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New Unicode Bug Discovered For Common Japanese Character "No"
AmiMoJo writes: Some users have noticed that the Japanese character "no", which is extremely common in the Japanese language (forming parts of many words, or meaning something similar to the English word "of" on its own). The Unicode standard has apparently marked the character as sometimes being used in mathematical formulae, causing it to be rendering in a different font to the surrounding text in certain applications. Similar but more widespread issues have plagued Unicode for decades due to the decision to unify dissimilar characters in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
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The character in question is Hiragana "No", codepoint U+306E. As far as I can tell, this has existed since Unicode 1.1 and there are no differences in the Unicode metadata when compared to any other Hiragana glyph. It is marked as IsAlphabetic=True, Category=Other Letter, and NumbericType=None for example. So are all the other common Hiragana glyphs. If there is a bug, it's clearly with some specific application, and not Unicode or Unicode metadata. Compare http://www.fileformat.info/inf... with any other Hiragana glyph, like http://www.fileformat.info/inf... (Hiragana "Ha").
Morphing Software
As you have just discovered, Slashdot cleverly avoids all Unicode bugs by not supporting Unicode at all.
It's a Unicode bug. Unicode tries to merge different characters into a single code point, because long ago they had the same origin. This particular character exists in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and mathematics, so can be rendered four different ways, but they all share one code point.
Applications have to guess what font to use. Being a mathematical program, this one defaults to the system language (Japanese) but has logic to detect this "no" character and render it in a different font. It isn't clever enough to notice that the rest of the sentence is Japanese, but it shouldn't have to be.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Que?
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Actually it does, it's just disabled in slashcode after the brief spam event when it was enabled.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
There are more native Chinese speaker than English speaker. How about you learn Chinese and shut the fuck up?
I think Chinese is the only language we need, it's already the most spoken language in the world.
Chinese is too.
Chinese does too.
Chinese does too.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
This is not a "Unicode bug". It is a rendering bug exhibited by some applications.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Just write chinese in pinyin and speak it normally. (the number of Chinese speakers does not matter, the issue is with how it is written down.) When it comes to ideograph based languages, we would have been better off designing an entirely separate text system rather than trying to shoehorn it into a font-character paradigm derived from the needs of writing and printing latin scripts. Indeed having a writing system designed around the needs of calligraphy would be a useful thing, but like with ideograph based writing systems it is a long way from the use case we normally see with alphabet based writing systems.
John_Chalisque
As I pointer out elsewhere here, Chinese can be written with a latin alphabet and a few accents. Likewise languages such as Sanskrit. Just as there is a difference between English handwriting and what can be represented in Ascii, we face a related issue with ideograph based writing systems. We would be better of writing Chinese webpages in pinyin, and developing a separate system for calligraphy and ideographs.
John_Chalisque
meanwhile the folks at soylent implemented it ages ago.
With all the effort wasted on 'beta', I wonder how much of the open source slashcode remains.
English is fine for factual information like air traffic control or shipping, but it would never work for Japanese society. There are too many important things you can't adequately express in English that are essential to Japanese people. Same with Chinese.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Actually, slashcode does support Unicode, all that needs to be done for /. to get Unicode is reconfiguring the database (and converting old comments, I guess).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
As I pointer out elsewhere here, Chinese can be written with a latin alphabet and a few accents. Likewise languages such as Sanskrit. Just as there is a difference between English handwriting and what can be represented in Ascii, we face a related issue with ideograph based writing systems. We would be better of writing Chinese webpages in pinyin, and developing a separate system for calligraphy and ideographs.
Except that there are so many homonyms in pinyin that a strong sense of the context is needed to read it. The logograms are much harder to write but reading is quite a bit easier, which is why they are still in use. That's not the same as English handwriting vs printing, where the differences are only in rendering and there is a 1:1 correspondence between a handwritten and a printed character.
Fuck it doesn't even support ASCII, let alone Unicode.
Try doing an English pound sign:
£
Nope.
