Heterogenia Linguistico - Vol. 2 Ch. 12

[ultraleaf]

EEEU huh

 

[eviljackspicer]

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE CHAT???

 

[Loksel]

@eviljackspicer Eeeu

 

[Twin127mm]

Oh my god, tell me he did not just called him "Stupid ^ ^ v v < > < > A B Start"

 

[thedude]

It turns out that a lot of the main sub-saharan language group features this kind of tonal system headache. From wikipedia's Tone (linguistics):
"In East Asia, tone is typically lexical. ... However, in many African languages, especially in the Niger–Congo family, tone is crucial to the grammar, with relatively little lexical use. In the Kru languages, a combination of these patterns is found: nouns tend to have complex tone systems but are not much affected by grammatical inflections, whereas verbs tend to have simple tone systems of the type more typical of Africa, which are inflected to indicate tense and mood, person, and polarity, so that tone may be the only distinguishing feature between "you went" and "I won't go". '

 

[Drifter]

Im waiting for the chapter when they encounter something frightening and the main tries to introduce himself. The other species then try to communicate to him "That thing is bad news and we need to run"

 

[Tyrn]

EEEU

 

[RandomPasserby]

EEEU I guess.

 

[xPureHavock]

Just discovered this and I fuckin love it.

 

[Voidknight]

EEEU? I understand.

 

[Jaxons]

EEEU is also cursed

 

[Anonyan]

@givemersspls
I have to assume it was more the original work than anything, Japanese makes some use of tone to distinguish words (apparently some people don't like calling it "pitch accent" since it's not well-defined but it seems to be the consensus on what people call it anyway) but in writing those words are spelled differently anyway so they rarely have a reason to make use of diacritics outside of katakana and hiragana.

Instead of being an armchair expert spending ten minutes looking up Japanese diacritics on wikipedia, I decided to back up my guesswork by actually just checking the raws and yeah, hey, there it is.

Spoiler

Regardless, I think this is better anyway. You're right in saying that diacritics would be more correct from an academic linguistic perspective, but not everybody understands what all the different diacritics mean, and everybody knows what a squiggly arrow is and can easily figure it out what it means from context.

 

[77BLc9JwJGpLVARkamJx]

EEEU (MOAR)

 

[Anonyan]

A) Yeah that's why I mentioned pitch accent instead of calling it a tonal language when it isn't.
B) It's 2019 and people still confuse they're/their/there, just because you've spent enough time learning how languages work to write five paragraphs about it and 70% of the world's languages are tonal doesn't mean that your average weeb trash won't have an easier time with arrows.

I was just clarifying that the arrows were in the raws since you mentioned it, not asking for an essay nerd, give me your milk money.

 

[Anonyan]

I still stand by my original claim that you're correct academically but that native English speakers often don't know shit about other languages and the average reader will grasp silly arrows just as well if not better than symbols they never see or use, and the translators are better off leaving it as-is.

Your mother is an EEEU.

 

[Anonyan]

I never implied it was more intuitive, just that 100% of people can figure out what it means given context, while not everyone knows what diacritics are and might still be confused even after being given context. The bit about Japanese people knowing diacritics on Latin letters makes absolutely no sense, since they never need to know anything remotely that detailed, they just need to know what letters on a keyboard correspond to which sounds in Japanese. They use Latin letters for typing, but don't need to know about Romaji's phonology or type vowels with accents like Hepburn does. This isn't me being an armchair expert for once, I have a couple of Japanese IMEs installed and typing in Japanese is way less involved than you seem to think.

It's not like anything anyone comes up with would be truly accurate anyway, since it's Japanese words representing something said in a fantasy language, and putting diacritics over specific syllables in Japanese OR English would be inaccurate because neither of those words are actually the sounds being said and the diacritics would always be in the wrong place regardless. If you're gonna be this autistic about it, you may as well demand that the author create an entire new fantasy language with its own alphabet with that readers are expected to learn so the diacritics can be put in the right places.

