by gwd | 2025-08-16 21:06:28+00:00
>>> he is 考慮ed as the 正当 財産 of some 一 or 他 of their 娘s.

> This doesn't appear to be a problem, but I still felt the need to call out what looks like the use of an exclusively masculine pronoun (in modern Chinese) to refer to "daughters".

IIRC, in Japanese, 他 is sometimes used for "hoka", which means "other"; as in, "Do you have this item of clothing in other (他) sizes?" The original text says, "some one or other of their daughters"; so that seems to be Claude's thinking.

> Do you know whether Japanese use of kanji focuses more on establishing that a kanji corresponds to some Japanese syllables and using that kanji wherever those syllables occur [as suggested by "作 no 答"], or more on using kanji to represent certain semantics however those semantics might be pronounced [as might suggest "言 no 答"]?

I know a moderate amount of Mandarin (along with smatterings of Cantonese), and about 3 months' spare-time study of Japanese in preparation for a recent trip there. (Note the shopping theme in my example above.)

My expectation, which matches my (very small) experience, is that Japanese are trying to write Japanese; and that therefore they have Japanese words in mind that they're trying to represent with Chinese characters.

It is absolutely not the case that a given Chinese character will always be pronounced the same way in Japanese. For one, multi-character Chinese words are also munged into Japanese words. For two, even for single-syllable words there's a context: e.g,. Japanese has two different ways to say "one", but they use "一" for both. I'm sure I've run into other Chinese characters that are pronounced differently depending on whether they're in a verb or an adjective.

So for example:

> Mr. Bennet 返答ed that he had 不.

> Do 不 you 欲 to 知 who has 取n it?

Remember that we're discussing a hypothetical universe where English speakers use the Chinese characters, but the vast majority of them don't know Chinese.

In English we use "not" in both cases, even though in Mandarin in the first case I'd probably construct a sentence using "没" in the first instance and "不" in the second.

So what would happen in our hypothetical universe? Given that most speakers don't know Mandarin, using "不" in both cases is probably the simplest, most stable result. One could imagine complicated rules for whether you write "不", "没", or "未", which are taught in school and maintained, even though they're all read as "not", and even though most people don't know Mandarin. But it would have to be one of those things which (like Chinese characters themselves) people decided they liked about their writing system and didn't want to give up.

Similarly:

> I'm not comfortable with the use of 作; just because the word in the idiom is make doesn't mean that any making is involved.

And yet, in English, "made a cake" and "made no reply" have exactly the same verb. Again, one can imagine it going both ways, depending on how things were established and maintained: One could imagine using "作" in both cases; or one could imagine using two different characters for two different shades of meaning, just as in Chinese there's 他, 她, 它, and 祂; or perhaps 的 and 得 (which I'm not sure people would naturally consider different words if they were only exposed to the spoken word).

The real limitation here is that there's no way ready-made to indicate the "make" -> "made" transition, as you can with "makes" ("作s" ) and "making" ("作ing").