No one, absolutely no one who is actually proficient in any of these languages, would find your proposal acceptable. The only people who advocate such things are, deservedly, dismissed as cranks.
So instead, how about we fix the problems with the current, largely acceptable system we have now?
we would have been better off
No, you might have been better off. Chinese speakers would not. They would like to use their written language, as it exists today, on computers just like everyone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese
they tried, but failed.
If you actually does know a little bit more than "pinyin", you should understand why they failed.
Actually, slashcode does support Unicode, all that needs to be done for /. to get Unicode is reconfiguring the database (and converting old comments, I guess).
No, it already works. It was active for a while some 10 years ago, but was removed because it was hard to sanitize. You could easily write you own comment score by reversing direction at the right time.
Still they could reactivate it if they just found a reasonable way of sanitizing features they don't want.
It's a Unicode bug. Unicode tries to merge different characters into a single code point, because long ago they had the same origin. This particular character exists in Japanese, Chinese, Korean and mathematics, so can be rendered four different ways, but they all share one code point.
Applications have to guess what font to use. Being a mathematical program, this one defaults to the system language (Japanese) but has logic to detect this "no" character and render it in a different font. It isn't clever enough to notice that the rest of the sentence is Japanese, but it shouldn't have to be.
The funny thing is that the same have never been done with latin letters and symbols, because that would be a mess. I really don't understand why they couldn't see it would be the same in Asian langauges.
The character in the Unicode table looks like a mashup of the hiragana (grammar-forming) version of the character, and the katakana (used as we do italics) form.
Just write chinese in pinyin and speak it normally. (the number of Chinese speakers does not matter, the issue is with how it is written down.)
"Chinese" is not a single spoken language. A passage written in one Chinese language, such as Mandarin, is often readable in another Chinese language, such as Cantonese, so long as they're written with Han characters. It's as if French could be read as Italian or Spanish with the same characters. In addition, different words that sound the same in a given Chinese language due to historic sound changes usually have different Han characters. They may end up sounding different in a different Chinese language whose different historic sound changes produced different homophone sets. Pinyin, on the other hand, depends on Mandarin and confuses homophones.
HTML entity pound sign (£): £
Literal pound sign, as on my keyboard: £
It's OK for me in preview mode.
Maybe it's your browser's encoding that's broken ? I have it set as UTF-8. Your rendering (£ (*)) seems to indicate you sent the byte sequence for UTF-8. But I suspect that your browser set the character encoding as ISO-8859-1 in its headers.
While I'm at it: "" <- This was supposed to be the "no" hiragana. Disallowed characters are stripped, rather than being "converted" to mojibake.
(*) Fun fact: rendered as £ in your comment and in editing mode, but as £ in preview mode.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Please name said software.
Any HTML renderer ought to be able to tell an element with lang="zh-Hans" (Chinese using simplified characters) from one with lang="ja" (Japanese).
Actually, English isn't very good for factual information either. It has too many homonyms, a very inconsistent spelling, too ambiguous sentences even with the very strict word order English has to use, no single language authority and too many standard variations.
Other Germanic languages are much more precise, as are Slavic languages. Due to the more complicated grammar and being synthetic instead of analytic, the meaning of a sentence is clear even if words in the sentence are shifted around, the spelling is usually also phonemic (you write words as you hear them - regular spelling).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
"symbols" occupy less space
Not if you have to make the font bigger to keep the strokes from touching each other. By that point, you could have used a smaller font on the Latin.
It would have been absolutely fine if they had just stuck to one codepoint per character and not tried to merge them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Slashdot is more in the spirit of Usenet than anything else. I wish they'd just strip the 8th bit on everything.
Then it would need to be written as it exists today, which would mean some sort of calligraphic text system. That wouldn't have been possible with the design of text-based system 30 years ago, where character bitmaps were stored in a lookup ROM for a rasterizer to use, but it shouldn't be difficult today.
Quoi?
