[HN Gopher] Office of the President of Mongolia: Top to bottom t...
___________________________________________________________________
Office of the President of Mongolia: Top to bottom text on the web
Author : robin_reala
Score : 309 points
Date : 2023-04-21 07:20 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (president.mn)
(TXT) w3m dump (president.mn)
| anderber wrote:
| It's really interesting that the numbers are sideways, I wonder
| if they actually write them that way or if it's just a quirk of
| the web.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| The link was timing out for me (HN hug of death?), so here's an
| archived version:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230421094510/https://president...
| zirgs wrote:
| It's crazy that HN can accidentally DDoS the official site of a
| foreign head of state.
| madaerodog wrote:
| It's optimized to be read on the horseback, you lean on the right
| or left to see beside the horses head and you can read the
| articles!
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| I love how this makes the usage of screen real-estate very
| efficient. You can some entire articles without having to scroll
| the page. I also love how landscape images fit neatly in this
| configuration.
|
| It is very tempting to try to make a website that uses this
| configuration for english text.
|
| Also, even though it is the very first time I see this script, I
| can tell that the website is very well done (well, it's the
| website of the president of the country, but still).
| tin7in wrote:
| Some time ago I lived with a Mongolian student for a while and I
| was really surprised to find out that Cyrillic is the default
| alphabet in the country.
|
| My language is written in Cyrillic and while most Cyrillic
| languages come from the same Slavic language family, Mongolian
| has very little similarities with the rest.
| Muromec wrote:
| Kazakh, Kyrgyz and many other languages are written with
| Cyrillic due to Soviet and Russian colonization efforts.
| paganel wrote:
| The same used to be true of the Romanian Principalities until
| the middle of the 19th century, when we switched to Latin
| alphabet in order to underline our Romance-language roots and
| to culturally distance ourselves from the expanding Tsarist
| Empire.
|
| Of course, the Soviet Republic of Moldova used the Cyrillic
| writing for Romanian throughout most of its existence, the
| people over there switching to Latin alphabet in the dying days
| of the Soviet Union was a prelude to their independence (I have
| two books in Romanian and using Latin alphabet published in the
| Soviet Republic of Moldova towards the end of the '80s - 1990,
| priced in rubles and all, really cool).
| githubholobeat wrote:
| Here is the writing process in action:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m0ak3c2XK4
| gen_greyface wrote:
| with the writing-mode property
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/writing-mod...
| robin_reala wrote:
| Yep, specifically this uses writing-mode: vertical-lr and text-
| orientation: sideways-right.
| gen_greyface wrote:
| any idea why there is a minor shift in line-height if we
| remove the text-orientation property.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I'm not seeing that in Firefox at least. Bug in your
| browser of choice?
| gen_greyface wrote:
| seems to be a bug in firefox developer version, works
| fine in chrome.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Work remains to be done. The page title is rendered sideways.
|
| (Not that the space exists in the browser to render titles
| vertically...)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Unfortunately, touchpad scrolling on this specific website is
| basically unusable for what I believe is a very large fraction of
| laptop users because:
|
| (a) it does scrolljacking, which _cannot_ be done well on the web
| (it doesn't expose the right primitives) so sites should _never_
| do it1 but find some other way;
|
| (b) its scrolljacking implementation is considerably worse than
| is possible; and
|
| (c) it intercepts _all_ scrolling, rather than leaving horizontal
| scrolling alone and only redirecting vertical scrolling.
|
| Fortunately, I browse the web with JavaScript disabled by
| default, so I'm fine other than when I'm checking this out!
|
| (I noted this a couple of years back in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27758336, and I don't think
| the site's implementation has changed at all since then; Firefox
| exhibits the same symptoms, Chromium has changed to behave
| somewhat more like Firefox now.)
|
| --***--
|
| 1 Sites, as distinct from apps; there are a few sorts of apps
| that can't avoid it and must do the best they can, e.g. maps;
| incidentally, Google Maps has the only consistently-decent
| scrolljacking implementation for web-based maps that I've ever
| found.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Does it cause for anyone else what it does for me -- the whole
| screen "vibrating" when you reach the limits of the horizontal
| scroll, or somewhat even while you're scrolling?
| DHPersonal wrote:
| It does that for me on a laptop, but only if I'm scrolling with
| a trackpad instead of a mouse.
| ravivyas wrote:
| Adguard is blocking the page
| https://reports.adguard.com/en/president.mn/report.html?aid=...
| ameshkov wrote:
| Fixed it, thanks
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Impressive monitoring of the forum
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| You can find plenty more examples on the Japanese web (top to
| bottom but also RTL)
| petesergeant wrote:
| Dual-English Arabic ads in UAE always make me do a double-take
| because of date order: Prime Day 24-23
| ywm brym
| rossmohax wrote:
| How does Mongolian IDE look like?
| twawaaay wrote:
| One thing is sure, I would not want to be a UI dev in Mongolia...
| roveo wrote:
| Oh, I recently moved to Israel, and at first was shocked with
| how much worse design in general is. Like, typography, ads and
| of course UI. There are maybe 3-4 common fonts used everywhere,
| and I think it's a common problem for "rare" scripts. It seems
| you need some "critical mass" of visual content to come up with
| good design practices and figure out what looks good in your
| cultural landscape.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| My first thought was about how browser tabs would be displayed.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| What does it say?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Blessed are the cheesemakers.
|
| It is not meant to be taken literally, it refers to all
| manufacturers of dairy products.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Really? Interesting. I wonder how many presidents in the
| world actually value who produces the food we eat.
