there are 10 katakana that are identical to kanji in some fonts
| left | right |
|---|---|
| 二 | ニ |
| 八 | ハ |
| 力 | カ |
| 口 | ロ |
| 工 | エ |
| 夕 | タ |
| 一 | ー |
| 厶 | ム |
| 才 | オ |
| ヶ | ケ |
which is katakana?
- left
- right
0 voters
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When I learned Japanese, I actually have to “unlearn” some of them to not be confused with their sounds in Chinese, although some of them do help like
もモ(mo) came from the Chinese character 毛 mao
It’s easier to remember some of them, if you know where these simplified forms came from
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I just read this on Wikipedia:
In the hymnbook used in the Catholic Church in Japan, there are some special kana characters. To represent the /l/ sound in the Latin language, the R column kana letters with ゜(the handakuten diacritic) are used (such as ラ゚ for [la], レ゚ for [le], リ゚ for [li], ロ゚ for [lo] and ル゚ for [lu]).
I wonder whether they represent V with ウ (U) or with W-series kana (ワ wa, ヰ wi, ヱ we, ヲ wo).
Transcription of Latin into katakana must be an interesting topic. Here’s one attempt, for instance, using the Ainu small kana which don’t attach a vowel.
| Latin | Kana | “Standard” transcription |
|---|---|---|
| Arma virumque canō, Trojae quī prīmus ad orbis Italiam | アㇽマ · ヰルンㇰヱ · カノオ , ㇳロヤエ · ㇰヰイ · ㇷ゚リイムㇲ · アド · オㇿビㇲ · イタリ゚アン | Arma wirumkwe kanoo, Troyae kwii priimus ado orbis Italian |
Also, RIP Catholic priest and Latin scholar Reginald Foster, who died at 81 on December 25th last year, perhaps from corona.
To quote Wikipedia:
Foster lived in Rome in an ascetic manner, sleeping on the floor under a thin blanket, giving away all gifts except books. Instead of wearing the clerical garb, which he believed no longer corresponded to the dress of poor people, he instead donned blue pants and shirts from Sears, with plain black sneakers and a blue polyester windbreaker in cold weather. The Swiss Guards called him il benzinaio (the gas-station attendant)
(…)
In addition to his full-time work as a Papal secretary, Foster also served as a priest, tutored students, and had a weekly program on Vatican Radio , The Latin Lover. Starting in 1977, he taught ten Latin courses a year at the Gregorian University in Rome. (…) the university fired him in 2006 for allowing too many students to take his classes there without paying. As a result, in November 2006 Foster founded his own free Academia Romae Latinitatis
(…)
Foster headed the effort to produce a modern Latin dictionary, Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis, published in 1992–1997. After retiring, he published The Mere Bones of Latin (Ossa Latinitatis Sola)
technically maybe not, but 99% of its use is inside katakana words
these are outdated
it usually writes now as
| | |
|—|—|—|
|wi|ウィ|
|wu|ウゥ|
|we|ウェ|
|wo|ウォ|
or
| vi | ヴィ |
| vu | ヴ |
| ve | ヴェ |
| vo | ヴォ |
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I’m not sure you’re using them correctly, the letter without the vowel is the big one before the smaller one, e.g. きゅ is not ki-yu, but kyu, フェ is not fu-e, but fe, and so on. Virumque would be ヴィルンクェ for example.
I was referring to this sub-article (and taking some liberties). Ainu has its own tweaks to kana, since the language is more permissive of consonants not being followed by vowels.
But you’re right, it wasn’t the most natural method.
This is an interesting video, by the way.
This is beautiful
Way to write any number from 1 to 9999 in 1 symbol
You need to remember only 9 symbols
1492
1776
1916
2001
2020
I wonder if it possible to create system where you can write any 2 numbers and instantly know sum.
There should be symbols that replace too many lines - so it also useful for normal use
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It’s nice, but in essence it’s not different from the arabic 4 digit numerals, except that it’s glued together to become what we’d perceive as one symbol.
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Sometimes the dumb way is the best way?
Written a number from bottom to top inside grids in digit grouping
This is 195
Humans tend to intuitively know the quantity less than 10, especially organized in rows, and they can be in any orientation in the grid.
This is 345
Adding two number would be to write the second number in an organized but supplementary way, fill the spots haven’t be occupied by the augend, and put the rest from the start
From top to bottom, every time a digit ground is filled, one extra ball dropped down to the bottom group.
And we get the answer 540
Although it is less of a “symbol system”, but a written form of “Abacus”
The Aegean numerals - Wikipedia seems to be like this. And it certainly would work. And Maya numerals - Wikipedia uses similar technique for addition and subtraction. Although it might have some unintended problems, like putting them along side existing scripts
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How ancient mathmagicians pushing the “rod” representation to the extreme
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The good old multiplication table (in Chinese it is called the nine-nine-multiplication-table/song), is very ancient, and still being taught today. Probably no shortcut for a general multiplication method with any digit length.
