Beauty

...is in the eye of the beholder, so saith the old saying. And apparently it's in the ears too. Yes, what constitutes "good" or "pleasing" for one person may not necessarily be similar to what it would be for someone else. (Traditional Chinese Opera is an excellent example of this, especially for the modern Western audience.)

And yet, I always cringe whenever I hear someone say something like "Japanese is a beautiful language!" Especially when it's in the context of "despite the fact that this movie is American, I want to watch it in Japanese because ..."

Somehow, I doubt the rabidly obsessed are either objective or educated to actually make such an assessment. Sure, in the West, we tend to say the same thing of the Latinate languages -- of Spanish and French, and conversely we tend to think of German and Russian as being "harsh" and "masculine", perpetuating such jokes that imply that German terms of intimacy still sound like swearing to the rest of Europe.

Pure rubbish. True, there are differences in the phonetic ranges of these languages, some of which may lie well outside one's own native tongue. For English or Cantonese speakers, for example, Mandarin may sound more pleasing because of its lack of glottal stops. Somehow, glottal stops are considered masculine or ugly. Or the regularity of (the five) vowel sounds (and three diphthongs) in Japanese might be refreshing for any speaker of the PIE language family.

But if an individual is a "young adult" male, reclusive and obsessive about Japanese animation, is it more likely that this person is actually finding Japanese to be a beautiful language, or is it more likely that in a case of self-induced hypnotism (or delusion), he's convinced himself that Japanese sounds so much better.

In fact, from personal experience, I've found that not only do such individuals who worship Japanese have minimal linguistic understanding (despite their obsession compelling them to learn the language), they have an even weaker understanding of their own native tongue (which in my case, would have been native English speakers). "Japanese is so much better than English; it's so much richer in vocabulary". Yes, well, maybe if you'd bother to read Chaucer,or Puttenham, or Shakespeare, or James Joyce. Or perhaps the poesy of Edgar Allan Poe and Rainer Maria Rilke. But no, clearly your extremely limited exposure to your native tongue is obviously enough to compare to the best of the literature of another language.

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it's even worth the effort to try to show this obvious fallacy in these rabid fans' philosophy. If I'm getting paid to teach, I shouldn't care what they do with the material taught, right?

Hrmm...

CJKE Crazy

[link]

The link above features a nice example of bad translation captured by engrish.com. However, as an amateur typographer with experience with asian fonts, I also recognised a second phenomenon: the seemingly random use of normal/bolded characters at the bottom for the Chinese translation. (And, for the curious, they didn't do a great job translating into Chinese either; apparently they did a second machine-translation, using the shoddy English as the new source.)

So what's the deal with the seemingly random bits of bolded text? Is it placed for emphasis, to help with the visual balance of clutter, given the relative high density of ink per line of text? Sadly, no. These fine toilet chaps, who couldn't bother finding adequate translators, also couldn't be bothered to find an adequate CJK/Unicode font. You see, the characters that are bolded, are in fact consistent with the kanji used at the top for the japanese font. The other characters, however, are some other default font that could accomodate the simplified characters not found in Japanese dictionaries (and therefore, Japanese fonts). In short, they used a simple word processor like MS Word, which, when given a character outside the font in use, would replace it with the default language font instead. For MS Word 2003, this was often MS Mincho, or MS Gothic. As for the new Vista, I have no idea how well it handles such cases.

Most people probably wouldn't care, and the Chinese-capable would probably just raise an eyebrow before proceeding. But the typographers and designers, familiar with the issues and hurdles of asian computing, would weep at such public display of ignorancce and machine abuse.

It makes sense on the one hand -- Why should a Japanese font incorporate all those glyphs from Simplified Chinese when it would rarely be used? But on the other hand, in this age of cliches and the oft-repeated word of globalisation, it might be prudent to create typefaces that are a bit more inclusive than just one language.

For the curious, what the message is *trying* to say is something closer to: "Because the stalls here are not stocked with toilet paper, customers are advised to purchase toilet paper for use [from this machine]". A bit clumsy as a translation, but i think it incorporates enough of the key words for the casual reader to see where they went wrong. Obviously, a natural translation would do a much better job than attempting to remain faithful to the original Japanese text.

Seriously Silly Sinophiles

People have been laughing for years at the shoddy English translations that've been produced from East Asia, namely, from China, Japan, and Korea. However, how much has been said about the Western fluency of asiatic languages?

