- Joined
- Feb 8, 2019
While I don't speak or understand anything other than the language of mutts, I've always been interested in eastern alphabets that didn't originate in a desert, but I'm glad I've never bothered learning any.
Chinese sounds nice, what with every word or concept being only one character, sounds simple and compact. But the problem is you have to take so long to write something that downscales so poorly that it's almost not worth it. Hell, the government made Simplified Chinese to improve literacy rates because quite a few of their characters were just too complicated. Doesn't help there's at least 50,000 surviving characters, though only weird literary nerds know that many.
Japan... whoo boy. I know the joke is that everything looks like a fucking alien wrote it, but holy hell. Did you know that Japan has three forms of writing? There's the Chinese (Kanji) script they kept after mainlanders gave it to them, still containing around 50,000 characters with only a few hundred getting simplified, though they're barely used. Then there's the syllabic languages. Katakana and Hiragana both contain the same sounds and homophones, but Hiragana (lit, women's writing)'s the majority of what you'll see (it mostly looks like retarded squiggles), whereas Katakana (looks more "intentional" and doesn't have a whole lot of circles or wraparound lines) is used for more important words, like verbs and names. Think of it like bolding Joshua Moon in the middle of a sentence. It's not pronounced in any weird way, it's just written differently, and, while not really "appropriate," you could just as easily write it in Hiragana or, more appropriately, Kanji. I know some people consider Romaji a fourth language, but really, it's just using phonetically writing Japanese in English. I could get into gay shit like how there's a retarded amount of prefixes and suffixes or how there's multiple meanings or ways to read kanji (the most common of which has ELEVEN different meanings), but this section is long enough and it's mostly just sperging about how obtuse the Japanese are.
One moonrune language I can't shit on out of the gate, however, is Hangul. You see, back in the 15th century, some Korean king realized long before the Chinese ran headlong into the modern world that the written language they spread everywhere sucked and was just as much of a contributing factor to illiteracy as poor education, so he made his own language and it's both consistent and readable by people who know what means what. Hangul is comprised of characters that represent consonants and vowels, and you combine them in a consistent way to create words. It's a sort of mix between an alphabet and a syllabic system. You take a couple of noises, put them together into one character that represents a syllable, then pair it with another to create a word.
I can read along with Hira-and-Katakana, but the second I hit kanji, I have to look up a guide to see what kana are used to pronounce it. With Hangul, even though I don't understand what I'm reading, I intrinsically understand how it's pronounced because the parts it's composed of always mean one thing. It's how I would create a written language. My only complaint is it's attached to probably the gayest sounding mainland language, Koreans constantly sound like they're talking about cock and making sexual moans, whereas Chinese people sound soulless and the Japanese sound like whiny bitches.
I haven't had any real experience with other eastern languages, like Thai, Vietnamese, or Malaysian, but I'd be pretty interested in seeing people's thoughts about them.
Chinese sounds nice, what with every word or concept being only one character, sounds simple and compact. But the problem is you have to take so long to write something that downscales so poorly that it's almost not worth it. Hell, the government made Simplified Chinese to improve literacy rates because quite a few of their characters were just too complicated. Doesn't help there's at least 50,000 surviving characters, though only weird literary nerds know that many.
Japan... whoo boy. I know the joke is that everything looks like a fucking alien wrote it, but holy hell. Did you know that Japan has three forms of writing? There's the Chinese (Kanji) script they kept after mainlanders gave it to them, still containing around 50,000 characters with only a few hundred getting simplified, though they're barely used. Then there's the syllabic languages. Katakana and Hiragana both contain the same sounds and homophones, but Hiragana (lit, women's writing)'s the majority of what you'll see (it mostly looks like retarded squiggles), whereas Katakana (looks more "intentional" and doesn't have a whole lot of circles or wraparound lines) is used for more important words, like verbs and names. Think of it like bolding Joshua Moon in the middle of a sentence. It's not pronounced in any weird way, it's just written differently, and, while not really "appropriate," you could just as easily write it in Hiragana or, more appropriately, Kanji. I know some people consider Romaji a fourth language, but really, it's just using phonetically writing Japanese in English. I could get into gay shit like how there's a retarded amount of prefixes and suffixes or how there's multiple meanings or ways to read kanji (the most common of which has ELEVEN different meanings), but this section is long enough and it's mostly just sperging about how obtuse the Japanese are.
One moonrune language I can't shit on out of the gate, however, is Hangul. You see, back in the 15th century, some Korean king realized long before the Chinese ran headlong into the modern world that the written language they spread everywhere sucked and was just as much of a contributing factor to illiteracy as poor education, so he made his own language and it's both consistent and readable by people who know what means what. Hangul is comprised of characters that represent consonants and vowels, and you combine them in a consistent way to create words. It's a sort of mix between an alphabet and a syllabic system. You take a couple of noises, put them together into one character that represents a syllable, then pair it with another to create a word.
"Hangeul in Korean is written as 한글, not ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ"
I haven't had any real experience with other eastern languages, like Thai, Vietnamese, or Malaysian, but I'd be pretty interested in seeing people's thoughts about them.
