October 24, 2008
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Wikidiving
Filed under, things I do when I'm supposed to be working.
A coworker and I were shooting the breeze recently and The Matrix came up as part of the discussion. So with nothing better to do I looked it up. Part of the article focused on the display of the Matrix code being a mix of letters and numbers with half-(physical-)width Japanese kana characters.
The half-width-kana article was about single-byte vs. double-byte representations of Japanese characters and was kind of short, but that's OK; it moved me on to Han characters, also known as Chinese characters, in addition to the Japanese syllabaries. But the Chinese text one was interesting.
Basically, what I thought about written Chinese was wrong; instead of each logogram being a word, they're each a syllable. Which makes me wonder how Cantonese speakers can read it -- it's one thing to have a picture that means "picture" and be able to use it regardless of language. But when you have two symbols for "pic" and "ture" then it seems like it would require you to know how the "base" language is spoken to be able to read at all.
There are a great many literate Cantonese speakers who don't know Mandarin very well, so I'm obviously missing something here.
But the one that amused me right before I went home was the "rare and complex" character for "verbose" that weighs in at 64 strokes and is basically written as "dragon dragon dragon dragon". I thought that was really funny, if for no other reason than imagining it being used that way in conversation. "Well, you know how Chin gets when he's drinking -- dragon dragon dragon dragon."
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