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One advantage to the traditional Roman numerals is that they can be summed by combination.
eg. 1806 + 244 can be written ↀⅮⅭⅭⅭⅤⅠ + ⅭⅭⅩⅩⅩⅩⅠⅠⅠⅠ, and summed as so:
ↀ Ⅾ ⅭⅭⅭ Ⅴ Ⅰ (1806) +
ⅭⅭ ⅩⅩⅩⅩ ⅠⅠⅠⅠ (244) =
ↀ Ⅾ ⅭⅭⅭⅭⅭ ⅩⅩⅩⅩ Ⅴ ⅠⅠⅠⅠⅠ =
ↀ ⅮⅮ ⅩⅩⅩⅩ ⅤⅤ =
ↀↀ ⅩⅩⅩⅩⅩ =
ↀↀⅬ (2050)
The position of the numerals is technically meaningless, so we never have to “carry digits”. We can just continue combining numerals into ones of higher value until we reach the final number, which will be made up of digits that can no longer be combined.
“Modern” Roman numerals use subtractive notation for reasons of compactness and aesthetics, ie. using ⅠⅤ for ⅠⅠⅠⅠ and ⅠⅩ for ⅩⅠⅠⅠⅠ; but this introduces positional information and cripples combinatorial addition.
Now try multiplication with Roman numerals 
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I just noticed Anoek’s typo of purgatory as pergatory and thought I’d discuss the word.
purgatory or Purgatory is a Latinate term, descended directly from Latin to English.
Its source is the noun púrgátórium, -a, which means a purgative or cleansing. One sees the connection.
The root of púrgátórium is the adjective púrgátórius, meaning “purgatory” in the literal sense: for example, a medicámen púrgátórium was a “purgatory medicine”, a medicine to induce purging.
In turn, púrgátórius derives from the verb púrgó, “to cleanse, purge”. English purge doesn’t come directly from púrgó but rather through French purgier.
And what is the ultimate root of purgatory? That is the adjective púrus, meaning – of course – “pure”.
I didn’t want to bump an old thread just for this, but I wanted to respond to a discussion in Post mortem for Fan YunRuo 8p, also without wishing to trivialise the subject matter.
Groin: On 2 july this year, the famous player Fan Yun Ruo 8p, aged 24, falled from a building and passed away.
李建澔2: Not a big thing but there usually isn’t space in chinese names actually pretend someone is named abc. You write it as A BC without a space.
Samraku: Do you mean there isn’t a space separating the surname from the given name? If so, I think it’s normal to transliterate that into English with a space, because while Chinese doesn’t use spaces, English does.
RubyMineshaft: I think he was talking about the space in the middle of the given name. OP transliterated it as Fan Yun Ruo. It’s a bit pedantic, but @李建澔2 is correct in saying it should be Fan Yunruo.
I think this is a late 20th C. / 21st C. convention.
It’s pretty common to see translations such as Go Sei Gen in mid-20th C. material, and A B C also seems to have been a popular style in the 19th C. and earlier.
This has got something to do with Wade-Giles vs. Pinyin, I guess. But I’m thinking of the dash for the two syllables of the given name. This is still in use in Honk Kong, like with Wong Kar-Wai, or Chow Yun-Fat, the actor from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. For historical people too, Chiang Kai-Shek is still common to see.
Vietnamese names are more usually seen without dashes like Ho Chi Minh.
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Vietnamese names do have three parts, I think: father’s family name, mother’s family name, given name.
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Clocks vs Watches
I think it’s interesting how in English we make the distinction between “clocks” and “watches” as (nearly) mutually exclusive classes. The distinction being that a “watch” is something that is worn or carried by a person, while a “clock” is not (although a clock could be mounted in a vehicle and hence be mobile).
I hedge my earlier statement with a "nearly" since there are always exceptions that challenge any rule
For the sake of having a word to refer to both classes at once, I feel that the modern English usage is to say “timepiece” to refer to the superclass that contains both “watches” and “clocks”. However, traditionally, the phrase “clock” was used to specifically refer to a time-telling device that audibly indicated the time (such as with bell chimes), while “timepiece” was used to refer to something that did not use sound and relied on visual indication instead.
I wonder to what degree these distinctions shape the way we think and see the world. Some languages don’t make the distinction. For example, it seems that in German “Uhr / Uhren” is the commonly used word to refer to both “clocks” and “watches”. However, I guess “Wache” is also used, but might carry connotations of “guarding” or “vigil”, or would something like “Armbanduhr” be more common? Perhaps, ultimately, German is a bad example for the point that I wanted to make with this paragraph, since it is also so rich with its compound words, like “Kuckucksuhr”.
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