No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
As a case study, I think Vietnamese is especially apt to show how the written language develops in parallel and sometimes at odds with the spoken language. The current alphabetical script of Vietnamese was only adopted for general use in the late 19th Century, in order to improve literacy. Before that, the grand majority of Vietnamese written works were in a logographic system based on Chinese characters, but with extra Vietnamese-specific characters that conveyed how the Vietnamese would pronounce those words.
The result was that Vietnamese scholars pre-20th Century basically had to learn most of the Chinese characters and their Cantonese pronunciations (not Mandarin, since that's the dialect that's geographically father away), and then memorize how they are supposed to be read in Vietnamese, then compounded by characters that sort-of convey hints about the pronunciation. This is akin to writing a whole English essay using Japanese katakana; try writing "ornithology" like that.
Also, the modern Vietnamese script is a work of Portuguese Jesuit scholars, who were interested in rendering the Vietnamese language into a more familiar script that could be read phonetically, so that words are pronounced letter-by-letter. That process, however faithful they could manage it, necessarily obliterates some nuance that a logographic language can convey. For example, the word bầu can mean either a gourd or to be pregnant. But in the old script, no one would confuse 匏 (gourd) with 保 (to protect; pregnant) in the written form, even though the spoken form requires context to distinguish the two.
Some Vietnamese words were also imported into the language from elsewhere, having not previously existed in spoken Vietnamese. So the pronunciation would hew closer to the origin pronunciation, and then to preserve the lineage of where the pronunciation came from, the written word might also be written slightly different. For example, nhôm (meaning aluminum) draws from the last syllable of how the French pronounce aluminum. Loanwords -- and there are many in Vietnamese, going back centuries -- will mess up the writing system too.
Oh I didn't know the current alphabet came from the Portuguese. I assumed it was from the French when they colonized Vietnam.
The point about the logographic characters being distinct is interesting. I guess if you don't have to phonetically spell it out you have some more freedom in picking what written characters will represent the meanings of the two words. It is still a shame we ended up with those homophones, but I guess that's just a path dependency thing since the spoken words came first. I guess they just had to work with what they had when they converted them into characters.
The French certainly benefitted from the earlier Jesuit work, although the French did do their own attempts at "westernizing" parts of the language. I understand that today in Vietnam, the main train station in Hanoi is called "Ga Hà Nội", where "ga" comes from the French "gare", meaning train station (eg Gare du Nord in Paris). This kinda makes sense since the French would have been around when railways were introduced in the 19th Century.
Another example is what is referred to in English as the "Gulf of Tonkin incident", referring to the waters off the coast of north Vietnam. Here, Tonkin comes from the French transliteration of Đông Kinh (東京), which literally means "eastern capital".
So far as I'm aware, English nor French don't use the name Tonkin anymore (it's very colonialism-coded), and modern Vietnamese calls those waters by a different name anyway. There's also another problem: that name is already in-use by something else, being the Tokyo metropolis in Japan.
In Japanese, Tokyo is written as 東京 (eastern capital) in reference to it being east of the cultural and historical seat of the Japanese Emperor in Kyoto (京都, meaning "capital metropolis"). Although most Vietnamese speakers would just say "Tokyo" to refer to the city in Japan, if someone did say "Đông Kinh", people are more likely to think of Tokyo (or have no clue) than to think of an old bit of French colonial history. These sorts of homophones exist between the CJKV languages all the time.
And as a fun fact, if Tokyo is the most well-known "eastern capital" when considering the characters in the CJKV language s, we also have the northern capital (北京, Beijing, or formerly "Peking") and the southern capital (南京, Nanjing). There is no real consensus on where the "western capital" is.
Vietnamese speakers will in-fact say Bắc Kinh when referring to the Chinese capital city rather than "Beijing", and I'm not totally sure why it's an exception like that. Then again, some newspapers will also print the capital city of the USA as Hoa Thịnh Đốn (華盛頓) rather than "Washington, DC", because that's how the Chinese wrote it down first, and then brought to Vietnamese, and then changed to the modern script. To be abundantly clear, it shouldn't be surprising to have a progression from something like "Wa-shing-ton" to "hua-shen-dun' to "hoa-thinh-don".