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A lot of people complain about the idea of unification without understanding it. I can't judge if unicode's unification is great or awful. The English-speaking media constantly says it's awful, but it's usually clear the authors don't know what unification is, who's driving it, or how unicode's work compares to what existed beforehand, so they can only be ignored. (They're sometimes trying to spin up some clickbait about ignorant westerners imposing blah blah blah on Asia, which just shows they no nothing about the topic.)
The issue:
There's a certain number of symbols which have been copied from one East Asian language to another. They're the same symbol, so unicode has one slot for that symbol. Then there's a second category where the symbol has been copied, but one group draws it a little different (the Japanese might like to put a little flick at the end of one line, or the Chinese draw the line a little slantier). And a third category where one group has developed a simplified symbol, which means again the traditional and the simplified symbols are the same thing but drawn differently. The two symbols are equivalent, the new one is just a new suggestion for how to draw it.
Unification is about having one slot for the symbols in categories two and three and leaving it to the font to decide how to display it.
(Unicode uses more precise terms, but I'm calling them "symbols" and "slots" for simplicity.)
A disadvantage to this approach is that there can't be a font which would display a symbol both the way a Japanese would draw it and the way a Chinese would draw it. Fonts have to choose one style to draw each unified symbol.
An advantage of this approach is that new languages and dialects can be added supported without needing another 100,000 slots per language or dialect (we do all know there are more than three East Asian languages, don't we?), and it's much easier for fonts to add support for all the East Asian languages because once they've done Chinese, Japanese is automatically almost finished.
Here are some example symbols:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
unicode.org's FAQ also has clarifications:
If the character shapes are different in different parts of East Asia, why were the characters unified?
http://www.unicode.org/faq/han...
Isn't it true that some Japanese can't write their own names in Unicode?
http://www.unicode.org/faq/han...
(All that said, it's been years since I looked into this so there's a chance I've gotten some detail wrong, but I'm confident it's a good summary of the issue.)
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Example: the story of the man who tried to eat ten lions:
Shí shì sh shì sh shì, shì sh, shì shí shí sh. Shì shí shí shì shì shì sh. Shí shí, shì shí sh shì shì. Shì shí, shì Sh shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí sh, shì shì shì, sh shì shí sh shì shì. Shì shí shì shí sh sh, shì shí shì. Shí shì shì, shì sh shì shù shí shì. Shí shì shì, shì sh shì shí shì shí sh. Shí shí, sh shì shì shí sh sh, shí shí sh. Shì shì shì shì
For the Chinese ideograph version and English translation, see slides 12 and 13 of
https://web.csulb.edu/~txie/38...
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Some users have noticed that the Japanese character "no", which is extremely common in the Japanese language
I have been reading the comments for 20 minutes because I don't understand Japanese, but I still don't understand the problem. There's a Japanese character called no, it looks very much like a lowercase English/Latin "e" rotated clockwise about 80 degrees and then flipped over the vertical axis. Is this being mixed up with something else or rendered wrongly? Can anybody provide examples of what it's getting mixed up with or how or where it's being rendered improperly?
It would be funnier if the bug was on character "Ni"
I'll buy that, but even native Sinolanguage speakers have told me the learning curve for an alphabet is much shallower. Like, MUCH shallower. And since most modern technical terms have Greek and Latin roots, sometimes its simpler for them to just use the Latin words, otherwise they have to convert the terms to native sounds using bizarre and difficult to use conversion systems. I do agree however that it would have been nice to use a system similar to Kanji right from the beginning had we had one.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Slashdot does support Unicode (assuming your browser can be convinced to post in the right encoding). It just happens to have most of the code points (basically everything above U+00FF) blacklisted.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
English is the official technical language for flight. ALL international pilots, military and civ, MUST know enough English to pass flight school and to fly international commercial flights. Its also the official language of sea navigation, but to a lesser extent. I don't think you need to be as proficient. And English with a number of loan words from Greek and Latin are used in international Engineering. But yeah, English is spoken by the majority of technical people around the world as a common information exchange language.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I think Chinese is the only language we need, it's already the most spoken language in the world.
