Japanese Language

"Here is a writing system that fails two out of three of Coulmas's criteria: economy and simplicity. By this measure it [Japanese] does not qualify as a 'successful writing system,' yet it works nonetheless."

taylor

しなければならない

Coulmas' criteria?

an orthographic system will never tend towards a minimum information state as long as grammar nazis are around lolz

jkerian

linguist who did some quite serious comparative linguistics work

books.google.com/books?id=geCphXcHm30C

taylor

well orthographies are hand crafted

日本語 has four scripts though

did Coulmas consider multiplicity in scripts as complex or noneconomical

jkerian

5:17 AM

mostly irrelevent

(apparently... I'm not actually reading Coulmas here)

taylor

im being judgemental, but sounds like a prescriptivist

jkerian

"A prescriptivist is anyone who disagrees with you" >_>

taylor

i think a prescriptivist is anyone who holds arbitrary opinion

jkerian

See... that's very much not what a prescriptivist is

taylor

u dun think so?

jkerian

5:21 AM

Nope... there is no particular requirement that it be 'arbitrary'

I would actually argue that most prescriptivism is very much NOT arbitrary, but rather the other way around. (trying to apply too much logic to languages)

taylor

i mean arbitrary in the sense that it has no sensible legitimacy

jkerian

those are 'weasel words'

taylor

well, i think of it like if your drawing conclusions without any sort of explicit and consistent application of rules, any conclusion is just as absurd and objectionable as any other

jkerian

Yeah... basically the problem here is that you're trying to define prescriptivism as only the 'bad parts' of telling other people how to use the language

All language education, both of your own language and of a second language, is inherently prescriptive

taylor

well not really, i take prescriptivist to be those whose who cannot justify their opinions in a meaningful way

jkerian

5:27 AM

I realize you do that, but that isn't what the term actually means

taylor

oh hhmm you think a prescriptivist is "trying to apply too much logic to languages"

then within that group of people, you have the prescriptivist activist, the one who will write a letter to the president of a company to tell him his company slogan is missing an apostrophe

jkerian

"Linguistic Prescriptivism" is just the activity of championing a particular way of using a language. There is no particular limit on the situations it applies to.

The "Descriptive Linguist", on the other hand, would do a survey of other company slogans to see if apostrophes are commonly omitted.

Strictly speaking, when you correct someone's spelling, you're being a prescriptivist. It's not inherently a bad thing.

@taylor heck... if you correct your OWN spelling, at least from small but acceptable divergences such as "u" and "dun", you're being a prescriptivist.

taylor

i never make spelling mistakes

i ain't never made no mistakes before

triple negative!

gibbon

9:44 AM

Anki is making me cry again.. it's just so horribly bad in a most tragic way.

snailplane

Haha, what's wrong?

gibbon

Now it's insisting on that I have less cards in my deck that I actually have.. I check on the web, I check on my phone, the cards are there. I clear all my local data and try to sync again, less cards.

I'll just give up for now. I'll be seriously pissed off if it syncs improperly and remove my cards from the remote db again.

snailplane

:/

gibbon

And the UI in the new version is just as bad as the old one, just something new to try to get used to.

snailplane

My study buddy was complaining about the beta recently. (I'm still using 1.2, which seems to work fine for me personally)

gibbon

9:53 AM

Of course he did, it's a disaster.

snailplane

Is that the same version that's giving you the syncing problem?

gibbon

Yes. But it was the previous version that thought it would be a good idea to remove my deck while syncing.

snailplane

I have a whole lot of decks in .anki/backups

500MB of them, hehe

i've been trusting that if something went wrong with a sync, or with anything, i could grab them from there

but I've never actually tried

gibbon

I'll definitely start making more frequent local backups

snailplane

What I meant to imply was: do you have local backups already, automatically created by Anki?

gibbon

10:00 AM

Backups? I don't think so.. I have my local copy, but if anki decides to screw with my deck during a sync, I'd assume it screws with my local copy as well.

snailplane

Ah, well, there's an option you can enable to create backups automatically

gibbon

I'll look into that, thanks.

