana's uppercase potential exists out there somewhere in latent space
- nullsense 6y agoThey do have half width versions though that are used when typing sometimes あ -> ぁ like if you want to indicate stretching vowel sounds out for emphasis.
- aviraldg 6y agoIsn't Katakana (for words that would normally be written with Hiragana or Kanji) also used sometimes to indicate emphasis? https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/5314/31389 https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/5314/31389
- fomine3 6y agoYes. writing word in kanji or katakana sometimes works as emphasis. In other words, writing word in hiragana works as not to be emphasised. Writing word in katakana that usually written in kanji is also works as emphasis with a bit different meaning. It tend to be used as stereotype. For example, 福島(Fukushima) / 広島(Hiroshima) is just a name of prefecture, but sometimes written フクシマ / ヒロシマ that refers nuclear plant accident / nuke bomb event. (I really dislike this usage).
- nonbirithm 6y agoSometimes all-katakana is used in fiction to indicate foreigner or robotic voices (like the Starmen in Mother 2). Writing a scream as a string of ア's instead of あ's gives it a piercing quality, moreso when you add the dakuten marker (゛), even though it doesn't change the pronunciation in this case.
- numpad0 6y agoMore of an indication that implications exist, e.g. ガンバる implies it’s supposed to be but not in kanji, ヒロシマ or フクシマ implies nuclear context. They can be used to convey tones in text similarly to how italics, caps, symbols and other decorations work in general, I think that’s what they meant to say by emphasis.
- dheera 6y agoNo concept of case is also true of Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and if I'm not mistaken, most South Asian scripts as well. There are an incredible amount of other ways to add emphasis in Chinese though, so it's not lacking anything, and I imagine the same is true of the other languages.
- 10000truths 6y agoArabic script has a vaguely similar concept of a given letter having multiple (up to 3) forms. The form depends on what letters precede and/or succeed it (if any).
- kingofpandora 6y agoThat has nothing to do with emphasis though.
- efreak 6y agoNeither do uppercase letterforms. Uppercase individual letters aren't emphasized, that's just grammar, much like Hebrew's final letters that are only used at the end of words (I'm guessing these indicated the ends of words to assist reading when spacing wasn't used--I've certainly found it useful as such).
- davchana 6y agoGurmukhi script also has no case difference, but has something like symbols, which adds sounds like nn ann, u in put or cut
- spijdar 6y agoAnd it's worth mentioning how relatively recently case was "invented" even for Latin and Greek/Greek-derived scripts (including Cyrillic, and probably Latin itself technically...) The way we write modern text is more modern than most people realize, I think. The letter 'j' wasn't really used as a separate letter indicating a separate sound until sometime around the 16th century I think! Case is older, but not ancient. I've seen some Greek on 3rd/4th century middle eastern ruins and I struggle to read the "all upper case with no spaces" writing sometimes, but that's just how it was! No "lower case" until much later...
- Clewza313 6y agoThe standard/formal way to emphasize in Japanese is with bōten "side dots": https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/03/furigana-dots-bouten.html https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/03/furigana-dots-bout... However, there is no easy way to enter or display these online, hence hacks like spacing.
- infogulch 6y ago> enter or display Hey Unicode Consortium, where you at?
- bargle0 6y agoMaking stupid fucking emoji.
- naikrovek 6y agoThey accept suggestions, and people suggest emoji. So suggest something that isn't emoji and it'll likely be accepted and added to the next version.
- jmmcd 6y agoThat doesn't help
- naikrovek 6y agoSuggest the characters that you feel are missing... Was I not clear?
- jmmcd 6y agoHmm, it looks like the discussion about emoji has been removed/moderated from the page? Anyway, my point was only that if someone is unhappy that emojis are being added, then proposing new non-emojis doesn't really solve their problem.
- lifthrasiir 6y agoThere is a similar thing in Korean Hangul (also unicased) where you put full stop between each letter: "알겠습니다." ("I see.") vs. "알.겠.습.니.다." I believe it is an independent invention.
- banachtarski 6y ago소.데.스.네. ^^
- lifthrasiir 6y agoThat kind [1] of language-script mismatches mainly for humorous purposes actually exists in Korean and is considered a kind of 한본어 (a portmanteau of 한국어 Korean language and 일본어 Japanese language). [1] In this case, Japanese そうですね "I see" written in Hangul.
- tasogare 6y agoChinese phonology is a bit restrictive but I have great fun written short messages in other languages (Japanese, French, English) with Chinese characters. Of course the number of friends I can do that why is very limited, which in a way makes it is even nicer.
- banachtarski 6y agoYea, I do it all the time in Korean when joking about something with friends. 친구들이랑 그렇게 얘기해요
- thaumasiotes 6y agoIn Chinese you use exclamation points: 我！太！满！足！了！
- kmeisthax 6y agoWait that's the opposite of what westerners do with fullwidth romaji - normal: It's a fine day, isn't it. - vaporwave: Ｉｔ＇ｓ ａ ｆｉｎｅ ｄａｙ， ｉｓｎ＇ｔ ｉｔ．
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cookiengineer 6y agoEvery time I'm reading these letter or the mega-wide numbers in Japanese uploads on youtube, I'm having a heart attack thinking my font cache is broken again. Not. funny.
- qiqing 6y agoThat's a very good example of using full stops in English for emphasis.
- hudixt 6y agoThis should be same for many language. Many Indian languages doesn't have a concept of upper/lower cases.
- maxnoe 6y agoThis is a form of typographic emphasis also widely used in German Fraktur texts, called Sperrsatz: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrsatz https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrsatz
- HelloNurse 6y agoFraktur letters are even more boxy than kanji and Chinese ideographs, it isn't accidental.
- jiofih 6y agoa n g r y this is also used in English but for a mocking tone.
- StavrosK 6y agoThat's an interesting fact, but I can't help but feel like your comment is a bit too unaware of its own culture. After all, there's nothing that makes capitals inherently shouty, it's just another convention. Saying "they didn't have capitals so they used spaces" would sound odd to an alien, who would wonder why capitals were necessary in the first place.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mekkkkkk 6y agoBut he's not talking to aliens though. We all know what putting stress or emphasis on words means. I'd be surprised if that was an exclusively western phenomenon. It's fun to hear how it's done in scripts that doesn't support our (as in the average HN reader) default way of doing it (which would be caps or italics/bold).
- seesawtron 6y agoMany of the Asian languages do not have the concepts of upper or lower case. They contain vowels that go beyond the basic 5 "aeiou" of the English language (eg. see [0]). These suffice to let the speaker know how exactly to say the word unlike in English where it has to be learned case by case based on whatever is popular or acceptable pronunciation. A subset of of these languages are tonal languages which also have special characters to additionally allow the speaker to set the pitch of the word correctly which then changes the meaning of the words [1]. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/hindi/guide/alphabet.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/hindi/guide/alphabet.sh... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
- mekkkkkk 6y agoI love how explicit some written languages seem to be. It sounds great to be able to reliably pronounce any word perfectly. I suppose it's a trade off of complexity though. Learning these more explicit languages seems really daunting. Maybe it's just bias?
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoI love Japanese culture and find myself really curious about it. Thanks for sharing this. Is there a place where I could learn more things like this one?
- underlines 6y agoI learned Thai in the last 10 years and they don't have letter cases. I naturally began to use spacings for emphasis in "Chat language". It's so natural to do this. กาก -> fail ก า ก ก ก ก ก -> FAIL!!!!!11!
- amake 6y agoKana are not alphabets; they are syllabaries.