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1. JordiGH (jordigh@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2018 03:14:09 UTC JordiGH

   I just had a dumb thought... languages based on Chinese characters must have written neologisms once in a while, right? And those neologisms must come with accompanying new characters too? Does this mean that, for example, science fiction or fantasy writers are allowed to come up with completely original new words like "chortle" or "grok" *and* also have new characters with which all readers would be unfamiliar at first?

   How do languages written with ideograms acquire new ideograms?

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   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2018 18:29:29 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     in reply to

     • Lew Perin
     @jordigh Good question! As @wrenpile notes, very few characters are actually ideograms.
     
     Thanks to Hong Kong's special situation, Cantonese has acquired new characters in modern times, so they can be studied in order to understand how characters may have been created in the past.
     
     A new character, to reflect a morpheme that doesnt yet exist in writing but is established in speech, usually (in modern times) takes the form of an existing character, with the "mouth" radical added to the left.
     
     People may actually create these on mobile phones by typing an "o" and then the character it derives from, if their phone doesn't support HK Supplemental Character Set.
     
     Over time, the "mouth" may instead become something that indicates semantics, so, hypothetically, if you had a word meaning whatever, lets say "spoon", that happened to sound the same as a word for "splash" that doesn't have a character yet, "splash" may at first be mouth+spoon smashed into one character, but it may over time become water+spoon instead, I guess especially if other spoon homophones become necessary.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2018 18:37:32 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • Lew Perin
     @jordigh @wrenpile I have no idea about the literature angle, if any authors, sci-fi or not, have actively minted new characters for the heck of it.
     
     If Neil Stephenson were Chinese, he would do it. :-D
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2018 18:38:14 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • ëäł
     @eal @jordigh Virtual Novels, meaning hypertext?
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2018 18:44:21 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • ëäł
     @jordigh @eal Ok, for me "Visual Novels" means "comic books for people who are embarrassed to say 'comic books' because people think comics are for kids".
     
     Oh wait, that's "graphical novels". Ok, I'm up to speed now, thanks!
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Friday, 05-Jan-2018 18:59:49 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     • Lew Perin
     @jordigh @wrenpile I probably got most of that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_character_formation . It goes into a bit more detail with concrete examples.