[Multilingual Monday] Aesthetics Over Comprehension
Those who know me, know that one of the things I love about languages is the (sadly declining) use of non-Latin characters, but of course just because I'm fascinated by them does NOT mean that I have any amount of EASE in a language that uses non-Latin characters normally (though on the other hand I've been caught a number of times on crap romanization too, but that's neither here nor there!). When you get used to seeing certain shapes or reading in a certain direction for so long, trying to introduce something fairly foreign is a painful process, especially when one gets thrown into a native speaker's handwriting ...
My friend Brian got this out of a vest that he'd purchased at Midwest Bearfest and did what most of my friends would -- gave the tag to me and said, "Here, you like other languages." :: laugh :: I admit that I stared at the thing for quite a while, and thought: It's Arabic script (not, of course, necessarily the Arabic language!) -- after all, on the "cutting" line I could swear the last character was a س, an Arabic letter S; the "angle" of letters was similar to handwritten Arabic that I've seen; the last characters seem to be at the LEFT of the lines where the pen marks "run off" -- of course, as my ability to read the remaining text became almost nonexistent, I started to doubt whether or not it was even Arabic that I was looking at! And this is, of course, easy to do -- if you are so used to printed materials and the like (as I am), then when you actually get REAL handwriting (which, in the case of Arabic script, is quite a different beast from the printed versions, especially as characters "stack up" on an angle in order for the last character to touch the base line), you freak a bit, like I did; I can (up to a point) understand Arabic text, so why is deciphering this so bloody hard??
So you can imagine the frustration that comes when one gets introduced to text that's MEANT to be more aesthetic; where less emphasis is put upon comprehension ...
dedos has similar Arabic calligraphy up in his living room on plates, and he kind of chuckled as I tried to read lines of the text with varying luck. As the characters overlap and diacritic marks start flying all over the place, it becomes unclear just where you're supposed to continue reading the text, or whether or not that upward stroke on the line below is supposed to be part of the line above as well or what. It's very beautiful; don't get me wrong, but I find it quite difficult to actually read; native readers might recognize the quote by recognizing a few words, but those of us without that knowledge just kind of stare at it even if we only recognize a few words. :: laugh ::
Also beautiful yet sometimes confounding are "seal characters", found in both Japanese and Chinese (at least! Possibly other countries too, but of those I'm unsure). A hanko in Japanese is a stamp with one's last name or business name; this stamp gets registered with the government of Japan and is used in lieu of a signature as signatures aren't legally binding in Japan (at least, they weren't). Of course this has led to huge hanko counterfeiting and fraud as of late, but the tradition has managed to stay around. One tends to find much harder-to-read forms of various kanji -- usually a more square "seal character" style -- that obfuscates the characters as a reader would know them in this day and age. While several of the characters are a given, there are many liberties that one can and HAS taken when making these characters, leading to an extensive amount of study on a number of people (like muckefuck, IIRC) trying to decode the characters into "normal" kanji.
Even with native speakers having a problem reading said text, it's still rather humbling to have one's language knowledge challenged so thoroughly by a PLATE or by a 15mm SEAL. There are but two more aesthetic forms of regular scripts -- if anyone has any samples of more, be my guest! I'd love to hear from you.
My friend Brian got this out of a vest that he'd purchased at Midwest Bearfest and did what most of my friends would -- gave the tag to me and said, "Here, you like other languages." :: laugh :: I admit that I stared at the thing for quite a while, and thought: It's Arabic script (not, of course, necessarily the Arabic language!) -- after all, on the "cutting" line I could swear the last character was a س, an Arabic letter S; the "angle" of letters was similar to handwritten Arabic that I've seen; the last characters seem to be at the LEFT of the lines where the pen marks "run off" -- of course, as my ability to read the remaining text became almost nonexistent, I started to doubt whether or not it was even Arabic that I was looking at! And this is, of course, easy to do -- if you are so used to printed materials and the like (as I am), then when you actually get REAL handwriting (which, in the case of Arabic script, is quite a different beast from the printed versions, especially as characters "stack up" on an angle in order for the last character to touch the base line), you freak a bit, like I did; I can (up to a point) understand Arabic text, so why is deciphering this so bloody hard??
So you can imagine the frustration that comes when one gets introduced to text that's MEANT to be more aesthetic; where less emphasis is put upon comprehension ...
dedos has similar Arabic calligraphy up in his living room on plates, and he kind of chuckled as I tried to read lines of the text with varying luck. As the characters overlap and diacritic marks start flying all over the place, it becomes unclear just where you're supposed to continue reading the text, or whether or not that upward stroke on the line below is supposed to be part of the line above as well or what. It's very beautiful; don't get me wrong, but I find it quite difficult to actually read; native readers might recognize the quote by recognizing a few words, but those of us without that knowledge just kind of stare at it even if we only recognize a few words. :: laugh ::
Also beautiful yet sometimes confounding are "seal characters", found in both Japanese and Chinese (at least! Possibly other countries too, but of those I'm unsure). A hanko in Japanese is a stamp with one's last name or business name; this stamp gets registered with the government of Japan and is used in lieu of a signature as signatures aren't legally binding in Japan (at least, they weren't). Of course this has led to huge hanko counterfeiting and fraud as of late, but the tradition has managed to stay around. One tends to find much harder-to-read forms of various kanji -- usually a more square "seal character" style -- that obfuscates the characters as a reader would know them in this day and age. While several of the characters are a given, there are many liberties that one can and HAS taken when making these characters, leading to an extensive amount of study on a number of people (like muckefuck, IIRC) trying to decode the characters into "normal" kanji.
Even with native speakers having a problem reading said text, it's still rather humbling to have one's language knowledge challenged so thoroughly by a PLATE or by a 15mm SEAL. There are but two more aesthetic forms of regular scripts -- if anyone has any samples of more, be my guest! I'd love to hear from you.