Flaw

10:46 AM

A: XとY、どちらのほうが安いですか
B: Xのほうが、Yよりもっと安いです。
Does もっと sound strange in this case?

Andrew Grimm

12:00 PM

It's bad enough it doesn't have dolphin meat, but jisho.org doesn't have the Japanese for dog meat!

No problems though - I found it in wiktionary.

Andrew Grimm

12:10 PM

When I read "In 2008, Japan imported 5 tons of dog meat from China compared to 4,714 tons of beef, 14,340 tons of pork and 115,882 tons of poultry" I had mentally converted it to "5000 kilograms of dog meat ... 4,714 tons of beef" and somehow convinced myself that since 5000 is more than 4,714 they import more dog meat than beef. Whoops!

You've gotta tell them! Shamisen is dog!

ento

1:33 PM

@Flaw Yes: もっと安い implies that Y actually is "安い" to a degree. B is comparing the cheapness of the two, when A is just comparing their prices.

Flaw

@ento I still don't get it.

How is comparing the cheapness of the two, different from comparing their prices?

Doesn't B's response satisfy what A is asking?

gibbon

It sounds strange if you're comparing a $10 gum to a $15 gum.. is what ento is saying, I believe.

ento

Yes, B's answering what A is asking, and at the same time, slipped in a subjective judgment that X/Y are cheap.

If a $10 gum is normally considered pricey, then yes, that sounds strange.

gibbon

1:49 PM

I'd say it's "pricey", yeah.

ento

Hehe I only have a vague idea about prices because my partner does all the shopping.

gibbon

Well I sincerely hope for your partner's sake that you realize that $10 is a bit much for a piece of gum.

ento

or for my own sake. (Ah, I think I was imagining a pack of gums..)

The strangeness of the $10-gum case comes from calling a "pricey" thing "cheap". Even if the conversation was about $0.1~ gums, B would be still slightly off the mark for comparing their values on a cheapness scale.

Flaw

That is to say that by using もっと, it reveals that B has a presupposition that both items are cheap, which is not necessarily the case, nor has been implied by A. So the introduction of this irrelevant presupposition makes the the use of もっと strange.

Was that a correct analysis?

ento

2:08 PM

Yes, right on the mark (with my analysis)

Flaw

2:30 PM

@ento Thanks for the help, I just learned today that もっと was strange in that case and couldn't figure out why.

ento

@Flaw お役に立ててよかったです

jkerian

@AndrewGrimm I really don't understand the hangups my fellow westerners have about eating dogs and horses.

gibbon

People have hangups about eating horses?

jkerian

@gibbon Unless they're elementary school students with a bottle of glue...

gibbon

I think It's a fairly common sandwich spread here..

jlptn1

2:42 PM

where do you see dog meat in Japan?

on a similar note I just ate what looked like the most seriously freezer burned steak that I forgot about in my freezer and was fearing the worst after researching about taste and edibility. it tasted great

jkerian

@jlptn1 you should write a cookbook based on this new preperation 'method'

jlptn1

'cold-aged'

all i did to prep was throw a bunch of salt and let it sit for 3 hours

cut the pure fat parts and fried that until it was mostly oil and cooked the steak in it

jkerian

3:06 PM

There's one group of people who are even more fun to tweak than mistaken prescriptivists... linguistic relativists, particularly the ones who psychoanalyze every little choice as being caused by "your racism/classism/sexism/etc"

Step 1: Insult the hell out of them... they've just claimed that any form of prescriptivism is a form of cardinal sin; Step 2: screw syntax. if they can figure it out in less than 10 minutes, you're not trying hard enough; Step 3: psychoanalyze every minute choice of every word. etymonline.com allows you to be truly rediculous here; Step 4: await your forum ban >_>

silvermaple

6:03 PM

@taylor mmm, for the most part it was just a "time and place" sort of thing...the entry was written to be (and sounded) pretty professional/official, so the double negative stood out a lot

gibbon

8:10 PM

@snailplane Anki screwed up my deck.

jkerian

@gibbon Is this the same issue you were having a few weeks ago?

gibbon

What issue was that? I have a lot of issues with this awful piece of software.

jkerian

heh... I've been happily using it since it was an emacs script :)

gibbon

I'll just take daily backups from now on.