This seems to me like you're assuming your experience with language is the same as everybody's. Japanese people have little reason to know diacritics outside of their own unless they know multiple languages or done studies into linguistics in-depth, and English speakers, despite having reason to know, rarely do anyway because it's hardly touched on in general education if at all. Sure, people probably know what the "é"s in "résumé" mean, but even common cases like that are often just spelled "resume" anyway, because people are lazy. Out of this entire thread of people making EEEU jokes you're the only person to care enough to bring it up.

You're like the one math major in a discussion thread about an anime where there's a whiteboard in the background for three frames, and while everyone else is laughing about how the tsundere said a dumb thing you're complaining about how they used the wrong order of operations in the equations on the whiteboard, and because it bothered you then surely it must bother everybody.

 

[kuma]

umm.. chinese language use tone extremely often..

 

[Ibri]

@givemersspls as someone from germany I don't perceive üöä as telling me to say uoa differently but as letters that are similiar to uoa, the dots have no independent meaning for me so if you put them over something else I wouldn't have the slightest idea what you meant by it. Well I guess I would know it means to change their pronunciation but I wouldn't know in what way. (Well not entirely true the modification is similiar enough that I could make some guesses but point is they are part of the letters for me not things I use to modify letters.) Anyway to make this concrete which diacritics would you use to convey what the manga wants to convey? And how since as Anonyan says we only get the meaning of what is spoken an diacritics are for specific characters if I am understanding it correctly.

 

[Anonyan]

Do you even know what intuitive means? You literally just described what intuitive means and in the same breath said oh, you didn't imply it was intuitive. I'm literally foreheading right now. You accuse me of being autistic but don't even understand this?

No, intuition has to do with how well knowledge transmits without reasoning, without actively thinking too hard about it. People who know what diacritics mean already have intuitive knowledge of how to parse characters and won't think twice about seeing them used, but people who don't understand them don't. In cases where 100% of people can figure something out given context (like with arrows that go up, down, and/or squiggly) that isn't intuitive because the context was required.

And I literally proved, as a normal reader, that I didn't know what the arrows meant. I am not some language expert. I honestly am not. I thought the arrows meant something like head movements. You knwo, since there had already been head movements before for language? Or something like a body movement, an actual movement. That already disproves your "100% of people can figure out what it means given context". That's already wrong.

The professor literally explains exactly what it is on page 5. That's context. Just because you skimmed the chapter and missed a character mentioning tone doesn't mean it isn't there and that you couldn't have figured it out if you had paid attention. And if you honestly did read everything thoroughly and still managed to be confused until they were gone, then okay, my bad, 99.99% of people can figure it out given context, whereas I would say that much fewer people could figure out tonal diacritics without needing to look them up or without the mangaka wasting time drawing extra pages explaining what they mean in real life. What diacritics should they even have used, since the original work is Japanese and the only diacritics they use in Japanese writing are used for kana to distinguish entirely different words?

And you're literally ignoring what I said. I never said that Japanese people know how to use diacritics. I said Japanese people know of the existence of diacritics. Does an English speaker know how to use diacritics? There's a good chance that no, they don't. Do they know ABOUT them and GENERALLY that they exist? Almost certainly! It's the same thing with Japan!

What the fuck kind of point is this? I generally know that rocket science exists too, but I'm not going to bother learning it just so the fake rocket science in my fantasy manga is easier to parse.

And you literally don't understand what my point is. My point is not "oh, this fantasy language should be like this or that because X reason in the real world". No! My point is "make it so that readers can understand what you've literally typed/written/drawn"! Using the existing system makes it easier for readers to understand what the hell is going on. You can still do ALL of your fantasy stuff, but don't use a system that is confusing!

No, I understand perfectly what your point is. My point which you don't seem to be understanding is that more confusing for you is not more confusing for everyone, and that diacritics that represent a change in tone are in fact less informative to someone who has no idea which diacritics mean what than arrows that show you exactly the direction that tone is going.

And oh, so what if I'm the only person saying this? Why the hell is that an important point? This is literally a comment system on a manga website. I'm literally making a comment. Don't just make crap up and pretend like I'm making this grand speech. I know no one cares. I'm still right about what I'm saying though, and this is literally a comment system where you can say whatever you want.

