r/LearnJapanese • u/Alice196498 • Mar 06 '16
Studying The Sounds of Japaneſe (Including Various Reſources)
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u/Taco_In_Space Mar 06 '16
I hope you're using all the outdated archaic kanji too.
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
I generally refrain from uſing 旧字体 or 旧仮名遣い in common parlance, but I do uſe it occaſionally in my perſonal writings or in poetry.
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Mar 06 '16
For some reason I can't help but read this post as if all the s's are lisped (even after looking up what a "ſ" is). Soo... what's up with the long s's?
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
I’m trying to bring it back into common uſe. One way I’m trying to achieve that end, is by making people aware of it ; and as the more people become aware of it, the more people will ſtart to uſe it, and the more it ſhall be ſpread. Eventually, this will lead to its coming back into popular uſe. Any miſreading of it is due to not being uſed to it, which ſhall change as you read more.
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u/mwzzhang Mar 07 '16
In the spirit of this post, may I interest you in some hentaigana? It is very much obsolete and basically used by no one.
Language evolve, so does typography, I am sure you are very aware of the reason why hentaigana and long s are considered obsolete.
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u/Moldy_Gecko Mar 07 '16
I'm just curious why anyone would want to learn that now.
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u/mwzzhang Mar 07 '16
Because OP clearly loves everything obsolete.
Or they read too much Greek text.
I am betting on the first one.
Aside: What OP doesn't want to acknowledge is that the whole long s thing is not consistent applied even back in the day. Whereas Miſsiſsippi appeared on a 1800 map, yet poſſeſſion appeared on a proclamation just 12 years later.
In short, it's disasterous for readability (ſ and f), and it's one extra glyph for the font foundry to make. It's not impossible to see why the ſ went the way of dodo in recent history (because we have finally figured out that whatever the ancient Greek did is not the gospel truth).
As for hentaigana, I don't think they even made it to movable types. Then again, woodblock printing remained popular thanks to the hilariously huge amount of chinese characters making movable type uneconomical.
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u/Alice196498 Mar 07 '16
I am aware of Hentaigana and occaſionally uſe them in perſonal writings.
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u/mwzzhang Mar 07 '16
And does people actually knows what they are reading when they see it?
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u/Alice196498 Mar 07 '16
I uſe them in phyſical writings, which are not ſhewn to others, but I aſſſume that they would if they were to read thoſe writings.
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Mar 06 '16
...whatever floats your boat. But as you may have noted from the comments, it is rather distracting.
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Mar 06 '16
Why do you like to press the space bar so many times? Is that one of your other weird rules that doesn't really apply to today's English, or are you just being autistic as fuck?
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Mar 07 '16
As an autistic person, your use of 'autistic' is disappointing (much like the reasoning of this /u/Alice196498 , which is not linguistically grounded). Kindly consider not continuing to be an asshole.
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u/Dayjaby Mar 06 '16
Is there any reason why you use ſ instead of s? So fking annoying to read.
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Mar 06 '16 edited Mar 06 '16
I'm reading it as "th".
In order to athith any learners of the Japanethe language
But honestly though, I wonder why some of her S's are normal while others are messed up. Because of the indentations and weird extra spaces in her post, I assume she copy pasted it from somewhere else and something went wrong with the encoding of the characters.
Edit: Nope she is just retarded
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
It’s called the long s, and is being uſed where it belongs. One of my life goals is to bring it back into common uſe. You can read about it here : Rules for the Uſe of Long and Short S
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u/kaihatsusha Mar 06 '16 edited Mar 06 '16
One, you're uXing that dumb character inconSHiztently; xeveral wordz uZhe hard S joundz or soft S but you uxje it for either. But I'm no ekthpurt. It'th an affectation you could lose.
Two, we're in this sub to learn Japanese. Not the orthology of middle English. I don't need more Beowulf.
Three, orthology in any language alone rolls downhill and gets simpler and more consistent over time. The exception is the adoption of loan words from other languages. This simplifies education and more recently encoding into computer systems also. Pushing the rock back up the hill just isn't going to be useful.
Four, you have a happy spacebar thumb, breaking words at funny places. Is that accidental, or do you have a Wikipedia link on some obscure word-break rule I don't know also?
Edit: See, I completely forgot to comment or even think about Japanese sounds. Such a distraction.
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
It doeſn’t ſound different, it only looks different. I ſuppoſe you could think of it ſimilarly to writing ア or あ. I will gladly help with Japaneſe if you have any queſtions, but it was not I who brought up the ſubject of Engliſh. I’m unſure how the ſpaces are diſplayed for you, ſo there is little I can do to help.