Since there's not really any alternatives out there as far as I know..

jkerian

there's a few of them out there

there is mnemosyne, and wahnf had a website he was working on for awhile

gibbon

8:18 PM

Intredasting.. Might look into moving cards over somehow.

jkerian

8:38 PM

I do find it somewhat interesting that you're having this much trouble with it.

and how did it 'screw up your deck' anyways?

Only bug I've ever run into is where it once reset the "next due time" to something in the past for several thousand cards... that wasn't a real big deal though (and was probably my fault).

gibbon

I tried cleaning up my deck last night, plus adding some new ones. When I tried syncing at work today it refused to get the new ones. When I synced at home now, some (but not all) of the previously existing ones that I edited last night had been reverted..

Luckily I've just recently started using it for real, so I have pretty small decks.

jkerian

This was always an anki2 deck? or was it an import?

Anki2 at work

and at home?

Anki1

8:42 PM

heh... that's your problem

anki1 and anki2 don't sync with each other

gibbon

Really? That dev should learn to not drink and code..

jkerian

uh... users should lrn2read?

I mean, that particular detail is plastered all over the "READ THIS BEFORE UPGRADING TO ANKI 2" pages

gibbon

Users don't read. But from anki1 it's clear that the guy has no idea about users. Also I can't even remember such notifications..

jkerian

meh... it should be noted that I haven't upgraded to anki2, read this once a month ago... and am 99% sure I diagnosed the problem correctly

gibbon

Upgrading now just to see what happens..

jkerian

8:51 PM

@gibbon As a dev, I wish to state here and now that "learning not to drink and code" is not something any dev should have to do

gibbon

Well.. Ballmer peak and all that.

jkerian

heh... if you want an annoying UI... check out groups.google.com using Chrome right now. Every location you browse to opens another "Do you want to switch to the old interface? If so, do this that or the other thing..." sub-window. I think I have 30 of them piled up so far

gibbon

lol, luckily I don't use google groups too much.

jkerian

Likewise... couldn't actually tell you what the old interface looked like

Keep in mind, he DID make the right decision about seperating the anki1 and anki2 variants.

gibbon

How so? I've read nothing about it.

snailplane

8:59 PM

@taylor Nothing's necessarily wrong with double negatives, but they belong to specific registers, and if you use a register that isn't expected, it draws attention to how you're writing, rather than what you're writing

jkerian

If something goes wrong in translation with my nearly 10,000 fact deck, the last thing you want to do is resync and blow my anki1 deck away

snailplane

Which isn't necessarily what you want.

gibbon

Fair enough, there was a buttload of text to read when first starting Anki2.

snailplane

@jkerian Google Groups is the historic sad pile of Google. :-(

jkerian

@snailplane wasn't it basically a usenet interface at one point?

snailplane

9:02 PM

It used to be Deja News

They bought it, and made the interface worse (for example, breaking Japanese)

It's gone through a lot of iterations, though. In most of them, they haven't ever made it clear that you were accessing Usenet, so people tended to use it thinking they were using some google service.

(They'd display their own groups alongside Usenet groups with no labelled distinction)

jkerian

Basically... my personal opinion is that Google Groups would be great for open source projects, as a replacement for their mailing lists, but meh

snailplane

They did improve several things about it, though. Like, they bought up older archives than what Deja had

And hey, they eventually made Japanese work again :-)

jkerian

I'm guessing the issue was simple encoding detection

snailplane

It's been too long for me to meaningfully comment

I don't remember the details from ten years ago

jkerian

usenet + japanese + web browsers... odds are pretty good it's an encoding issue

snailplane

9:12 PM

@jkerian Well, almost by definition, it was an encoding issue, but the "detection" part, maybe not so much

gibbon

Need to store application specific data? I know, let's create a regular non-hidden folder for it.. I want to strangle this guy.. Well, successful upgrade anyway, hopefully things will work better now.