Not much. Or at least, not much on this side of the world. In Asia, however, the locals constantly laugh, chuckle, chortle and snicker at the grevious mispronunciations and syntactic inaccuracies that the "foreigners" produce. Most people of minimal international awareness have probably heard of, or visited, engrish.com. Wonderful stuff.

But now, there's apparently been another site, called Hanzi Smatter (link on right), that does the flip side -- featuring the blunders that the western world does to asian text. It unfortunately features way more tattoo blunders than I'd like (due to my personal aversion to tattoos, and photographs that reveal more about the skin quality of the individual instead of the subject matter), but still entertaining, and oddly addicting.

There is, in the design world, a certain school of thought wherein the "image" or "aesthetic" overrides the symbolic or the semantic. (The main reason for my contempt for contemporary art critics.) A man, woman and snake in a garden with an apple tree is a bit hard to pass off as original without making the viewer draw SOME allusion to the biblical story of Eden. And Chinese characters, an old and established writing system for some 1/6th of the world's population, isn't exactly source material for "obscure references".

In a slightly related corollary, I recently read on a forum or comment box of a blog, the use of the word "pictogram". It almost made me scream. Except that I was alone, so it'd arouse no attention. (Like a tree that falls in a forest...)

Among the 5'000+ characters that are required for reasonable erudition, and the 60'000+ characters that modern dictionaries admit as being legitimate, only about 8% would be truly pictographic -- visually representing their intended meaning. Such characters include "fish" (魚), "bird" (鳥), "hand" (手), and "tree" (木). An overwhelming majority (~80%) of Chinese characters, on the other hand, are composed of two elements: a phonetic, and semantic half.

The phonetic half (usually on the bottom, or the right half of the character), gives some hint to the pronunciation, normally through rhyme. The semantic component, on the other hand, hints at its meaning or function. (A hand radical on the left, for example, often indicates a verb: 掃 (to sweep), 持 (to hold), 揺 (to wave), 打 (to strike); a water radical indicates a liquid object: 湯 (soup), 海 (ocean), 池 (pond; lake), 油 (oil).)

For this reason, contemporary scholars prefer other terms than the archaic "pictogram" or "ideograph". Instead, the linguist might use "logogram", the educated layman "character", and the typographer "glyph". Wikipedia adequately explains the distinction between "Chinese characters" and "Chinese words", for the more curious.

Majuscule ß

It's finally official!

But first, a preamble:

Back in First Year, I decided to take German 101. In that class, we learned the German alphabet, and its different written forms (upper/lower case. ...maybe cursive). One letter was more special than the rest, it was more than a mere letter with a diacritic: it was the eszett (ß). Deceptively similar to the Greek letter Beta, the Eszett a voiceless /s/ sound, and so named for the supposed historical ligature of S + Z (although you have to think in terms of medieval scripts, so it was more like ſ + 3).

"Why isn't there a capital letter version of the eszett?" I clumsily asked.
"Because it would never begin a word, and therefore there's no use for it," answered the professor.
"But what about when you're writing in allcaps...?"
The professor only smiled in response, either appreciative of my intellect, or disguising her contempt of my germanic ignorance.

But the question persisted in my mind. Surely there were renegade typographers who'd design a majuscule ß for billboards or something.

And back to the main story.

Andreas Stötzner, a German typographer, has been lobbying the Unicode Consortium since 2004 for the official use of a majuscule ß. He reasoned that it was important to have such a character especially to distinct between names (WEISS vs WEIß, for example), which would normally be all pigeon-holed into "SS" for all-caps applications like tombstones or telephone directories. People are, after all, rather sensitive about names.

In 2007, Stötzner resubmitted his proposal, this time appealing on typographical/design grounds rather than grammatical reform. And now, as of 4 April 2008, it appears that the unicode block uni1E9E is now reserved for the magical majuscule ß. Success!

Although Stötzner has spent considerable time and thought on the design of such a glyph, it seems that independent typographers will always have their own methods of creating their own majuscule ß. Finally, German comicbook characters will be able to scream without a compromised eszett!

Also, it means I now have a set unicode spot for this majuscule eszett that I was going to end up designing anyway for my pet project typeface. For a draft preview, see below:


(Click on image to go to site for larger resolution)

Endlich, haben wir Großbuchstabes Eszett!