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Japanese game developers face ridiculously high font license fees following US acquisition of major domestic provider. Live-service games to take the biggest blow
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Uhh... Basically every language I can think of have had some form of childhood activity that pushed learning it's asinine rules at some point in it's history. Cause fun fact. Literally every language that has ever existed is batshit crazy, makes no sense and might as well be unhinged nonsense. That's not a monopoly English has. Not by a fucking long shot. That guy's comment is racist as fuck tho
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Excellent time for the Japanese to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language.
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Agree you've covered some of the pros of alphabet systems and cons of logographic systems, and those are totally valid. You're neglecting the other sides though, so let's balance that out: Here's some pros of logographic systems: * Higher information density - you can say more with less, and readers can parse it faster * Compound words are intuitive - just put the symbols for the two halves of the words next to each other (or visually combine them in some cases) * Symbols have direct meaning - there is usually no "sounding out" words to figure out what they mean, the symbol by itself fully encapsulates meaning, independent of pronunciation * Because meaning is independent from phonetics, ambiguity is reduced with homophones, in that two words that *sound* the same still have two different-looking symbols * Written communication can still be understood even across different dialects, and even across different languages altogether, if the same logographic system is used, and even if those logographic symbols have different pronunciations. This separation makes it possible to communicate across language barriers *without* having to learn a whole other language. * Logographic systems don't have to adapt to changes in pronunciation over time, they're stable Here's some cons of alphabet systems: * Much lower information density takes longer to read, most people have to internally convert the visual data to sound to understand it, so it physically takes more brainpower/effort to understand written text * Wild inconsistencies in phonetics within a language, requiring rote memorization of spelling "rules" and all of their various exceptions. Makes learning new words difficult as you can't be sure if you're "sounding it out" correctly unless you've heard the spoken word * Meaning directly depends on phonetics/pronunciation, which can lead to confusion and ambiguity with alternate pronunciations, alternate spellings, and differing dialects (e.g. Canadian French vs. Metropolitan French) * Learning a language that uses an alphabet system means learning it twice - the written language *and* the spoken language * Homophones and hereronyms? Good luck Also here's some food for thought. I 100% guarantee you use a logographic system every single day, very easily, without even realizing it. In fact, nearly the whole world uses it - Arabic numerals.I don't know about a lot of those points. I can read French quite well, but can't speak it for shit, I don't know how much I have to "convert" in my head since its phonetics are irrelevant to me (and as English became a main online language, tons of people everywhere in the world can read and write it, but not really speak it since we are all communicating primarily through text - my English pronunciation sucks btw)... but anyway, about stability and adaptation, China has 120k+ different characters in its language, the vast majority got out of use because other ways to write the same thing became more popular, so I don't think it works like you described. Have you ever heard about Paulo Freire? The guy developed a very interesting literacy method, he tested it out with adult rural workers from poor regions and in just 2 months he was able to get those people to read and write (even if with grammatical mistakes) because his method is phonetic (well, there's quite more to it, but the reading/writing part is phonetic). For learning to read/write other languages, the "no sounding out" might be an advantage (like a lot of netizens writing in English without really speaking it), but for your own language, well, from what I understand they expect that only by high school the kids in Japan and China should be able to read their local newspaper because of the amount of characters they need to know for it, meanwhile Paulo Freire got adults, who have very low mental plasticity, able to do it in 2 months...
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It's *debatably* artwork. Every single person has their own handwritten "font" - more than one if you write cursive and block letters. A font doesn't have a message or a meaning, it is just a means for conveying information through text. I'm sure you can produce several examples of specific fonts that qualify as "artwork" (though it's just a numbers game since there are literally hundreds of thousands of different fonts on the web, if not more) but that doesn't prove that every font is automatically "artwork". We could also make the claim that every drawing is an artwork depending on how we define the word, but that doesn't mean that every nine-year-old who draws an "original character" that's just a green Sonic the Hedgehog should be able to use the legal system to bully other people because he's an "artist".And each dev is free to make their own font. But if they want to uses someone else's, it stands to reason they might have to pay that someone else. If you draw a really cool painting. That doesn't mean I'm allowed to then just scan your artwork, print it on bottles and sell them. The problem here is no one had the foresight to realise it's a pretty big issue when you're leasing the rights to a specific font for a specific period of time, what happens after the lease expires? If they did, the contractual language would be different. It's not a problem in this sector alone. It's a problem, in many sectors, but no one seems to learn from others mistakes.
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Elsewhere in these comments, someone did suggest generative AI, and frankly, yeah. Using a program to apply a particular art style to a zillion glyphs would be down right commendable, prior to ChatGPT.
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Excellent time for Japanese devs to collectively develop some open-source fonts. Many hands make light work.