Only in head count, not by region. If the world was populated only by the Chinese, which seems to be their goal, then yes, Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. However, if you break that fact down by dialect, your statement is really weak. Mao's goal to have the entire PRC speak Mandarin really failed.
It's a democratic language that will draw from other languages where necessary and useful.
Not really. Mao tried to force all Chinese to speak Mandarin, and he failed miserably. Kinda the exact opposite of "Democratic". But of course that's not the fault of the language per se...
It's a language that has proven it can adapt to changing circumstances.
Chinese may be, but if Japanese is an example, and Japanese is adapted from Chinese by Han explorers to Japan in the Iron Age; its not very adaptable at all. The Japanese have developer THREE different writing systems to cope with with some shortcomings of the language (only two tenses, underdeveloped pronoun system, etc). That may be a shortcoming of Japanese, but Japanese is just a symptom of a language root that isn't very forgiving. I will say however that a language that can be nuanced such that 9 different meanings from changing the tone of one word may be more flexible than I give it credit for,
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
If only everyone just used UTF8 encoding. Unfortunately, Microsoft insisted on using UTF16 and now here we are...
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Then neither are basically all of the accented characters:
ÃéÃÃÃ
ÃÃÃÃ"Ãs
Quarter, half, most of the currency symbols, etc.
Extended ASCII is pretty bog-standard. But my point really? I press the pound-sign (or the other characters) on my keyboard, and Slashdot can't render them. Facebook can. The Register can. Every forum in the world can. But not Slashdot.
ICAO general rules and regulations
4.4.1c - ICAO languages are English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Japanese and Chinese syntax differ too much for parallels as close as those of Mandarin and Cantonese. Japanese puts the verb at the end (SOV) and marks noun case with postpositions (wa, ga, o, e). Chinese, on the other hand, puts the verb in the middle (SVO), more like English. (Other orders are possible: Welsh and Arabic put the verb at the beginning, or VSO, and Kashmiri and Dutch split the verb into a part that's second and a part at the end, or V2.)
Chinese also uses serial verb construction, where verbs before the sentence's main verb double as prepositions. For example, a sentence that glosses literally as "I sit aircraft depart Shanghai arrive Beijing travel" is understood as "I by aircraft from Shanghai to Beijing travel." (English is also SVO, but manner and place phrases follow the verb, producing "I travel from Shanghai to Beijing by aircraft.") In Japanese, each of these prepositional verbs would have to go after the noun and would probably need a participle ending like -tte to link them into the sentence.
For about eight centuries prior to World War II, Japanese used kanbun, a way to mark up Chinese text to show the equivalent word order in Japanese, allowing it to be read as Japanese. It used reordering marks called kaeriten.
I cringed immediately on seeing this.
Let's be clear here: the character is U+306E, "hiragana letter no"
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/306e/index.htm
The general category is "letter, other"
Nothing to do with math (that would be "math symbol")
If there is a bug, it is not in Unicode, but in some crappy software.
Nothing to see, move along.
Drawing an inference from the not-fact that the top of the batting order in every Wikipedia FAQ does not include how to set your user agent to send the right encoding header, I'd suggest that Slashdot's long-disabled Unicode support fell far short of the mark in the first place. (2005 just called. It wants to dissolve its de facto clue-stick monopoly.)
I authored a CJK word processor that ran under MS-DOS in the 1980s and early 1990s. Two of our linguists did our own in-house unification that ended up not so different than Unicode which came later.
At the time that Unicode came out, our largest customer groups were embassies, diplomats (Snowden-style), and other academic linguists (with a strong representation from the Brigham Young young-adult diaspora). Maybe 40% of our new customers in the early 1990s were still running turbo XTs, 286s, and 386 castrati (16 MHz SX of the 16-bit bus resurrected). It takes a long time for the wallet of a dusty academic sinologist to recover from dolling out $5000 in 1985 (true story, many times over). 20-year-old Mormon missionaries where not especially flush, either.
