kanji

Make English pronunciation (and word definitions) easier to understand with this imported “ruby character” / “furigana” typesetting feature!

Feb 20, 2023

Culture, Language, Literature, UI / UX

annotation, defintion above words, footnotes, furiagana, kanji, ruby, ruby characters, zalgo text

Background: In some languages with non-phonetic elements (e.g. Japanese kanji), there can be additional phonetic annotations above the symbols (Figure 1) to clarify the pronunciation of a non-obvious word. This is particularly useful for students, and for clarifying the pronunciation of rare words. Proposal: Strangely, the English language does not frequently employ this style of…
Modern “Emoji” characters will become the basis for writing systems of civilizations 1000 years from now.

Jul 5, 2015

Communication, Culture, Language

alphabet, character, Chinese character, inescapable destiny of language, kanji, Language, orthographic fun fact, owl, save icon, the future

Background: Our current alphabet is derived from an ancient system of representational icons. These icons were once pictures of actual objects, but have been simplified to an easier-to-write form over the millennia. For example, according to the inerrant source of knowledge known as Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet): The letter “Q” used to be one of these: This…