| bojan wrote:
| Considering the massive government subsidies the farmers in
| the West are enjoying, I would say the answer to your
| question is, quite a few.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Indeed you have a point.
| rchaud wrote:
| Is there a president out there that doesn't pander to
| agribusiness?
| rob74 wrote:
| ...and Google Translate misidentifies it as simplified Chinese :(
| Symbiote wrote:
| <html lang="en-US">
|
| at the start of the page won't be helping.
| rchaud wrote:
| When I loaded the page, the pagination numbers were in
| English, but the page text was in Mongolian script. About 2
| seconds later, the page reloaded and showed everything in
| Mongolian.
| smn1234 wrote:
| these is also an option for english via hyperlink at bottom
| left of page, for https://president.mn/en/
| posterboy wrote:
| to be fair, google translate misidentifies a lot of input if
| instructions are unclear.
|
| And I think it's acceptable that they do not offer
| transcription for all the foreign scripts. Though helpful it
| would be, it's also very likely to make many mistakes.
| omneity wrote:
| As a native arabic reader, Mongolian gives me headaches. My brain
| keeps seeing it as an unreadable arabic script rotated 45 degrees
| to the left. (It also turns out it does have some arabic
| influence[0])
|
| Still fascinating and super cool.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script
| csomar wrote:
| Same here. It seems like my brain is trying to process it as
| Arabic and "find" the patterns when there are none?
| omneity wrote:
| Yes and right when my brain thinks it found something it
| could make sense of, my head tries intuitively to tilt to the
| left and I have to forcefully resist it.
| pneumic wrote:
| Not-native Arabic reader here. To my eyes, it pretty clearly
| has a "baseline" that, if you tilted the text 45deg to the
| right, would run along the "bottom". With this in mind, the
| similarity of many characters and ligatures to those in Arabic
| is striking.
| slothtrop wrote:
| Incidentally, having listened to a few clips of the language,
| it sounds like it has a slight Arabic tinge in some words. And
| otherwise reminds me of Russian, and sometimes Hangul.
| roydivision wrote:
| Even as a non-arabic reader my head still wants to tilt 45
| degrees automatically.
| shpx wrote:
| But probably in the wrong direction, unless you've
| internalized that Arabic is written right to left.
| [deleted]
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| You mean 90 degrees right?
| forinti wrote:
| I can't read arabic at all and this gives me a strong
| impression of being on its side too.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| No kidding! At some point Genghis Khan invaded Afghanistan.
| Over the next century Pax Mongolica made it as far as Egypt.
| Conquered swathes of Persia, felt cute, sacked Baghdad. Just
| Mongol things.
|
| Splintered into a bunch of Khanates that started fighting each
| other..
|
| Arguably they fell apart because they picked up so many scripts
| and cultural and religious influences the different types of
| Mongols could no longer communicate or tolerate one another.
| Then the bubonic plague came and they became insular again
| instead of expansionist.
| omneity wrote:
| Indeed. The fall of Baghdad [0] during that century at the
| hand of Hulagu Khan[1], the grandson of Gengis Khan, is
| thought to be a critical turning point that ended the islamic
| golden age and drove the eastern islamic caliphate to a dark
| age Iraq and other descendant countries never fully recovered
| from.
|
| <graphic warning> According to some accounts, Hulagu cut open
| the belly of the Caliph Al-Musta'sim, pulled his guts and
| left them on top of the caliph's head to drip while he was
| slowly dying. Some other accounts relate that he was killed
| by horse trampling wrapper in a rug.</graphic warning>
|
| It's also fascinating that Mongols, with all their mighty
| army, would settle in a land upon invading it, marrying into
| the locals, adopting their religion and traditions. Some
| modern Russian, Turk and Persian populations have this
| "reverse influence" from past Mongol invasions and admixture
| with actual Mongol people. Tatars[2] are a notable example, a
| Russo-Turko-Mongol population descending from Golden Horde
| troops who settled around the Volga (as everything in
| ethnographics, this is contested).
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulagu_Khan
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Tatars
| omeid2 wrote:
| The Mongoles did some horrible things. In the Shahr-e-
| Gholghola, when the grandson of Gengis Khan was killed, he
| ordered that everyone in the city be killed, including
| children in cribs. As if that was not enough, they left the
| city and returned a few days to kill any survivors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahr-e_Gholghola
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Arguably they fell apart because they picked up so many
| scripts and cultural and religious influences the different
| types of Mongols could no longer communicate or tolerate one
| another. "
|
| Interesting thought and it certainly had influence, but I
| would argue that the trope that one strong ruler conquers a
| big kingdom, but it doesn't stay united, because his heirs
| cannot settle on the next great king, is a quite common and
| often repeated one.
| mrweasel wrote:
| It doesn't really help that they use Arabic numerals and rotate
| them 90 degrees.
| antman123 wrote:
| As a native Syriac speaker, saying Mongolian has Arabic
| influence is like saying it has Hebrew influence.
|
| Syriac =/= Arabic. And Mongolian is influenced by Syriac not
| Arabic
|
| and if you are wondering :) yes, a lot of letters ARE Syriac
| rotated 45 degrees
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| That's a super fancy !=
| robofanatic wrote:
| that's a good attempt to represent the original "not equal"
| symbol [?] better than <> used by t-sql
| lionkor wrote:
| And pascal!
| yosito wrote:
| It doesn't fully work on my phone, which really makes me wonder
| how easy it would be to use digital devices as a Mongolian, who
| only speaks Mongolian, and no other language.
| leto_ii wrote:
| Interesting to note numerals are still Arabic, but written
| vertically. Does that mean that in school Mongolian kids learn to
| write digits sideways? Would be pretty cool :D
|
| edit: e.g. here: https://president.mn/mng/?p=7112
| sanxiyn wrote:
| writing-mode support is pretty good these days. Here is another
| website in the wild using it for vertical text, mixed with
| horizontal text: http://ko.scp-wiki.net/gumiho
| iso1631 wrote:
| Google translate _really_ struggles with this page. Only thing it
| manages to get out is "The" a few times!
