On 1/27/06, Terry Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Well, let's just say, I think there should be different > standards for "write once / read once" versus "write once / > read many". The mere use of written language once implied > the latter, but I suppose text messaging breaks that rule.
Since we are on this, let me share with you guys a little 'ice-tip' for how the younger generations in Taiwan communicate: A: why did you tell av8d that I am a bmw ? B: Well, you are just like one of those ogs or obs ... A: oic, you think you are much q than I ? B: ... A: I would 3q if you stop doing so. B: ok. A: Orz B: 88 A: 881 Can you guys figure out the details ? Here is the decoded version: A: why did you tell av8d that I am a bmw ? [8 in our language is pronounced as "ba", so av8d = everybody] B: Well, you are just like one of those ogs or obs ... [ogs= oh-ji-sang, obs=oh-ba-sang, Japanese, means old guy, old woman, respectively] A: oic, you think you are much q than I ? [oic=Oh I see; q = cute] A: I would 3q if you stop doing so. [ 3q = thank you ] B: ok. A: Orz [ appreciate very much --- it looks like a guy knee down when seeing an Empire ] B: 88 [ bye-bye ] A: 881 [ bye-bye with a tone, sometimes 886 = bye-bye-loh ] The above example is just an extremely simple one. In the real world, they combined all sort of language sources --- mandarine, japanese, english, taiwanese ... as well as "shape" like Orz. This kind of mixture-of-everything is widely used in young generations, sometimes called "net terms", sometimes called "Martian words". It faciliates the online activities among youngists, but creates huge 'generation gaps' --- some dictionaries were published for high school teachers to study in order for them to talk and understand their students. IMO, a language is a living organism, it has its own life and often evolves with unexpected turns. Maybe in the future some of those Martian Words will become part of formal Taiwanese, who knows ? :) > First of all, they are, much more than Western alphabets, > strict about stroke order and direction (technically the > Roman alphabet is supposed to be drawn a certain way, but > many people "cheat" -- I think that's harder to get away > with with Asian characters, because they tend not to look > right when drawn wrong). And when you have the actual > stroke sequence data as input, recognition is easier and > more reliable (I think that was the point behind the > "graffiti" system for the Palm Pilot). But ... to my knowledge, all of the input tablets that using OCR has a training feature. You can teach the program to recognize your own order of strokes. The ability to train (be trained) is a very key element of such an input device. -- ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Runsun Pan, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nat'l Center for Macromolecular Imaging http://ncmi.bcm.tmc.edu/ncmi/ ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list