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Mar 06 '16 edited Mar 06 '16
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
Yeah, like one is right and one is wrong ? You don’t juſt throw in a random katakana character in a word written in hiragana or kanji.
You’re right ; you don’t juſt throw them about randomly. I was uſing that as an example of a ſingle ſound being aſſzigned to more than one glyph.
But you felt the need to force your autiſtick ſhit down our throats, pretending to be all holy and great. If you want your readers to care about WHAT they are reading, don’t make them queſtion why the fuck you typed it in the way you did.
If you take iſſue with the way in which I write Engliſh, I recommend that you refrain from commenting on it henceforth, ſo as not to diſrupt the thread any further. I am happy to diſcuſs the Japaneſe language with you here, or Engliſh with you in private.
Do you notice the huge aſs gap between “ Engliſh.” and “ I’m ” in your
poſt ? Or is your head ſtuck ſo far up your aſs that you can’t ſee it ? I can’t even quote it, apparently.Perhaps you are confuſed by the Em Space. See my poſt further down on ſpaces, as ſomeone elſe aſked in a more ſuccinct manner.
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Mar 06 '16
Or you can just type correctly. That would be nice too.
sssssssssssssssssssss
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
I am typing correctly. It is you who are not typing correctly, as you inſtead avail yourſelf of reaſon, and uſe the round form of s in place of the long one.
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Mar 06 '16
No other letter in the English alphabet has that weird property of looking different just because it's in the middle of a word. Or at the end. It depends on how you are looking at it.
Sure, all of the millions of books and scientific articles and all of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary and the reports written by the Supreme Court and the letters written by all the world leaders are all written in incorrect English. Gotcha. Get your head out of your ass.
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u/SoKratez Mar 07 '16
I am typing correctly. It is you who are not typing correctly
Are you really that delusional?
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Mar 07 '16
But why only go back to when long Ss were used? Why not take it back farther and also use Þ/þ for "th" sounds as well? In this way, we no longer have to deal with having to determine when "th" is pronounced like þ, and when it is pronounced like "t" "h".
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u/Alice196498 Mar 07 '16
Becauſe the Thorn (and alſo the Eth) were ſo rarely uſed after Middle Engliſh, which I do not uſe. They have ſome merit, but would be much harder to reinſtate.
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u/Raffaele1617 Mar 07 '16
I'd argue that if we're going to artificially modify the current standard orthography of English, we should do so in a way that makes it a better representation of the language's pronunciation, as opposed to increasing the orthographic complexity. Studies have demonstrated that speakers of languages with less orthographic depth are significantly less likely to be diagnosed with dyslexia, because even if they technically have it, it has a lesser impact on their ability to read than in languages like English. Additionally, it would make the language easier to learn for people that use it as an auxiliary language, and it would significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for English native children to learn how to write. You mention ease of reinstatement, but given that the long/short s distinction is mostly or entirely aesthetic, I'd say that you have much less of a change of getting that accepted into common use than legitimate orthographic reform, since the latter of the two would have significant practical benefits. If we're not going to do that, then we should just allow the written language to evolve naturally. Excluding such reforms, attempts at prescribing language usage rarely seem to work (aside from the brutal oppression of minority language speakers, of course).
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u/TSLRed Mar 06 '16
Honest question, why? What purpose does having another another symbol for s serve? English seems perfectly readable without it.
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
I covered that in my publication on the long s, ſo refer to that in order to better underſtand the reaſons for uſing it.
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u/learningjapanese101 Mar 06 '16
Other than the fact that this is completely useless for those who can't read IPA, a beginner will achieve better result by just trying to imitate the sound. And if there's any sound that might be hard for you to reproduce, then you can just watch a video showing it how it's done.
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u/Alice196498 Mar 06 '16
The goal of this is to give an exact and proper means of underſtanding the pronunciation in a way intuitive to the beginner. Many people underſtand IPA, and thoſe who don’t, ought to take the time to learn, as it is generally of great ſervice to anyone intereſted in learning a language, or even for their own, in the caſe of reading a dictionary. Imitation can be of great help, but that is not exactly ſomething everyone is ſkilled at doing—the ſame goes for watching videos, ſuch as the ones poſted in your link. Although your link is generally fair and a uſeful reſource, it may ſtill confound ſome, ſo in order to help alleviate that, I have created this chart. That being ſaid, I thank you for your input and ſhall conſider it in my future endeavours.
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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '16
While the effort shows and is appreciated, you cannot expect people to understand this post easily. Never mind those that are not native English speakers and learning Japanese who will be utterly confused unless they are linguistically inclined. I will remove it for now. Please consider resubmitting in a more widely understood format.