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| lmao.
|
| Copy pasting this, from that page, into Google Translate:
|
| > monggol ulus un yerUngqeiilegchi uqun a iin qUrelsUqe
| erdenibUrin U usun chaqilgan stants barigdaqu gajar tu ajillaqu
| Uy e ber erchim qUchUn U saiid b, choiijilsUrUng erchim qUchUn
| U qanggamji iin OnO iin baiidal, chinagsida iin tOlOb Un tal a
| bar tobchi tanilchagulba.
|
| > monggol ulus qeregchegetU erchim qUchUn U ben 80 qubi ii
| dotogadu du ban UiledbUrilejU,
|
| Results:
|
| > - The - - l abar tobchi tanilchagulba.
|
| > 80 togaduduban UiledbUrilejU,
|
| Copy-pasting it into GPT-4 and asking for a translation:
|
| > "Mongolia's heroic history of the ancient period, from the
| time when heroes ruled the land, has left many great legacies.
| Among them, the unparalleled courage and power of the heroes of
| that time have been passed down through generations. Today, we
| continue to celebrate their extraordinary achievements and
| admire their incredible strength, while also learning from
| their wisdom and following their footsteps.
|
| > "Mongolia's heroic history spans over 80 years, during which
| many heroes have emerged and made their mark on the nation."
|
| Unbelievable. Google's slipping hard on translation.
| kweingar wrote:
| > Unbelievable. Google's slipping hard on translation.
|
| It's true. Google Translate has some stiff competition in
| LLMs. It needs to start making up translations out of whole
| cloth if it wants to catch up.
| qtzfz wrote:
| How do you know that's an actual translation and not a bunch
| of bullshit?
| izacus wrote:
| Turns out... it's a bunch of bullshit. Kinda shows just how
| much society here values bullshit over correctness, doesn't
| it?
| kps wrote:
| "Mongolia's heroic history spans over 80 years" is
| _technically_ true.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| To be fair, it's more about Google Translate straight up
| doesn't support Mongolian scripts than being this bad. It
| only supports Mongolian language in Cyrillic.
|
| * Surprisingly, I can't find the help article that lists all
| supported languages anymore. There used to be one: https://we
| b.archive.org/web/20221205131847/https://translate...
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| But it has "Mongolian" as an option on its drop-down menu.
| It does not specify "Mongolian - Cyrillic."
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| But it actually is "Mongolian - Cyrillic".
|
| It's simply mislabeled (or not clearly labeled, whatever
| you call it).
| luckystarr wrote:
| I copied it into GPT-4 and it gave me:
|
| ---snip---
|
| The Mongolian script reads:
|
| Mongol uls und erkh choloologchuudiin ooriin aimagtai
| kholbootoi zarim niitlel, surtalchilgaany stantsuudyg kharzh
| bui gazar deer azhillazh baina. Ene berkhchlenguudiig sudlan,
| shinechlekh zorilgoor erkhem khuvaar' bolon tolovlogoo
| oorchlon, tsalingiin shagnalyg nemegduulsen bolno. Chinii
| baidal, azhil khiizh baigaa tal am'dralyn tuvshind tuslakh
| gartsyg taniltsuulzh baina.
|
| Mongol uls khogzhliin tosliig erkhem khuvaar' bolon san 80
| khubitai iim dotoodyn tosol deer azhillazh baigaa uulzalt
| bolno.
|
| In English, the translation is:
|
| The Mongolian state is working on certain publications and
| broadcasting stations related to their province in the area
| they are visiting. These activists are researching and aiming
| to innovate, updating their important schedule and planning,
| and increasing their salary. They introduce the help they
| provide in the aspect of the living standards where they are
| working.
|
| Is the Mongolian state working on an internal project with an
| 80-million budget for development with an important schedule
| and planning?
|
| ---snap---
|
| edit: I pasted it into a second chat and then it gave me:
|
| ---snip2---
|
| The Mongolian script you've provided appears to be in
| Classical Mongolian, which is written vertically. Here is my
| attempt at translating the text into English:
|
| The Mongolian nation has a long and rich history, and the
| customs and culture of the people have been passed down from
| generation to generation. The land is vast and diverse, with
| many different landscapes and natural wonders to explore.
| Over the centuries, the Mongolian people have overcome many
| challenges and have continued to adapt and grow, forging a
| strong and unique identity.
|
| Mongolia has a proud heritage that dates back over 80 years,
| and the people have always been resilient and determined in
| the face of adversity.
|
| ---snap2---
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Damn, so it's just completely making stuff up.
|
| Can confirm, pasted it into 3.5 and it came up with
| something totally different.
| rchaud wrote:
| This is what the AI industry hand-waves away as
| "hallucinations". The first GPT authored book could be
| titled "Lying with Confidence".
