Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2014 December 23

= December 23 =

Simplified Chinese with more strokes than traditional
When people think about simplified Chinese, they think about reducing strokes, merging characters and maybe re-establishing ancient variants. However, there are simplified characters which have the same number or even more strokes than their traditional counterparts. This topic isn't explained anywhere and even when people ask in Chinese fora, the answer is like "the OP has a great imagination (sarcastically)" or "Are you kidding? If a character had more strokes, it wouldn't be called 'simplified'." But these characters do exist. If you scan a dictionary from mainland China where the traditional characters are given in parentheses, you will be surprised of how many examples there are. I can guess the reason, but I'd like to have some source explaining this. 冊 is simplified to 册. The number of strokes (5) is the same, but the strokes were arranged differently. The reason could be that although the number is the same, the simplified character is still easier to write, but I think it doesn't make any difference here. Other examples are 強->强 and 氹->凼, the latter always has one more stroke. Then there are characters which may be altered due to the pronunciation of similar characters like 奼->姹 and 呵->啊 (Though I think the last one can be accepted in traditional Chinese as well). Another point about simplification: I thought characters were only merged, but apparently it works the other way around as well. 於 has three readings and therefore several meanings, but only one was simplified to 于. So both 於 and 于 exist in simplified Chinese. This makes comparing both sets even more difficult. --2.245.254.124 (talk) 00:54, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you have a question?  KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 )  ( Chin Wag )  07:53, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
 * It's easy to miss, but reads "I can guess the reason, but I'd like to have some source explaining this."  91.120.14.30 (a different editor.)
 * I don't have a source that answers the question directly, but Wikipedia itself suggests the reasons why this occasionally occurs. It is a misconception that the rationale for simplifying traditional characters is always and only a matter of reducing strokes.  That is the single most important guiding principle, but there are others. See the heading "Elimination of variants of the same character" in our article Simplified Chinese characters, or this section of the relevant article in the Chinese Wikipedia.  (Sorry, but it was easier for me insert that as an external link.) In the Chinese article, 强 is cited as an example. This simplified form replaces not only the traditional variant 強, but also the equally accepted variant 彊, which obviously has many more strokes (as well as less common variants with even more strokes). The simplified form is also something of a compromise between 強 and 彊 and is easy to remember because it incorporates the common character 虽. In the case of 於／于, a different principle is at work.  The simplified version was created for the most common reading of the character to make the writing system more efficient.  The other readings preserve the traditional character.  Single-character words that occur very frequently, especially prepositions such as 于, have clearly been priorities for simplification, whereas less frequently used single-character words are often left in their traditional form, since they are relatively "advanced" characters that are less essential for written communication. Marco polo (talk) 14:57, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

What language is the following sentence? "Jtaten, mon frero Julien".
HOOTmag (talk) 18:31, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * French, I believe, based on "mon" = "my". Most of it appears to be proper names, though. StuRat (talk) 18:36, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * It looks like a conlang, or just one-off silliness (but it's not Esperanto): XXX, my brother Julien. French "mon frère")  The first word is either misspelt or the conlang has a weird phonology/orthography. μηδείς (talk) 18:48, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Googling the phrase gets a lot of French slang/texting abbreviations, and jtaten seems to be a username. μηδείς (talk) 18:53, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Jtaten is Je t'attends. So: je t'attends mon frérot Julien. Frérot is "petit frère". Contact Basemetal   here  19:01, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, that makes sense. I was trying to parse Jtaten as Je t'a t'en, but that made no sense. μηδείς (talk) 19:12, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I would say it was Haitian Creole.  KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 )  ( Chin Wag )  15:57, 28 December 2014 (UTC)