Maybe I'm not complete to read the whole thread because there are much about ignoring things. I just want to say some intuitive thoughts about the language Chinese.
First of all, still many Chinese type in English to search title of Chinese songs in osu! for the sake of consistency. Personally, I'm used to type pinyin to search for song title because osu! in the past had poor support on unromanised searching (maybe it's because many maps from 2012 and earlier only have their romanised one, both for Chinese and Japanese songs, as metadata at that time was not much forced).
First of all, still many Chinese type in English to search title of Chinese songs in osu! for the sake of consistency. Personally, I'm used to type pinyin to search for song title because osu! in the past had poor support on unromanised searching (maybe it's because many maps from 2012 and earlier only have their romanised one, both for Chinese and Japanese songs, as metadata at that time was not much forced).
Context after here is not holding new idea so I delete them in my post. But anyways, I'm completely not convinced how changes on Mandarin/Chinese metadata would help it be more practical. On the contrary, they're ignoring the general case of Chinese and making things even worse.melloe wrote:
Thirdly, to address the problems of grouping together romanized Chinese syllables into words. It is true that in grouping together syllables there is a lot of ambiguity, but much of that ambiguity should be able to be cleared in context. For instance, taking this charming example provided to us:Context should be able to very easily clear up such ambiguities. What is the song about? What is the rest of the song saying? Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions, which I imagine would comprise the vast majority of such instances.Hollow Wings wrote:
"Gu Niang, Shui Jiao Yi Wan Duo Shao Qian?"
this sentence mainly has two meanings:
1. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i buy a bowl of your dumplings?" (姑娘,水饺一碗多少钱?)
2. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i sleep you one night?" (姑娘,睡觉一晚多少钱?)
However, some of those ambiguities will be purposely rendered in the form of puns etc., such as here:These will most likely make up such a negligible percentage of these instances of ambiguity that to go through with the proposed changes and deal with these intentionally ambiguous titles as they come up would not be completely remiss -- but I personally believe that even these hypothetical cases, however rare, should be considered before pushing any changes. That is just my opinion, ultimately it's not up to me.Fycho wrote:
For example, specific examples like "他谁都打不过", it's used intentionally to represent two meanings that are "Nobody can beat him" and "He can beat everybody", "Ta / Shui / Dou Da Bu Guo" and "Ta / Shui Dou Da Bu Guo".
In fact for many contemporary Chinese ballads, their titles are deliberately came up as such (in the form of puns). As for the first example given here, the song title can still be sexually suggestive even if its formal title is about dumplings. Because Chinese lyrics are not as logical as daily language,
and people just can easily get the ambiguous meaning because there is no way to distinguish their pronunciation difference in a song-wise tone without logical context. "Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions" as you said is often not the truth. Joint of Chinese characters into a single word will often cause loss of meaning in this way. (I have more examples, one of which is my uploaded map)
Fourthly, about "v" vs "u." To Chinese speakers of course "v" makes the most sense, as that is the input they use in their everyday lives, but to the western audience, "v" will make absolutely no sense. "u" and "yu" are both inadequate romanizations of "ü," because "yu" will be pronounced "yoo" by most westerners, but "v" will be next to useless for everybody except for Chinese players. "v" is more ambitious in that it serves to correctly represent a specific sound instead of simply approximating it, but for western osu players it is completely counterproductive.
I'm not sure if you go through the HW's post thoroughly but there was an example given to prove that the change from "v" to "u" will result a worse case under certain conditions: “绿光” & “露光” will be both romanised in "Lu Guang" while their actual pronunciation are completely different. For non-Chinese speakers, I don't think it can be a better way either to pronounce it or to remember the title by any means. Ofc I understand that "v" has no connection with the actual pronunciation of "ü". I was also confused when I first used a keyboard to type Chinese. However, this is just a general knowledge for all Chinese users and Chinese learners. That's how we Chinese grow up. So even we may understand that "v" can be senseless in pronunciation manner,
I don't get why non-Chinese speakers have the advantage to ignore such knowledge (which is common to us) at all. When you want to memorize a title in a different language, accepting its small piece of rule/regularity (actually it's really small) is not demanding is it? In fact for the pronunciation of Japanese romanised way of "ra" (similarly, ri, ru, re, ro), the actual pronunciation is far from /ra/, but somehow similar to be in the middle of /ra/ and /la/. Personally I'd even say it sounds much closer to /la/ in general. But when you have to memorize it, you simply accept its setting of being forced "ra". That's the same thing.
Lastly, Chinese is generally referred to as logographic rather then ideographic, as a character represents a morphheme rather than a more nebulous concept, and as ideogram usually refers specifically to a symbol that is independent of any corresponding sound--although of course no logographic writing system is without a phonetic component built into it. The terms themselves are rather fuzzy anyways, so to achieve anything of actual accuracy one has to resort to such ungainly terms as HW's "ideophonographical." However, to call Chinese logographic is not incorrect. In fact, most people, even linguists, do it.
I don't know how you call Chinese logographic so steadily so I just want TRUE evidence. And I don't even want to read Wafu's post again because he was simply doing this once and once again without compelling support. Anyways, the most intuitive thoughts of the language Chinese is still ideographically, based on how we accept Chinese education for more than 12 years. Many words that combined by two or more characters are also generated by the joint of meanings of those characters together. For example, “未来”(future) can be split as “未”(not happening) and “来”(come). And the easy joint would be "has not come yet", which is the close meaning of "future". And the word “银行”(bank) can be split as “银”(silver, which is the general currency in ancient China) and “行” (an organization/commercial firm focusing on specific fields, pronounced as Hang). And it's obvious that the joint of those two meanings an organization/commercial firm focusing on money, which is bank.
The third example would be my own map https://osu.ppy.sh/s/598869 “花儿纳吉” (The actual correct pronunciation should be Hua Er Na Zei, which is different from normal Mandarin pronunciation Hua Er Na Ji). This title has no direct meaning from Mandarin as it's from minority Chinese language (Qiang language). The official meaning is "Being happy like a flower". However, the song title still has its similar meaning to the combination of Mandarin in Chinese culture , which was also part of intention by the song author: “花儿” is flower, “纳” is containing/accepting, “吉” is happiness. If being wrongly considered as logographic, the song title would be less valuable, which is what we cannot accept. There are just thousands of more examples so I have to stop here.
As a result, I completely don't understand why you guys keep trying to call Chinese logographic by any means. It's highly COUNTER-INTUITIVE. And in fact the change of combining characters is highly impractical (as you wanted to state below the opposite way) in this way, because simply consider each character as pronunciation (as logographic indicates) will result in MEANING LOSS and CULTURE LOSS, which is definitely a wrong way to approach to Chinese language.To the crux of the issue.
The real dichotomy here is between practicality and officiality/aesthetics. That is a highly subjective discussion and is conducive to many (as seen here) tetchy discussions. Grouping words together will almost certainly make it more convenient for non-Chinese speakers, there should really be no question about this. I personally don't even pay attention to the name of a Chinese map if it's over three or four characters long; the profusion of capitals and spacing, to my English-speaking mind, is simply inconvenient, and I would rather memorize the mapper's name, the artist's name, and the background instead. Japanese titles, meanwhile, are multisyllabic, and I would rather have a few multisyllabic words than six monosyllabic words. How closely we adhere to "ISO 7098" really should not be a question. We're a small international circle-clicking community, not an official international organization, so shouldn't we rather consider things from a functional, practical perspective?
Sorry but I just think the way of changing is even more impractical for the reason stated above