| martin_balsam wrote:
| Wow. They only agree with "Mongolia " and the number 80
| nologic01 wrote:
| Cool. There is actually a W3C draft spec for Mongolian script![1]
|
| We tend to assume that left-to-right script is a law of nature
| but it is just one of many variations that have been invented and
| used across space and time. Right-to-left (Arab / Hebrew) [2] is
| well known but a most intriguing one used in antiquity by Greeks
| and others is _Boustrophedon_ (alternating from left-to-right /
| right-to-left).[3]
|
| Boustrophedon mode is in one sense the optimal script form. At
| the one-time expense of having to learn to recognize letters and
| words both ways one can then (in principle) speed up reading as
| the eyeballs don't need to jump across the page to start a new
| line :-)
|
| [1] https://www.w3.org/International/mlreq/
|
| [2] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-scripts
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "At the one-time expense of having to learn to recognize
| letters and words both ways"
|
| That is a very expensive expense, though. And the result might
| still be worse.
|
| I can quickread a page in a couple of seconds, because my brain
| memorized the shape of the words and even sentences. It took me
| years of lots of reading to achieve that. I am not sure if my
| brain could handle the double amount of shapes, because this is
| in effect what would be needed. And eye movement is very quick.
| But feel free to give the experiment a shot and share results.
|
| (it should be trivial to write a script that rearranges text
| that way)
| nologic01 wrote:
| > That is a very expensive expense, though. And the result
| might still be worse.
|
| That's entirely possible but it is hard to tell without going
| through the entire learning process. There might be a lot of
| redundancy (as we can quickly recognize mirror shapes) which
| if tapped at an early age might make it actually a trivial
| "add-on".
|
| Anecdotally you can learn within minutes to _slowly_ parse
| script in reverse order. Whether you can ever get to the same
| speed is not clear. We do know that some cultures did use
| alternating script (so its clearly not impossible) but we
| also know that they abandoned it in the end - so there might
| be some disadvantages.
|
| Maybe the reason for eventually adopting uniform LR or RL
| instead or alternating is not the difficulty of mastering
| mirror versions, but being able to quickly start reading from
| any line on a page. For example finding the spot where you
| left reading, or scanning to find a relevant part. For this
| task the alternating form is actually less efficient as you
| need to jump back and forth as you go down (or up :-) the
| page.
| shubb wrote:
| It shouldn't be too hard to make a chrome pluggin to render
| comment threads like this in alternative forward and mirror
| / backward lines. As you say reading mirror writing isn't
| too hard so you could sort of slowly get good at it while
| wasting time on HN anyway. Would be a fun silly project
| might give it a go.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Wow Boustrophedon looks really interesting. Thanks! I asked
| GPT4 to write a Haiku about Elon Musk in that style. It gave me
| this:
|
| Elon's cosmic sound (=)
|
| = Spacetime symphony thrives
|
| Starward notes resound (=)
| masklinn wrote:
| There's also scripts written bottom to top (Libyc), and even
| stranger scripts which are written and read in different
| directions (Hanuno'o is generally written bottom to top --
| carved away from the writer really -- but read left to right).
| jl6 wrote:
| Now this is the kind of nano-optimization I can get behind!
| topper-123 wrote:
| Korean can be written left to right or top to bottom, which is
| very cool.
| 1-more wrote:
| Do the individual syllables also reverse direction? They're
| normally read left to right and top to bottom. I'd imagine
| that they're taken in as complete syllables by readers rather
| than read sound-by-sound, so they maintain left-to-right.
| AdamN wrote:
| I'm guessing it was top to bottom and then during the
| modernization process, left to right was added? It's smart
| that both forms are allowed though as I could imagine
| modifying a written language takes many years and massive
| public effort.
| kijin wrote:
| Yep, it used to be top to bottom, and the columns were
| arranged right to left. As a side effect of this recent
| transition, it's not particularly difficult to read Korean
| right to left, either.
|
| It's the same in Chinese and Japanese. It helps a lot that
| the letters are designed fit into individual square blocks.
| The blocks can be arranged any way you want. There have
| been internet memes, for example, written to mean one thing
| when you read left to right and a completely different
| thing top to bottom.
| glandium wrote:
| Note that Japanese went with horizontal right to left for
| a while before going with left to right. I don't know if
| Chinese or Korean did the same.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I think Chinese was usually written right to left when
| written horizontally. This can still be seen for instance
| at the front of temples and gates.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I think you mean vertically.
|
| But yes, Chinese was written top down, right to left. The
| PRC basically switched over to left-right, top-bottom
| right away (it kind of went hand in hand with the
| simplification project). Taiwan for example kept the
| traditional format for a lot longer.
|
| When I was learning Mandarin in the late 90s, all our
| imported material from Taiwan was still top-down, right
| to left.
|
| Here's an example Taiwanese newpaper from 1993 (yes,
| that's Michael Jackson) https://www.taipeitimes.com/image
| s/2021/08/29/p08-210829-fro...
|
| You can see the body text is arranged top-bottom, right
| to left, and the headlines employ a mixture of
| approaches.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The traditional way is vertically, indeed, but on
| occasions you had to write horizontally, which was then
| usually also done right to left (can still be seen here
| and there, as I mentioned in my previous comment).
| jinwoo68 wrote:
| At least for Korean, it was right to left only when
| written top to bottom. Then it changed to left to right.
| It's never been right to left horizontally. I _think_ it
| 's the same with Chinese. I'm not sure about Japanese.
| bjoli wrote:
| Hangul in general is pretty smart in general. You can get the
| hang of it in an afternoon, which is something you cannot say
| about the Korean language in general.