Imagine this as your early-adopter power-user-base for the newly ratified Unicode 1.0 Asian language support.
Many people at the time running Windows 3.11 were running in 4 MB. Multilingual software remained stuck in this grotesquely underpowered rut until the P54 was introduced in the mid-nineties.
It's not just the print and display fonts that were a burden to the software of the day, but the mere Unicode code point tables themselves. 256 KB of code-point mapping tables was the rough equivalent of Google grabbing another 256 MB to process-isolate another browser tab (4 MB then, 4 GB now).
Of course, one can code up a bespoke compression method and clever language subset overlays. I'm sure we invested more man-hours in bespoke compression methods and clever data overlays than Zuckerberg invested in coding up The Facebook, original edition.
It's probably a good thing that Unicode was rushed to fruition, however broken it now appears to be twenty-five years later, before the first release of NCSA Mosaic. Otherwise, Unicode might have been cobbled together Brendan Eich in a succession of 4 a.m. coding binges the week after he pounded out JavaScript.
It's funny that this bug involves typesetting mathematics. If any software was broken with respect to Asian character support, it was surely the original TeX—paragon of infinite breakage that we all now know it to be.
Back in the mid-to-late eighties, the very idea of sprinkling Asian fonts into math display mode would have been delegated to the savant sibling sequestered in Lamport's sound-proof attic.
Just say "No" to Unicode.
Table-ized A.I.
Some users have noticed that the Japanese character "no", which is extremely common in the Japanese language (forming parts of many words, or meaning something similar to the English word "of" on its own).
That isn't even a sentence in English. It is extremely grating to read crap like this, and it does not convey much about the story. .
No, it already works. It was active for a while some 10 years ago, but was removed because it was hard to sanitize. You could easily write you own comment score by reversing direction at the right time.
Still they could reactivate it if they just found a reasonable way of sanitizing features they don't want.
Dude, all other websites support Unicode. Sanitizing it properly cannot be rocket science.
I think Chinese is the only language we need, it's already the most spoken language in the world.
That is false. English is the most spoken language in the world. Chinese is the most popular primary language.
Not even by head count. 1.5 billion people can speak English, contrasted to 1.0 billion can speak "Chinese".
ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a 7 bit encoding system. The most common strictly 8 bit encoding is ISO-8859-1, slightly expanded by Microsoft as Windows-1252, also known as Win-ASCII.
Of course these days, everyone in their right mind should generally be using UTF-8 for transfer and storage. UCS-16 and UTF-16, though widely used internally, are basically a mistake for that kind of thing.
Considering that Windows NT was around *before* UTF-8, it would have been rather difficult to implement it. What you really meant to say was, unfortunately, standards committees are often too slow to implement things like UTF-8 in a timely manner.
Chinese may be, but if Japanese is an example, and Japanese is adapted from Chinese by Han explorers to Japan in the Iron Age; its not very adaptable at all. The Japanese have developer THREE different writing systems to cope with with some shortcomings of the language (only two tenses, underdeveloped pronoun system, etc). That may be a shortcoming of Japanese, but Japanese is just a symptom of a language root that isn't very forgiving. I will say however that a language that can be nuanced such that 9 different meanings from changing the tone of one word may be more flexible than I give it credit for,
That's not right. The exact origins of the Japanese language are lost to pre-history, only guessed at. It was the writing system that was brought over from China. Then katakana and hiragana were added to support the parts of the Japanese language that can't be written adequately in the Chinese system. They were simply added to support the way the language was already spoken, not to make up for any limitations.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Because the Europeans override the Asians when creating the unicode "standard". They wanted to save code space, despite not being short on it (maybe some idiots think it could be done in 16 bits, but no one on the committee was that naive).
In English, why is 1 and l not the same code point, despite having the same look in so many fonts, and even many typewriters did not have a separate 1 and 0 key (tell that to kids these days and they won't believe you). It sounds idiotic to us to give them the same ASCII code. Now imagine native speakers of Asian languages being told similar things about their writing systems.