It's a super important point because we're talking about an anecdotal experience and you're asserting that everyone would have been less confused, like you would have been, if they used diacritics instead of silly lines, but I would wager money that there would have been some people that would be even more confused.
I don't know why you would even think "I'm making a comment in a comment system" is somehow a rebuttal to somebody pointing out that you're the only person bothered by a perceived problem. I never said you're not allowed to make a comment, just that you're the only one who complained, which gives us an idea of how many people were bothered, and the length of your posts shows that you care way more about it than you should. Like I said, big "math major nitpicking math" vibes. Obviously the two situations are different, because the math in that metaphor I used before has way less influence than tone in this manga, but the attitude you have is exactly the same which is why I bought it up in the first place.
Hell, if anything the fact that you felt the need to explain tonal diacritics to someone who speaks German, where they're much more aware about them and that they generally exist because their language absolutely relies on the umlaut, just proves my point.

Hell, thinking about it some more...

I said very clearly that the author could have just used diacritics purely for the sake of conveying that it's a matter of tone. Then you use the surrounding words to describe what that means. The author literally already did something similar, just in a fairly confusing way.

What the hell is even your problem then? If you're saying the author could've just used any diacritics and explained them from context, which they already did in their own way, then are you saying that you would've been fine with the squiggly lines being over different syllables instead of next to them? That's not always even possible when writing with Kanji where one character represents multiple syllables. So yeah, if your idea is so much better, please give us a real example of what the author should've done, instead of just saying "my idea is better and totally possible."

Oh also, if we're being autistic about language, please stop overusing "literally" when you aren't saying things that could be taken figuratively, that really grinds my gears.

 

[Anonyan]

I want to clarify something here. You're misunderstanding my points, because you keep reiterating points and explaining what diacritics mean and accusing me of missing points when I'm challenging your points (and throwing the word "literally" around like candy on Halloween, jesus christ it's like a generation-z picnic). I understand what you're saying perfectly, and saying you're wrong. I'm not saying that people that read don't generally have intrinsic knowledge of diacritics existing, I'm saying that knowing something exists doesn't mean you know how it's used and that it makes the situation harder to understand for someone unfamiliar with them. Someone knowing what diacritics are but not how they're used tonally doesn't "support you" just because you view people knowing they exist at all as a point for you when I'm challenging that core point directly and someone not knowing about tonal diacritics is also an example I'm using. You've got a mean case of "because I'm right everything supports me, even if that same evidence is also an example of something they cited, and if they disagree with me they're not understanding me so I don't need to try to disagree with them, just imply that they're stupid."

An anecdote is still a valid data point. I've also provided additional reasons why my anecdote could be generalized. It wasn't just herp derp, I had this experience, so everyone else should too. It was I had this experience because of X, Y, and Z reasons, and X, Y, and Z reasons generally hold true for other people, so it makes sense that others would have similar experiences.

Here's an example of what I mean right here. I've never made any effort to imply that other people won't agree with you. I've specifically made an effort to point out that some people don't fall into your anecdote, and that you being the only person to speak up doesn't mean you're the only person who knows what diacritics are, but that specifically you're the only person who it bothered enough to complain about it. Instead of debating the actual point I put out there, that being the idea that arrows make more sense for someone who doesn't know what diacritics are and learning new diacritics is less clear than arrows that directly show tone movement, you're debating some imaginary point I didn't make where I said you're the only person who could possibly be confused by this.

But anyway, I'm not gonna let this shitshow devolve any further by giving you other points to misquote and say that disagreeing with you is not understanding you. Address this core of the issue (which, to be fair, I edited in so you may have missed it), and if you can give me an example of how you would've done it better than the author by using diacritics in a language where one character can mean ten syllables, I'll give you your internet trophy:

What the hell is even your problem then? If you're saying the author could've just used any diacritics and explained them from context, which they already did in their own way, then are you saying that you would've been fine with the squiggly lines being over different syllables instead of next to them? That's not always even possible when writing with Kanji where one character represents multiple syllables. So yeah, if your idea is so much better, please give us a real example of what the author should've done, instead of just saying "my idea is better and totally possible."