| i_no_can_eat wrote:
| In general, you're correct
| pkd wrote:
| The runic script (futhark) could also be written l2r and r2l in
| alternating lines.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This seems pretty efficient as there's no deadheading to get
| back to the other end of the line. When doing puzzles like
| word searches or scanning things laid out in grids like news
| article headlines, I do this l2r->r2l type of scanning. I've
| even caught myself using t2b->b2t scanning as well in these
| types of situations. It's just much more efficient
| rvense wrote:
| I'm not an expert on alphabetization, but AFAIK kids actually
| have some trouble getting the letters "the right way round", I
| think especially if they start very early. They might be
| learning the abstract shape first and the learn to force it
| into the self-relative forms like always-left-to-right. Which
| kind of makes sense, since objects in nature are usually
| encountered from all sides, orientation is rarely valuable. So
| in that sense I'm not convinced it's really an expense to have
| to learn it. And anecdotally, my son when he was 3-4, when
| presented with a grid of items would tend to go over it row by
| row in alternative directions, like writing in boustrophedon.
| And as you say it would also make very long lines of text more
| readable - I think Greek inscriptions often have ludicrous line
| lengths, like several meters. So there it's not just your
| eyeballs that are jumping, you actually have to walk back to
| the start of the next line!
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| kids are excellent at picking information because their
| brains by default will attempt "wild" interpretations of the
| same information. Their brains are the perfect startup in a
| way, in that they fail quick, they fail often , and they
| learn immediately.
|
| This is also why its hard to do magic tricks with young kids.
| They will tend to be looking at all the wrong spots. Their
| brain doesn't pick up on attempted misdirection, it just
| decide to make a new test happen from a different vantage
| point.
| Max-q wrote:
| I once read that the brain stores the shape of the letter and
| the orientation separately, so both have to be learned.
| ale42 wrote:
| > speed up reading as the eyeballs don't need to jump across
| the page to start a new line :-)
|
| Reminds me of dot matrix printers... some could write lines
| from right to left without needing to go back to start of line,
| thus alternating directions.
| orangewindies wrote:
| That was usually in draft mode, since the left-to-right and
| right-to-left lines wouldn't quite line up perfectly.
| davchana wrote:
| As a kid I thought if i write English in a mirrored way i.e.
| right to left, & mirrored, it would be my code script, nobody
| else can read it. People read it very easily.
| yakubin wrote:
| That's how Leonardo wrote, because he was left-handed, so
| it was more practical -- it preventing smudging the writing
| with the wrist.
|
| (Except Leonardo didn't write in English.)
| lupire wrote:
| Not just smudging. The entire mechanical act of writing
| (and everything) is optimized for left handed operation
| being the mirror image of right-handed operation, since
| left is mirror image of right.
| antman wrote:
| My favorite is Egyptian which had the extra feature that the
| letters were equivalent if rotated with respect to the y axis.
|
| So if you had an animal looking letter you could place it in a
| aesthetically pleasing way looking left or right e.g. on each
| side of a door
| haskal wrote:
| I don't get it. Do you have an example that you can show this
| happening in?
|
| Thanks!
| aix1 wrote:
| Here is an illustration and explanation: https://web.mnstat
| e.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/images/glyph...
|
| The whole page:
| https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I think the OP means that E and 3 would be equivalent.
| maf8987678 wrote:
| This actually works fine with latin letters. Think of for
| example advertising or graffiti where this trick is used
| sometimes to gain attention.
| OJFord wrote:
| Not all of them, depending on font (and case) - bdpq, sz.
| rvense wrote:
| My understanding is that hieroglyphics can be read and
| written in either direction, and that the animal characters
| in particular give it away, if they're face right you read
| from the right and vice versa.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| Yes, and there are some inscriptions where this is used,
| for example in "speech bubbles", where two figures facing
| each other on a wall talk to each other, with the texts
| flowing in different directions.
| omneity wrote:
| I wonder if this horizontal glyph direction has some sort of
| meaning lost to the sands of time. Armchair speculating
| outloud, maybe it's not purely aesthetic and could imply some
| sort of past/future tense?
| paulusthe wrote:
| It was the attempt to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs into
| Phoenician which led to all of today's alphabetic languages.
| Archaeologists recently found a temple in the Jordan area in
| which the earliest known attempt at an alphabetic language
| was written; it was a translation between Egyptian and
| Phoenician.
|
| Alphabetic, non pictographic languages are an order of
| magnitude easier to learn and express than pictographic
| languages, which require rote memorization of hundreds to
| thousands of pictographs and their modifiers. In contrast,
| the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess
| the sound of the words by the spelling, which is simply
| impossible in, say, Mandarin.
| alasarmas wrote:
| I agree with your point in general, that alphabetic systems
| are easier to pick up. However, it's not true that you
| can't guess the sound of a Chinese character. From
| Wikipedia [0]: Radical-phonetic
| compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates
| the general meaning of the character, and the other (the
| phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is Liang
| (liang), where the phonetic Liang liang indicates the
| pronunciation of the character and the radical Mu ('wood')
| indicates its meaning of 'supporting beam'. Characters of
| this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms.
|
| 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram
| akavi wrote:
| Note that the "phonetic" component can become incredibly
| strained in modern Chinese languages. Eg, take the
| character "Yu "; in Mandarin, it's pronounced "yu".