The problem with "no" is sort of a side issue in some sense to all this, but the problems with Han unification have been known for decades.
Why do you think language gets overhauled in Orwell's 1984?
Because Orwell was a little too enamored of the so-called "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"? I hate to break it to you, but, despite its many obvious parallels to the real world, 1984 was ultimately a work of fiction.
While it's undeniable that language has some influence on culture and thought, the idea that it can be as influential as proposed by some early SF writers (e.g. Orwell, Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao, or Samuel Delaney's Babel-17) is mostly discredited.
Then what about just stripe unicode for comment subject, and leave the comment content intact?
Even using vector fonts doesn't fix the problem that Unicode wasn't a great solution for managing the diversity of characters in many Asian languages.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I was once at a conference in Germany, most of which was given in English because it was an international crowd. One of the German speakers started off by saying that he used to start by apologizing for his bad English, but the host (who was Turkish) told him not to worry; Bad English is the most widely spoken language in the world. (Which is fine; English is flexible enough about most things that if you don't need to be subtle, Bad English will usually do.)
German's the only non-English language that I'm even vaguely functional in, and even then it was much more useful for me in Czechoslovakia, where people had learned German in school to deal with tourists, and I mainly wanted to talk to them about the same sets of things, like train schedules and getting food and hotels and which bridge went to the castle. Northern Germans speak a relatively comprehensible dialect, though too fast for me to do much in real time; understanding Austrians is more like being a New Yorker in deep Alabama. (I play music at a local German jam session, and some of the tunes have the lyrics translated from Bavarian or Swiss into German...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm pretty sure my mom's manual typewriter when I was a kid didn't have 1, less sure about whether it had 0. But it did have the proper French and Spanish accent marks (left, right, circumflex, N~, cedilla, most of which my PC keyboard doesn't have), and you composed them with letters by using the backspace.
And yes, she could do two-column left-and-right-justified newsletters on it - she'd type a draft, count the letters, type the final. But she happily switched to using a Macintosh to type them, and let it handle that stuff.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yes, I know you were trolling, but in your mythical 7-bit-clean English, even if you're not using English letters like ð or , or ligatures like æ , or distinguishing between short and long S's (you know, the s you used to think were f's), how do you put diaeresis marks over words like cooperate, or distinguish between m-dash and n-dash and hyphen, or get the left- and right-side quotation marks without using some Microsoft or Apple ``smart quote'' breakage, much less deal with accent marks in words of foreign origin that are now part of English because we stole them fair and square and they're ours now, or handle degree marks, or words with superscript letters like the abbreviations for the and that and George and Your, or ...
And turning them all into leet-speak, like earlier Ye Olde Hwaetever's, just doesn't count.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Keep in mind that India, which is nearly as populous as China, is a predominantly English speaking country. If sheer number of speakers is a key, the future will probably turn out to be something like Firefly, with a mishmash of Chinese and English.
nuq ghe''or vIghel SoH?
rewriting history since 2109
I honestly don't really care for the argument. I just think it's a stupid argument to make because you can apply it to other languages.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Tell me more, educate me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Don't you just hate sentences that (while providing important background information)?
Done, don't see the issue with Chinese writing and it's consonants. You have failed to identify the issue.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
According to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/...
Chinese are apparently first when it comes to native speakers. What data distinguishes whether someone can speak it as a second language and what level of language knowledge does the person have to know to be counted to speak that language?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
For the Chinese ideograph version and English translation, see slides 12 and 13 of...
I know I'm a few days late to this thread, but how about we forgo the propriety ppt filetype plug-in hell, and go straight to Wikipedia ?
Note that problems also involve Korean, which is written with an alphabet not ideographs.
Excellent. I wish I'd found that when writing my comment. I'd read a printed version so I was just happy to find any version of it online.
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I haven't read it, but the full explanation is on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...