On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, Eric Hildum wrote:
> on 01.9.26 6:15 AM, Michael Turner at leap@gol.com wrote:
> > I'd have it more like this:
> > Where are you going now? I'm going out for a drink.
> > どこに行きますか。読みに行きます。
> > ...
>
> Unless you are communicating with your boss, your Japanese is far to formal
> for the context implied. I doubt many people would use ~masu form in a
> keitai message, unless it was a first message sent as an introduction.
That was rather my thought, too.
> However, your corrections of the noun for drinking and addition of the
> question particle do improve the Japanese....
Ok, I know, not the place to argue Japanese, but still, I'm not sure I'd
count replacing the kanji for "drink" (飲み) with the kanji for
"read" (読み) as a "correction of the noun for drinking." (And
that hurts; if there's any verb I would know, it would be "to drink.")
Anyway, that "correction" was pretty obviously a typo; he uses 飲み
in the second example.
As for the question particle, none of my friends ever use it when using
the dictionary form of a verb. (I.e., they say 「行きますか」 and
「行く？」, but never 「行くか」.) Maybe it's just the age
group I hang out with, though.
Well, though I may have pushed a little to hard in the example of my
claim of Japanese using fewer, shorter words, I don't think it's really
very off the mark.
> on 01.9.26 6:15 AM, Michael Turner at leap@gol.com wrote:
>
> > Now take into account that the English is legible in a
> > 5x7 font (barely), but the Japanese becomes a total
> > blur at that size, for all but the simplest kanji.
> >
> > This is an old argument, of course. It's not how many
> > characters, but how many pixels, at a given level
> > of legibility.
Very true, and this is actually something I was going to mention, except
that I forgot by the time I'd finished working out half-width character
box space used by various this-and-that in English and Japanese.
But I don't think that the difference is as big as you make it out to be.
In terms of horizontal width, there's basically no difference, if you
count a roman character as using a half-width character space and a kanji
as using two half-width character spaces, as I did. My phone uses 5x9
for the smaller roman typeface and 11x12 for the smaller kanji typeface,
which I find quite readable even though I'm not all that familiar with
kanji. Given an extra pixel for inter-character spacing, the 6-across
half-width and 12-across full-width are basically both at the minimum
readable size, so neither roman characters nor kanji are at an advantage
over the other there.
For vertical width, I'd guess you need 7 and 11 pixels respectively for
minimum readablity, and 9 and 13 for reasonable readability. With the
latter, you're looking at getting about 45% more characters in in English
than in Japanese, which is I suppose a fairly substantial difference.
But then again, I think that with Japanese you can get away with a
smaller pixel size than you can in English, and thus still have a
physically smaller screen using 11x11 kanji than you could using 5x7
roman characters. But then again, maybe not.
At any rate, if after all this contemplation I can't even decide which
side of this argument I'm on now, it's definitely going nowhere. :-)
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 3 5778 0123 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
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Received on Thu Sep 27 08:41:54 2001