| However, it's used as a phonetic component in:
|
| 1) Shu : pronounced "shu"
|
| 2) Tou : pronounced "tou"
|
| (There are even worse examples which I can't think of in
| the moment)
| cyberax wrote:
| Phonetics don't really tell you the tone. Also, there are
| tons and tons of exceptions.
| yakireev wrote:
| _> the language you 're reading this post in allows you to
| guess the sound of the words by the spelling_
|
| It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct
| most of the time, unless you know the word already. And
| when you don't, you'll be dealing with all kinds of
| Cansas/Arcansas and
| although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the
| time.
|
| In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the
| way it is written and maybe miss the accent. In e.g.
| Spanish you can read the word correctly with the right
| accent most of the time. Even Korean is more phonetic than
| English - in English the best you've got is a guess.
|
| Not unlike Mandarin, by the way.
|
| Source: non-native speaker of English, also speaker of some
| other languages.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's a necessary evil owing to the large English lexicon
| filled with homophones. The Japanese stick to their
| ponderous use of Chinese characters for similar reasons.
| munificent wrote:
| The spelling of English words gives you two separate
| clues:
|
| 1. How it is pronounced.
|
| 2. Its etymology and what it means.
|
| Because pronunciation has changed over time and changes
| across regions, these two features are in conflict. If we
| made spelling uniformly reflect (current, in some given
| place) pronunciation, then we would lose clues as to
| etymology and meaning.
|
| For example, an English speaker can reasonably guess that
| "native", "nation" have related meanings because of the
| shared "nat". If we made the spelling follow
| pronunciation and did "naytiv" and "nayshun", some of
| that is lost.
|
| Ideally, pronunciation would be fixed across time and
| place so that a language's spelling reliably reflected
| _both_ meaning and sound. But that ain 't how humans
| work.
|
| In written languages that do this "better", it's mainly
| through some combination of:
|
| 1. The written language is simply younger than written
| English and thus has had less time for pronunciation to
| diverge.
|
| 2. The language is used by a smaller, more homogeneous
| community.
|
| 3. Elites exert political force to prevent pronunciation
| or meaning from changing and to reject loanwords at the
| loss of expressivity.
|
| English does none of those things. It's been around a
| long time, has spread throughout the world across widely
| disparate communities, and is happy to absorb any good
| idea it finds in any other language. It is the Perl of
| written languages, for better or worse.
| mcguire wrote:
| By the way, meaning also drifts over time.
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| 4. Spelling reforms have been introduced to amend the
| orthography to rationalise it and better reflect current
| pronunciation.
|
| This is what some people advocate for English - entirely
| misguidedly in my view.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Why misguidedly, in your view?
| Shorel wrote:
| The spelling of English definitely doesn't give enough
| clues about how a word is pronounced.
|
| Me, and millions of other speakers of English as a second
| language, will vehemently disagree with that point.
|
| The rest of your comment reads like a detailed attempt at
| rationalization of this untrue affirmation.
|
| As a counterargument, take Spanish. Spanish is not
| younger than English, pronunciation has diverged and for
| example someone from Cuba and someone from Argentina
| pronounce many words differently.
|
| The Spanish-speaking world is by no means small, or
| homogeneous.
|
| And we absorb loanwords like madmen. Mostly from English,
| but also French, Japanese, Italian, etc.
|
| The point is: Spanish is a much more phonetic language in
| its written form than English, so much that we have no
| spelling bees.
|
| English simply fucked up itself with the great vowel
| shift, that's all.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be
| correct most of the time, unless you know the word
| already. And when you don't, you'll be dealing with all
| kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and
| although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the
| time._
|
| "Most of the time" is an exaggeration. English is (sadly)
| less strictly phonetic than many other languages, but
| still highly phonetic. Nearly every word in your own
| comment can be pronounced phonetically.
| Max-q wrote:
| << Even Korean is more phonetic than English>>
|
| Well, that's a strange statement. Hangul is not just
| better by accident, it's designed to be an advanced
| phonetic system making it possible to write many
| languages. You can learn in a few evenings, no need to
| know Korean, and you will be able to read Korean
| perfectly out loud without understanding what you are
| saying.
| bluesmoon wrote:
| Hangul is phonetic, but doesn't have the capability to
| represent all phonetic sounds of a language. For example,
| Hindi has 4 distinct letters and consequently sounds for
| the each of D and T (D: dd ddh d dh, T: tt tth t th),
| which all correspond to the single Hangul letter diot
| (d). I have Korean friends who write their names in the
| Chinese script because they don't have the necessary
| letters to represent the sounds.
| jk_i_am_a_robot wrote:
| English has had a long trip to the language it is today.
| It doesn't help that at the latter stages of its
| development writers disagreed on or disregarded the rules
| of spelling.
| masukomi wrote:
| I like that. Mine is boustrophedon. When you get to the end
| of a line, you continue the next line starting at the same
| end. I know the ancient Greeks used it. I don't know who
| else. I keep pondering how hard it would be to write a text
| editor that handled that correctly.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
| kijin wrote:
| Only LF and no CR? Sounds Unixy enough for me.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Omg, I love the way this was handled. Impressive and well thought
| out.
| rogerallen wrote:
| I wish it was easy to render western text to multiple columns
| that are fit to the screen. Reading like a multicolumn paper
| newspaper and scrolling horizontally. I think this shows that it
| would be pleasant to read text on the web this way.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Surprised there's not a Cyrillic version. As far as I know, most
| Mongolian people can't fluently read that script.
|
| Edit: Apparently the government is pushing for increased use of
| the Mongolian alphabet in official documents.
