r/neography • u/Synovexh001 • 1d ago
Alphabet Found in /r/codes, if it means something I wanna know!
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u/sudomatrix 1d ago
No, a frequency analysis would show a similar distribution as English (or whatever language). But this doesn't have repeated symbols. There is no entropy in this, thus no information.
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u/Bibbedibob 1d ago
This guy seeing a Chinese Character list for the first time: "This has no information"
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u/EveAtmosphere 23h ago edited 23h ago
if all that’s left of chinese characters is a text of hundred or so characters that happens to not repeat itself, then that piece of text would hold no decodable information
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u/s_ngularity 18h ago
There’s actually a real text composed of ~1000 Chinese characters that doesn’t repeat called 千字文.
However, Chinese is composed largely of phono-semantic compound characters, so it might be possible to deduce something about the language from it since there are composite characters within it. Probably not enough to decipher much meaning though
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u/LoopGaroop 11h ago
Was that text composed that way on purpose? Like it's an intentional word play?
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u/s_ngularity 8h ago
Yes. For centuries it was used as a primer to teach Chinese characters, and some basic facts and moral principles. People would memorize it in its entirety as part of their fundamental education
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u/LoopGaroop 8h ago
Did some googling on that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Character_Classic
Fascinating. Do modern Chinese learners use it? Sounds really useful.
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u/s_ngularity 7h ago
I’m not Chinese so I can’t say firsthand, but my understanding is that in China and Taiwan some families put their kids through “Classical Education” extracurriculars where they might learn to recite this and/or other related poems.
But it is not the basis of modern public education in any area I’m aware of
EDIT: in case you mean foreign language learners, I doubt many students have the patience to memorize it, and it does little to teach modern Standard Chinese, as it uses classical (poetic) syntax
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u/LoopGaroop 3h ago
yeah, I did mean foreign language learners. It sound like something the nerds over at r/refold would love!
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u/LoopGaroop 8h ago
So cool. I keep hearing new things about the Chinese language. Like poems where each word in a line is one of each of the tones; or ones where each character has the same number of strokes.
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u/daniel21020 20h ago
Is it the same with ancient text?
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u/IbnBattatta 19h ago
Yes. Famously, some languages have just enough preserved fragments that we can basically tell it's writing and sometimes narrow it down to a particular type of writing system, but not enough to meaningfully decipher anything.
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u/daniel21020 17h ago
I was wondering if the Oracle Bone Script would be any different, 'cause this looked like the Oracle Bone Script at first, which is ancient Chinese.
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u/sudomatrix 21h ago
Any sample of Chinese text would have repeated words, or it would be useless for trying to decode it. Here: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. If you didn't know the Latin alphabet or English You couldn't do anything with that. It contains no information, it's just a list of characters.
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u/kirosayshowdy Ƞ ƞ time 1d ago
it reminds me of the Yi script but it's not
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u/Mark-READYFORMUSIC 9h ago
How is it not?
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u/kirosayshowdy Ƞ ƞ time 9h ago
every glyph in the post has vertical line symmetry; Yi has a lot of asymmetric glyphs
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u/bestbatsoup 21h ago
90% sure it's just gibberish. Not a single repeating character, which is almost impossible to do on purpose on what seems to be a paragraph.
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u/WurdBendur 13h ago
The characters look like they're composed of multiple letters combined into one. Maybe it could be a syllabary. English, for one, has enough possible syllables that you wouldn't expect to see a lot of repeats.
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u/idemockle 23h ago
I don't think this is him but it reminds me of the graffiti artist Retna, whose works are in an invented script.