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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Mixed text [was: Re: Pinyin
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References: <32C892DC.1BDD@scruznet.com> <7fybe9ur4n.fsf@phoenix.cs.hku.hk> <E3JwxH.F24@midway.uchicago.edu> <32D1E070.CD8@scruznet.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 03:32:21 GMT
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In article <32D1E070.CD8@scruznet.com>,
Mike Wright  <darwin@scruznet.com> wrote:
>Daniel von Brighoff wrote:
>> 
>> In article <7fybe9ur4n.fsf@phoenix.cs.hku.hk>,
>> Lee Sau Dan ~{@nJX6X~} <sdlee@cs.hku.hk> wrote:
>> 
>> >    deb5>    This never made sense to me.  If you can use your
>> >    deb5> software to place Chinese and Latin characters side by
>> >    deb5> side on a few pages, why can't you do it on all of them?
>> >
>> >Perhaps, they think  that   the characters "contaminate" the   running
>> >text, in the same way that I  think English words appearing in running
>> >Chinese texts is contamination.
>> 
>>         Perhaps.  Personally, I find it more of a bother to page to the
>> back everytime I want to see the characters for a term than to "bleep"
>> right over them when I don't care, but maybe I'm an exception.
>
>Nope, I agree. I prefer to see the originals right there in the text. 

Well, maybe we're both exceptions.
[snip]
>
>I suspect the use of appendixes is due to the original writer not having
>the capability of mixing Chinese and English text on their home computer
>(or, more likely, typewriter). Often, the folks who end up producing the
>final copy for printing probably don't know Chinese at all and have to
>bring someone in to do the appendix. Putting the whole thing together
>with mixed text is probably just more trouble than it is worth. This is
>bound to change now that desktop computers can do virtually all
>languages.

I found it hard to believe that major university publishing houses
(Cambridge, UofC, Yale, etc.) do not have both the software and the
personnel to handle mixed text in-house.  At some point, the writer is
giving her editors a list of character equivalents so they make the
appendix.  Why, at this moment, they cannot do a global change
(romanisation -> romanisation + characters) is utterly beyond me.  It's
not like it would raise the page count unduly.

By the same token, as anyone who typed (as opposed to input) a term paper
can tell you, footnotes used to be a major headache.  Now, with software
than can instantly format them perfectly, they are harder and harder to
find. 
>> 
>>         As I said, they can but just don't bother.  Also, handwritten
>> characters seem most common in a certain era, after the demise of movable
>> type and before the advent of modern computer technology.  In the movable
>> type days, creating a new piece of type for a handwritten character was a
>> monumental pain; if you didn't have pre-cast type, you didn't bother.
>> Nowadays, creating a new true-type font is as easy as justifying the
>> margins.  In between, anything that could be photographed could also be
>> printed, so if you had the patience to handwrite the characters on every
>> page of your manuscript, it was possible to include them in the final
>> work.
>
>I haven't seen any handwritten characters in new printed material in
>many years, but back in 1979-80, when I was on a team was producing
>Chinese texts for the Defense Language Institute, we had one gentleman
>with excellent handwriting who wrote out *all* of our lesson texts - and
>we produced many volumes of textbooks. Eventually we got a Chinese
>typewriter, which took several days to assemble and which took just
>about as long to produce a page of text as did careful handwriting. At
>the same time, DLI was just acquiring its first primitive computerized
>Chinese word processing equipment.

I've seen those books and, yes, the gentleman had excellent handwriting.
Unfortunately, this is too often the exception.  I remember reading a book
on Sino-Korean characters from about the same era where the hanja were so
sloppy, they looked like they had been engraved reversed onto a metal
cylinder with a stylus.

lsd:
>> >Yes,   the  transliterations  can   turn   the   English  words   into
>> >Japanese/Korean spellings  which   are pronounced close  to  (and only
>> >close to) the English sounds.  However, because the syllable structure
>> >of both  Japanese and  Korean  (and many SE  Asian  languages) is much
>> >simpler than that of English (and many  other European languages), the
>> >transliterations cannot   be  perfect.  The  problem  deterioates when
>> >there are clusters of  consonants,  such as   the "spr"  in  "spring".
>> >(Japanese  "gudamoningu" for "Good Morning" is  one of  the worst that
>> >I've heard of.)
>> 
>> Worse than 'suturaiku'?
>                 ^
>"Sutoraiku", actually, and the worst for me was "Makkudonarudo". I
>couldn't understand what my friend was saying until she drew a picture
>of the Golden Arches.

Of course, it's 'sutoraiku' and not 'sutsuraiku'.  For being such an
'oraai' guy and spotting that, you've earned a shiny piece of 'kyandee'.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