| azubinski wrote:
| Don't worry, they will learn as quickly as they quickly learned
| the Cyrillic alphabet, which appeared in Mongolia in 1940 only.
| And for this it will not be necessary to kill as many people in
| the "purges" as they were killed by the "Choibalsan's troikas".
| RobotToaster wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the majority of the Mongolian people were
| illiterate before then, since education was mostly limited to
| monks.
| gondaloof wrote:
| [flagged]
| fjfaase wrote:
| I am not sure what is harder: learn separate characters for
| words or learn the correct spelling for words? Especially
| with English where there is a big gap between spelling and
| pronouciation, learning the correct spelling for words takes
| a lot of memorization effort.
|
| The fact that many adult cannot spell 100% correctly, proves
| that spelling is difficult.
|
| Writing a language is always harder than reading. Many people
| rely on muscle memory when writing words. It might be that
| this works better for writing chinese characters than for
| words, which is more likely to fail when words contain
| multiple instances of characters.
|
| It might also be the case that the number of strokes needed
| to write an average characters is about the same as writing
| an average word.
| 76SlashDolphin wrote:
| But there are many languages where words are (nearly
| always) written the way they are said. As a native
| Bulgarian I always found the concept of a spelling bee very
| odd. IMHO it's the best of both worlds but it only really
| works where accents are less of a thing.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I imagine you think the Cherokee writing system was a "waste
| of human work" too. This feels like you're arguing for a
| global monoculture.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Imperial measurements are a gigantic waste of human work too.
| Metric won
|
| The US continues to use them though, it's part of their
| culture. We don't need to optimise everything, and the world
| would be a very sad place if we did.
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| franky47 wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm French, we use metric everywhere.
|
| I've picked up woodworking and imperial inch fractions are
| a much better mental model for simple math
| (doubling/halving/dividing lengths, centering things etc)
| than arbitrary mm values.
|
| There's also a thing about the inch being a (subjectively)
| good "bite size" unit. 1cm is too small, 10cm is way too
| big.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| I'm also French and I live in the US. What a load of
| crap. You're telling me it's easier for you to double "6
| and 3/4 inch" than "17.14 cm"? I balk every time I have
| to do the mental gymnastics.
|
| "Okay, 6+3/4 inches doubled, that's 12+6/4 inches. But
| 6/4 is 1+2/4 which is 1+1/2, so 13+1/2 inches, or 1ft
| 1+1/2in".
|
| "Okay, 17.14cm doubled, that's 34.28cm".
|
| Really, for you the first one is easier?
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| If you've ever done woodworking, you'd appreciate the
| imperial system, especially when working with kerf size
| and whatnot. The imperial system was literally made for
| that kind of application. Rather, not made, but it
| emerged.
|
| The imperial system emerged piecemeal as a series of
| domain-specific measurements, where each unit conveyed
| deeper meaning beyond rote volume, distance, etc. For
| example, an acre means much more than 43,560 feet
| squared. It means "roughly the amount of land that a pair
| of oxen can plow in a day". A nice domain-specific
| measurement that communicates something useful to the
| experts of that domain, in this case, plowmen, farmers,
| and lords of the manor.
|
| With inches, an inch is about the length of your thumb.
| Imagine doing woodworking and measuring in thumbs - it's
| right there in front of you, easy to conceptualize and
| work with, an intuitive "bite-size" unit of measurement.
| Fractional centimeters aren't as intuitive to work with
| and conceptualize. 6+3/4 inches is a lot more workable
| than 17.14cm.
| justeleblanc wrote:
| I have dabbled in woodworking. I still stick to metric.
| You can spend all day rationalizing why the system you've
| been immersed in since childhood is more intuitive. In
| the end, it's more intuitive to you because it's what
| you're used to.
|
| Your example is a prime one. I'm not used to measure
| things with my thumbs, so if you told me that something
| is ten thumbs wide, I'd have to think some time before I
| could make a mental picture of it, and an inaccurate one
| to boot. I'm used to measure things with centimeters, so
| I immediately know what 10 cm looks like.
|
| > Fractional centimeters aren't as intuitive to work with
| and conceptualize.
|
| To you they're not. To people used to it, they are.
| franky47 wrote:
| Pretty much, the same way fractions carry over inches as
| decimals carry over the next power of ten, and as a
| developer I find powers of two more intuitive.
|
| Example: I mostly work with 3/4" thick material, which is
| a breeze to divide into 3 for 1/4" mortice and tenons.
| The equivalent 19mm in that respect is a bit trickier,
| though fortunately EU 3/4 lumber tends to be only 18mm
| thick.
| eloisius wrote:
| Everyone loves to rip on the US as one of the only
| countries that "won't use metric" but I wonder how many
| places officially adopt metric but traditional measures are
| still in common use. In Taiwan it's very common to buy
| things in Jin jin, aka catty. It's 600 g in Taiwan and
| slightly less or more in other Sinophone countries. Housing
| is also measured in Ping ping, which is the square area of
| a standard tatami matt. I think Japan uses this too because
| in TW it's a legacy of Japanese colonialism.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| For mainland China, a Jin is 500g. Very common unit of
| weight.
|
| Housing would be measured in Ping Mi , square meters.
| It's pretty much impossible to understand that one as
| anything other than an adoption of the foreign norm.
| (Similarly for Jin , set at half a kilogram to fall
| within the range of traditional use while still fitting
| seamlessly into the metric system. But wholesale adoption
| there would mean measuring weights in Gong Jin ,
| kilograms, which isn't done much.)
