Comment on Asian Beauty

• Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.

  That reminds me of the “Password Strength” comic by xkcd. All right, it’s settled. Next time I need new password, I’m feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.

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• JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  So the characters are still words, right? As in not phonetics? Would it be like someone named Tristan getting the Spanish word Triste because it sounds like Tristan?

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  • howrar@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So the characters are still words, right?

    Most likely yes. All characters in Chinese are defined jointly by the way it’s written, the pronunciation, and meaning. You can’t invent new characters like you would a new English word and have something that can be read out loud because there’s no system for deriving pronunciation from the written character itself.

    I say most likely because there are still some characters that are phonetic in that their meaning is just the sound, but these don’t cover the whole spectrum of possible sounds in the language as far as I know. They also wouldn’t look as nice in tattoo form since they all use the same radical.

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  • elucubra@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Tristán is a proper local name in Spanish

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    • JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m aware, it was just the first English name and Spanish word I could think of that sounded similar for the example.

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