Re: Word count of minimum vocabulary

"Mok-Kong" == Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Mok-Kong> In general, foreign words are either translated
[into Chinese]
Mok-Kong> according to meaning or according to pronunciation or
Mok-Kong> with a mixture of these two.

Sometimes, it's both together. e.g. "hacker" --> <hei1ke4>
(literally: black guest/person), translating both the meaning and the
sounds (from English to Mandarin).


Mok-Kong> Thus "telephone" is translated to two characters
Mok-Kong> meaning "electricity/electrical" and "talk/speech"
Mok-Kong> respectively (sort of "talking by means of
Mok-Kong> electricity").

When telephone first arrived in Shanghai, people called it
<de2l"u4feng1>. But of course, this translation couldn't survive.
Chinese people are afraid of such unintelligible sequence of sounds.
So, very soon, this purely phonetic translation was replaced by
"electro-talk".

On the other hand, in German, there used to be the word Fernsprecher,
translating "telephone" by meaning. But this has been replaced by
"Telephon" nowadays.


Mok-Kong> In English text processing, nowadays e.g. using Latex,
Mok-Kong> the processor has to adjust the spaces between the words
Mok-Kong> in order that the successive lines have the same length,
Mok-Kong> giving thus a nicer look.

LaTeX -- and any professional-quality typesetter -- also adjusts the
spaces between any 2 characters to make it lock nicer. This is called
_kerning_. Sometimes, when 2 characters come together and look ugly,
they're replaced by a third one -- called a _ligature_. The "fi"
ligature is common in most typefaces.

And there is hyphenation there to help making lines not too long or
too short. Typesetting Roman-letter text is a pretty complicated art.
Text-setting Chinese/Japanese is much more straightforward.



Mok-Kong> For a Chinese text, lines of the same number of
Mok-Kong> characters (of the same font) are automatically of the
Mok-Kong> same length and there is therefore no need of any
Mok-Kong> adjustment of the spaces between the words.

It can be as simple as that. And the result is not intolerable.

But there are some fine-tuning in higher quality typesetting.
e.g. certain punctuations should never appear a the beginning of a
line (such as a close quotation mark); others should never appear at
the end (e.g. open quation mark). This is avoided by push the
offending punctuation to the previous/next line. This affects the
no. of imaginary square boxes on those lines. So, those imaginary
squares need to be squeezed closer together on the now overcrowded
lines. (It is acceptable to add an extra square to the end of a line
without such squeezing, provided that the extra squre is occupied by a
punctuation.)



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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