• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    18 hours ago

    Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.

    • stray@pawb.social
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      55 minutes ago

      I don’t mean to agree with that other person hating on kanji, but if they’re going to take on the task of making a new font they could potentially alter the writing system somewhat to simplify some things and/or extend versatility of some characters. A new evolution would be exciting.

    • PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml
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      17 hours ago

      Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.

      • geekwithsoul@piefed.social
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        11 hours ago
        1. that’s literally one of the most bigoted comments I’ve ever seen in the fediverse

        2. your comment is in English, a language so non-functional it’s the only one that had to have spelling bees to get kids to learn its asinine rules

        • Holytimes@sh.itjust.works
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          5 hours ago

          Uhh… Basically every language I can think of have had some form of childhood activity that pushed learning it’s asinine rules at some point in it’s history.

          Cause fun fact.

          Literally every language that has ever existed is batshit crazy, makes no sense and might as well be unhinged nonsense.

          That’s not a monopoly English has. Not by a fucking long shot.

          That guy’s comment is racist as fuck tho

          • PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml
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            3 hours ago

            I also think it’s an excellent time for Americans to drop imperial units and use metrics like a functional measurement system - is this also racist?

              • PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml
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                23 minutes ago

                I think ideograms suck because they are an extremely bad writing system, and imperial units suck because they are an extremely bad measurement system… why is one racist and the other is not?

                If someone around was still using roman numerals I’d also say it’s an excellent time to drop that system, but fortunately everyone already did.

                edit: Bonus question: If I say it’s an excellent time to drop the Gregorian calendar do I win at racism for expanding it to the whole world?
                The Chinese use ideograms so booo, but their local mix of lunar and solar calendar is great.

                • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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                  10 minutes ago

                  I think ideograms suck because they are an extremely bad writing system

                  That’s nice, but what you originally said was that “the Japanese don’t have a functional writing system”, which is bigoted, because it constitutes an unreasonable belief/prejudice against a particular group of people (“the Japanese”). It’s an unreasonable position because the Japanese writing system is obviously functional, as millions of people use it to great effect every day.

                  imperial units suck because they are an extremely bad measurement system

                  This is not bigotry because it isn’t an unreasonable belief, and it doesn’t target/prejudice against one specific group (other than ‘imperial measurement users’, which isn’t really an identifying or culturally significant group).

                  Bonus question: If I say it’s an excellent time to drop the Gregorian calendar do I win at racism for expanding it to the whole world?

                  Bonus answer: no, bigotry targets/prejudices against a specific identifying group. “The whole world” doesn’t qualify as a group that you can be bigoted against. Hating everyone makes you a grumpy curmudgeon, but not a racist.

                  Hope this helps.

      • zaperberry@lemmy.ca
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        17 hours ago

        Why? And what constitutes a “functional language” to you?

        Is the fact that they can read, write, speak, and understand the language not “functional” enough for you? The point gets across to the person receiving the message.

        You can even translate it to a “functional language” of your choice, with some restrictions. Translation restrictions aren’t isolated to Japanese either, there’s lots of languages that have things which don’t translate well, or at all, to English.

      • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        … they already have two syllabaries. They’re not about to upend their whole writing system just to maintain foreign intellectual property.