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I mentioned logograms specfically, but this made me racist toward Japanese people. So hey, congratulation, you now hate latinos.>Excellent time for **the Japanese*" to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language. "All I said is that the Japanese do not have a functional language. I don't understand where people think I was being derogatory about a specific race."
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Evidently game devs have some distinct expectations, or they could already use those and save some money. This could be a rallying point for professional artists to build a font family conveying whimsy, authority, fantasy, antiquity, futurism, etc. Like how DejaVu covers a little bit of everything.
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>Excellent time for **the Japanese*" to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language. "All I said is that the Japanese do not have a functional language. I don't understand where people think I was being derogatory about a specific race."
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I don't know about a lot of those points. I can read French quite well, but can't speak it for shit, I don't know how much I have to "convert" in my head since its phonetics are irrelevant to me (and as English became a main online language, tons of people everywhere in the world can read and write it, but not really speak it since we are all communicating primarily through text - my English pronunciation sucks btw)... but anyway, about stability and adaptation, China has 120k+ different characters in its language, the vast majority got out of use because other ways to write the same thing became more popular, so I don't think it works like you described. Have you ever heard about Paulo Freire? The guy developed a very interesting literacy method, he tested it out with adult rural workers from poor regions and in just 2 months he was able to get those people to read and write (even if with grammatical mistakes) because his method is phonetic (well, there's quite more to it, but the reading/writing part is phonetic). For learning to read/write other languages, the "no sounding out" might be an advantage (like a lot of netizens writing in English without really speaking it), but for your own language, well, from what I understand they expect that only by high school the kids in Japan and China should be able to read their local newspaper because of the amount of characters they need to know for it, meanwhile Paulo Freire got adults, who have very low mental plasticity, able to do it in 2 months...Sure, I agree that alphabet systems are initially easier to learn than logographic systems. But to achieve that they sacrifice the consistency and lack of ambiguity of a logographic system. It's funny you bring up Korean as an example of a good alphabet system, because I can assure you as someone who is currently learning Korean, it has it's weird spelling inconsistencies and pronunciation "rules" and exceptions, just like any other alphabet system. And again, I'm not trying to convince you that one is better than the other. My whole point is that one *isn't* any better or worse than another. They each have their own strengths, weaknesses, and specific purposes, they're both functional, one isn't better or worse than the other as a whole.
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Sure, I agree that alphabet systems are initially easier to learn than logographic systems. But to achieve that they sacrifice the consistency and lack of ambiguity of a logographic system. It's funny you bring up Korean as an example of a good alphabet system, because I can assure you as someone who is currently learning Korean, it has it's weird spelling inconsistencies and pronunciation "rules" and exceptions, just like any other alphabet system. And again, I'm not trying to convince you that one is better than the other. My whole point is that one *isn't* any better or worse than another. They each have their own strengths, weaknesses, and specific purposes, they're both functional, one isn't better or worse than the other as a whole.A take I had from this is that a non-phonetic written language works like cached memory (and you might have a lot to cache), while phonetic is like real-time rendering. I was reading about how Vietnam changed to its current script, and just like Korea, and also Paulo Freire's view of language, seems like the change made the language more accessible.
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Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I've heard in my life. Fucking leeches.They own a font, which is a way of writing the letters. Wondering though, how many Japanese fonts are there?
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I’m sure they will over time, but I would guess there’s a surprising number of potential issues with any font variance. That’s the kind of thing that can appear hardware-dependently, like certain high/low-res monitors showing fonts too big, too small, or even not at all. So any bug fixes that have come through on the subject will rely on user bug reports. If it was as simple as the font swapping feature seen in Word, I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big deal.
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A take I had from this is that a non-phonetic written language works like cached memory (and you might have a lot to cache), while phonetic is like real-time rendering. I was reading about how Vietnam changed to its current script, and just like Korea, and also Paulo Freire's view of language, seems like the change made the language more accessible.You're absolutely correct that Korea (and Vietnam I suppose, I don't know much about their language) invented their alphabet to make literacy more accessible, and I think that's awesome and a really good feature of alphabet systems. I can even see why that would make people *prefer* alphabet systems, since accessibility is super important when you're first learning a language. I think your cached vs. real-time analogy is spot on. And while you can definitely come up with scenarios where caching is better than real-time rendering, and other scenarios where real-time rendering is better than caching, it'd be difficult to argue that one is unequivocally better or worse than the other.
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Owning literal letters has got to be the dumbest shit I've heard in my life. Fucking leeches.I remember back during the NFT hype cycle how people were claiming they'd patented particular shades of color and were selling rights to them on the blockchain. I gotta wonder who even enforces this shit. Where do you go to register a font-type you claim you own that looks shockingly similar to a font people have been using since the printing press was invented? So much of this just feels like vexatious litigation. "Ah, yes, that's actually *my 'a'* and you need to pay me $20k to use it".