| londons_explore wrote:
| Isolating your country language-wise does have some benefits.
| For example, it tends to create cultural unity and prevents
| parts of your country breaking off and joining a neighbouring
| country.
|
| For example, in the USA, the english vs spanish divide pretty
| much aligns with the US/mexico border. If both countries used
| the same language, the border could be more easily moved by
| groups friendly to one government over another. The effect
| could be strengthened by requiring english/spanish tests at
| the border, and preventing teaching in the 'wrong' language.
|
| It can also prevent emigration of the smartest people.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| > Isolating your country language-wise does have some
| benefits. For example, it tends to create cultural unity
| and prevents parts of your country breaking off and joining
| a neighbouring country. [...] If both countries used the
| same language, the border could be more easily moved by
| groups friendly to one government over another.
|
| Why then have no serious attempts occurred by parts of
| Canada to join the US or vice versa? Most of both countries
| speaks English and only English, with extreme cultural
| overlap and a huge shared border.
|
| I don't think most of the southern US would want to deal
| join the mess that is northern Mexico right now, nor would
| the cartels want to release northern Mexico into the
| relative safety of the southern US. That matters far more
| than the different majority language across the US-Mexico
| border.
|
| > For example, in the USA, the english vs spanish divide
| pretty much aligns with the US/mexico border.
|
| If you're talking only about the number 1 language in each
| country, then sure, but otherwise you're vastly
| underestimating how much Spanish there is in the US,
| especially in states like California, New York, Texas, and
| Florida among others.
|
| It's easy for anglophones to ignore "por espanol, oprima
| dos" in phone menus or to tune out the daily occurrences of
| Spanish one passes on the streets or doesn't quite hear
| clearly from the front in restaurant kitchens, but it's all
| around us to the extent that Spanish-speaking visitors can
| get around fine with limited or no English in some major
| cities - and that's getting only more true, not less.
|
| The US has more Spanish speakers including those of limited
| competency than any other country except Mexico, including
| Spain; if you restrict to native-level speakers, the US
| appears to be number 5 on the global list, behind Mexico,
| Colombia, Argentina, and remarkably narrowly behind Spain.
|
| Source (2021), in Spanish: https://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/
| espanol_lengua_viva/pdf/espa...
|
| The same source notes the continuing growth of Spanish
| language and Hispanic origins in the US. It predicts that
| by 2060 the US will be the second biggest Spanish-speaking
| country (I presume they mean natively or at a native
| level), and that 27.5% of the US will be of Hispanic
| origin.
|
| To be clear, I don't mind the growth of Spanish in the US
| and don't view English as inherent to the American
| identity, even though I'm a native anglophone. Hell, German
| was pretty major in the US too before the world wars last
| century, and my immigrant great-grandparents probably spoke
| Yiddish better than English. The foundation of the US is
| not about linguistics, nor ethnicity.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| ...are you under the impression that Mongol bichig is a
| script similar to Chinese characters? What issues do you
| think it has that Cyrillic doesn't have?
| wellanyway wrote:
| It doesn't appear that this person actually knows what they
| are talking about.
| wellanyway wrote:
| > no purpose other than grazing the dictators' testies You do
| realise cyrillic script in Mongolia is a direct consequence
| of Soviet history-rewriting "one russian man" policy? And
| that current effort in post-soviet countries to move away
| from cyrillic and russian is mostly driven by security - as
| in one less reasons for Russia to come "save their brothers".
| throwaway482374 wrote:
| I was fascinated to learn there are more Mongolians living in
| China than in Mongolia.
|
| They still learn the traditional Mongolian script.
|
| There was some uproar a few years back when the government
| required core classes like math and science to be taught in
| Chinese, but the rest is still taught in Mongolian.
|
| Mongolian script is also printed on Chinese currency, in
| addition to Tibetan, Uyghur, and Zhuang.
| josu wrote:
| >I was fascinated to learn there are more Mongolians living
| in China than in Mongolia.
|
| *Mongols. They are Chinese Mongols. Not Mongolian nationals
| living in China.
|
| PS: Not trying to be the "actually" guy, I'm making the
| correction because I was confused at first so I had to look
| it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongols_in_China
| rcme wrote:
| Literally the first line of the Wikipedia article:
|
| > Mongols in China or Mongolian Chinese
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Surprised there's not a Cyrillic version.
|
| Well, when you access https://president.mn/mng/, it would be
| weird for them to give you the version of the page that you
| asked not to get.
|
| Go to https://president.mn/ and it's all Cyrillic.
|
| What's the surprise?
| seszett wrote:
| Probably, the person you are responding to does not
| understand that "mng" in the URL means "Mongolian written in
| the Mongolian script" and did not guess either that the
| letters "MN" at bottom left meant "Mongolian written in the
| Cyrillic script".
|
| And why would they?
|
| The biggest surprise here is your answer, IMO.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Fair enough, that makes sense. I'd clocked there was a
| language toggle to the English version but didn't think to
| remove the path. Thanks for the heads up!
| owl57 wrote:
| It isn't actually a toggle, but a pair of links to the
| other two versions, MN and EN. EN version has two links as
| well, to MN and MNG versions.
| smn1234 wrote:
| would this need some special treatment for SEO?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Why would it?
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| This is so cool - love to see non-Latin script being treated as a
| first class citizen.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I have to lock rotation and turn it landscape to read this not
| only that, you have to scroll all the way to the top first to
| start reading. /sarcasm
| cheapliquor wrote:
| Yo this looks cool as hell
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