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On 14/07/2011 12:13 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> What's so incomprehensible about it? ALW's music has no redeeming
> musical qualities that I've ever heard, basically a sort of feel-good-pop-
> crap musical style.
>
> Even hearing the name triggers my gag reflex.
Some people actually *like* feel-good music. Shockingly enough.
I will freely admit though, Starlight Express was surprisingly lame.
(And I don't mean just the music.)
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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> On 7/13/2011 9:31, Darren New wrote:
> > I don't think it's keyboards as much as it is collation by computers.
> Kind of related, but think about how Chinese dictionaries get sorted, given
> that each word is one character and there are tens of thousands of
> characters in the language, since Andrew brought up chinese to start with.
After seeing a (Japanese) phone directory in an anime, which was full of
kanji, I wondered how the names get sorted. (I think, although I can't
remember for sure now, that they get sorted by their transliteration to
hiragana, which has a unique and unambiguous ordering.) Then I wondered
how phone directories are sorted in China, given that they don't even have
an alternative script like Japanese has (namely hiragana/katakana). Someone
explained it to me, but I can't remember it now.
Another interesting question is how they support writing kanji in
cellphones (which have only the classical 0-9 numpad). Yes, they do
support it. It's a bit complicated.
--
- Warp
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> The same sound has up to four different tones possible. That doesn't make it
> unambiguous, tho. For each sound+tone, there's still dozens of meanings you
> need to disambiguate, even if it's written.
I have always wondered why in Japanese, and probably also in Chinese,
there's no strict one-to-one-to-one correspondence between a kanji symbol,
its meaning and its pronounciation. The whole writing system seems to be
designed precisely for that: One symbol has (exactly) one meaning and one
pronounciation, making it completely unambiguous.
But no, the same kanji can have a half dozen meanings, typically at least
two or three different pronounciations depending on context (at least in
Japanese), and moreover, the same word can sometimes be written with
different kanji symbols (again depending on context, meaning and/or the
phase of the Moon). So the whole idea with the kanji writing system seems
to be completely wasted, making it overly complicated for no good reason.
--
- Warp
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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:56:34 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
> > On 13/07/2011 07:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> >
> >> I was going to say, "Andrew Lloyd Webber" and "epic masterpiece" create
> >> a fair amount of cognitive dissonance for me - those two things don't
> >> really belong in the same sentence, IMNSHO.
> >
> > Yeah, weirdly a couple of people have voiced this incomprehensible
> > opinion...
>
> What's so incomprehensible about it? ALW's music has no redeeming
> musical qualities that I've ever heard, basically a sort of feel-good-pop-
> crap musical style.
>
> Even hearing the name triggers my gag reflex.
We're talking about Andrew here, same guy who doesn't dig Mozart, GEB and
poetry... :p
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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> > Take the lyrics of almost any song, remove the music and you get a poem.
>
> Yes. And typically not a very good one.
>
> (If you actually sit down and think about it, it's surprising how many
> songs have lyrics which don't actually /make sense/ either.)
OK, now for some nice entirley comprehensible lyrics...
Brian Eno's "Kurt's Rejoinder":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJNl7NjtbEU
Enjoy!
Best Regards,
Mike C.
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On 14/07/2011 12:35 PM, nemesis wrote:
> We're talking about Andrew here, same guy who doesn't dig Mozart, GEB and
> poetry... :p
On the other hand, there are people who like hip-hop and rap. :-P
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On 7/14/2011 4:47, Mike the Elder wrote:
> OK, now for some nice entirley comprehensible lyrics...
In China, they teach english with The Carpenters. "Because you can
understand what they're saying. That's why they call it easy listening."
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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On 7/14/2011 2:34, Warp wrote:
> Someone explained it to me, but I can't remember it now.
It is essentially sorted by how you write the character. Not the final
shape, but how you write it.
So first come all characters with a single stroke, vertical strokes before
horizontal strokes. Then all characters with two strokes, again vertical
sorting before horizontal. Etc. (Uh, approximately like that. Don't go
taking this post as authoritative, as I'm doing it from memory.)
If you know how to read Chinese but not write it, you have a very hard time
looking something up.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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On 7/14/2011 2:39, Warp wrote:
> I have always wondered why in Japanese, and probably also in Chinese,
> there's no strict one-to-one-to-one correspondence between a kanji symbol,
> its meaning and its pronounciation.
Because Chinese writing is at least 5000 years old or so. The same writing
system has been evolving for about as long as the pyramids have been around,
so rather a lot older than Judaism, for example. You expect anything used
by a billion people for 5000 years is going to be logical and consistent? :-)
> The whole writing system seems to be
> designed precisely for that: One symbol has (exactly) one meaning and one
> pronounciation, making it completely unambiguous.
I'm sure it started out that way. Now spread it slowly across warring
empires that spanned five time zones, let it stew for a few thousand years
without any means of communication faster than horses, and see if everyone
still agrees on the meaning and pronunciation of everything.
> So the whole idea with the kanji writing system seems
> to be completely wasted, making it overly complicated for no good reason.
I don't think saying "the whole idea with the kanji writing system." I think
saying "a logically designed ideographic writing system would have these
beneficial properties." But it wasn't logically designed, any more than
human bodies were.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 09:38:53 +0100, Invisible wrote:
> Some people actually *like* feel-good music. Shockingly enough.
Sure, which is why we all can have different opinions about it.
Jim
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