General > General Technical Chat
Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from?
gamalot:
--- Quote from: coppice on January 03, 2023, 04:34:28 am ---
--- Quote from: pdenisowski on January 02, 2023, 04:43:40 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on January 02, 2023, 02:26:10 pm --- Simplified reduced the character set so much the overlaps are much greater.
--- End quote ---
My understanding is that most of those cases involved merging of two characters where one of the two merged characters stayed the same, e.g. 雲 and 云 both becoming 云. Situations where two different characters were merged into a single, different character (like 發 and 髮 both becoming 发) are significantly less common.
蓝 and 兰 do share a radical in traditional characters (艹 in both 藍 and 蘭) but I get the feeling (not being a Chinese native speaker :)) that 兰 is being used simply because it's a lot easier to write and has the same reading.
--- End quote ---
If you look at the pre-Unicode character sets, the most popular were Big5 for traditional Chinese, and the CNS standard for simplified Chinese. Depending on the variant, Big 5 is about 13000 to 14000 characters. CNS is about 6000 characters, They cover similar needs. That's how much the character set shrunk. Traditionally 云 was just shorthand for 雲, both meaning the same thing - a cloud. Many of the simplifications in simpliifed Chinese were just codifying the simplified way people were already writing those characters in informal writing.
--- End quote ---
云 and 雲 have different meanings in traditional Chinese, 云 means "say", 雲 means "cloud"
harerod:
Maybe a native / fluent speaker of Chinese could comment on the following. I am not familiar with writing Chinese, only Japanese.
Writing Japanese on a computer involves entering words or phrases in phonetic form. A conversion tool (e.g. Input Method Editor) will then suggest kanji/kana combinations for the input.
Due to the huge amount of homonyms (which may be largely due to the historic mapping of the Chinese tonal system to the Japanese vowels), this may result in lots of potential valid kanji/kana. Same as in simplified Chinese, writing reforms obscure the etymological background of many kanji.
I'd expect oddities in Chinese technical documents could be traced to several sources, including:
- plain typo
- typo due to homonyms (pinyin input)
- translation error
Input methods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_input_method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
Edit: clarification / typo
gamalot:
--- Quote from: harerod on January 05, 2023, 05:07:41 pm ---Maybe a native / fluent speaker of Chinese could comment on the following. I am not familiar with writing Chinese, only Japanese.
Writing Japanese involves entering words or phrases in phonetic form. A conversion tool (e.g. Input Method Editor) will then suggest kanji/kana combinations for the input.
Due to the huge amount of homonyms (which may be largely due to the historic mapping of the Chinese tonal system to the Japanese vowels), this may result in lots of potential valid kanji/kana. Same as in simplified Chinese, writing reforms obscure the etymological background of many kanji.
I'd expect oddities in Chinese technical document could be traced to several sources, including:
- plain typo
- typo due to homonyms (pinyin input)
- translation error
Input methods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_input_method
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method
--- End quote ---
The most common is translation errors, and it is difficult to find electronic engineers with good English to do document translation.
tautech:
Here's one I remember from a few years back:
Humorous Frequency :-//
Anyone jump straight on that one ?
gamalot:
--- Quote from: tautech on January 06, 2023, 06:09:23 am ---Here's one I remember from a few years back:
Humorous Frequency :-//
Anyone jump straight on that one ?
--- End quote ---
harmonic frequency 谐波频率
谐 means humorous or harmonious
---
Now you know the answer, could you pls tell me what the meaning of 'jump straight on' in return? :-DD
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version