jkerian

@gibbon I like that feature :P

snailplane

Ah, on Linux, Anki 1.2 sticks it all in $HOME/.anki

At least, as far as I can tell it does.

gibbon

@snailplane I know! Anki 2 does not!

snailplane

Where does it go?

gibbon

9:13 PM

$HOME/Anki

snailplane

Weird

I wonder what the rationale was

gibbon

Now I have two applications doing this.. The rationale was: i.imgur.com/xVyoSl.jpg

jkerian

Ahh... I was thinking about windows... ".anki" seemed reasonable for linux

@gibbon seriously... you're getting a bit stupid

snailplane

I have no idea where it puts it on Windows, though I also have it installed on Windows

(Because I always feel a bit uncomfortable and would rather get back to Linux, so I don't spend a lot of time with it :-) )

gibbon

@jkerian maybe.. obvious problems like these annoy me. And there's simply no excuse for saving such data in this manner.

jkerian

9:16 PM

Unless other users found it confusing and asked him to change it

My guess is that the new format doesn't mandate "only one anki folder"

gibbon

There should at the very least be an option for it in the settings. (I only looked briefly but didn't see one)

jkerian

You could just as easily start from the current system and call the ".anki" thing stupid... and it would be just as pointless

gibbon

..and if other users ask for it, then I'm sorry, but in this case they would just be wrong.

jkerian

It's probably related to the need to put media files with the decks, something that wasn't a major concern with Anki 1

gibbon

I just hope he adds an option for it.

jkerian

9:19 PM

You know... you could actually open a Feature ticket, rather than whine in a chatroom

gibbon

I could.. and I might.

Anyway, enough about anki then. Unless you two have something good about it to talk about. :p

jkerian

FWIW I agree with you, I do think the hidden folder makes alot more sense for linux users (and something non-hidden in /Users for Win7)

But I can see various reasons for making the change in the other direction

snailplane

I always have things to talk about. The challenge is restraining myself from talking endlessly :-)

gibbon

@jkerian what I mean is, it's ok to create an Anki folder for me to put these media files in. (I'm not sure what that is in anki) It's somewhat ok (though imo not really) to leave that folder there without an option to change it. It's not ok to store just any files there as though I would like to have "direct access" to his .db file. This should be out of sight.

snailplane

@gibbon I haven't used Anki 2, but they claim there's a way to change it if you like

jkerian

9:27 PM

heh... quite a few geeks I know have taken advantage of the sqlite .db files out there :)

gibbon

I'll look harder next time.

snailplane

Personally, I'm at a local maximum with Anki 1.2

jkerian

wonders if it's just that he switched to one of the multi-platform settings toolkit offerings

gibbon

Those geeks would find those files anyway. :P

snailplane

Maybe 2 could be better in some ways, but I'm not prepared for the transition cost if so!

Actually, it was only relatively recently that I switched to 1.2

jkerian

9:28 PM

I'll probably switch this weekend

snailplane

Good luck!

gibbon

Well, time for bed soon, sorry for the excessive whining tonight. Broken software (and there's a lot of it) is something I have a very low tolerance level for..

jkerian

@gibbon You will find that it's extremely difficult to go through life then...

Work on a big, complicated project, it'll cure you of that issue very quickly :)

snailplane

I think the path of least resistance is allowing yourself to adapt somewhat

gibbon

@jkerian Though I am already, it's only made me less tolerant!

snailplane

9:38 PM

Maybe some physical activity to work off frustration? hehe

Can't go through life getting upset over everything

jkerian

It also helps to sort out issues. If I were to stop working today, there would still never be a moment from now till at least 2020... in which code I had written was not running at that moment, somewhere.

snailplane

Of course, I do exactly that sometimes. So don't think that's a lecture, or anything ;-)

jkerian

That kind of code is fairly important... and we treat it as such. You really don't want to see the UIs we use internally though. :)

jkerian

11:27 PM

good lord the ignorance on reddit's Japanese boards is painful

Transcript for