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Korean language dropped Kanji altogether postwar, and one of funny anecdote circulated on the bad parts of Internet in 2000s was that a cause of a minor train f

Korean language dropped Kanji altogether postwar, and one of funny anecdote circulated on the bad parts of Internet in 2000s was that a cause of a minor train fire in South Korea was that a requirement of fireproof wood was misinterpreted as incendiary wood, because the language relied on Kanji for distinction between those. CJK languages could be used in phonetics only, sort of as in backup mode, but not really.

jefftk 3y ago
If only they'd used english and required inflammable wood!
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Many Latin-derived languages have that one problematic word. It's not only English. The opposite of it would be "non-inflammable", so it's not really ambiguous. It's just anti-systemic and confusing. "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    > "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it. On the contrary! "Flammable" has been used in English for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable) and at this point it's used intentionally to make it clear that we really do mean something can burn.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      And "inflammable" has been around for so long that it has spread to a big handful of languages. One of those being English. Flammable is the obvious construction you get from the Latin, but it's not exactly the word that spread into English. It seems to have been created there later.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    I think the ambiguity in inflammable lies in in- prefix rather than in the second part. If someone told me that incombustible and inflammable used to point at the same property at one point, I’d believe that.
dheera 3y ago
> but not really Languages will evolve to disambiguate those situations. Vietnamese and Korean already have done so. They have no practical issues communicating with their writing systems. It's not impossible for Chinese to do the same. Native speakers who learned Chinese through Chinese characters will always find it the most natural, and would surely consider it a pity to lose characters, but if an entire generation is hypothetically brought up reading pinyin only, they will find it the most natural and find ways to disambiguate words on their own. Not saying I support such a shift happening in Chinese, just saying that it's not impossible for the human brain and society to cope with, if it were to happen, and it's not something we (the aging generation) have much say in.

jefftk 3y ago

If only they'd used english and required inflammable wood!

marcosdumay 3y ago
Many Latin-derived languages have that one problematic word. It's not only English. The opposite of it would be "non-inflammable", so it's not really ambiguous. It's just anti-systemic and confusing. "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.
- jefftk 3y ago
  > "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it. On the contrary! "Flammable" has been used in English for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable) and at this point it's used intentionally to make it clear that we really do mean something can burn.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    And "inflammable" has been around for so long that it has spread to a big handful of languages. One of those being English. Flammable is the obvious construction you get from the Latin, but it's not exactly the word that spread into English. It seems to have been created there later.
- numpad0 3y ago
  I think the ambiguity in inflammable lies in in- prefix rather than in the second part. If someone told me that incombustible and inflammable used to point at the same property at one point, I’d believe that.

dheera 3y ago

> but not really Languages will evolve to disambiguate those situations. Vietnamese and Korean already have done so. They have no practical issues communicating with their writing systems. It's not impossible for Chinese to do the same. Native speakers who learned Chinese through Chinese characters will always find it the most natural, and would surely consider it a pity to lose characters, but if an entire generation is hypothetically brought up reading pinyin only, they will find it the most natural and find ways to disambiguate words on their own. Not saying I support such a shift happening in Chinese, just saying that it's not impossible for the human brain and society to cope with, if it were to happen, and it's not something we (the aging generation) have much say in.