I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)
I agree with you that there must be a newer/better way to construct a Chinese-like writing system that isn't quite a burden to both learn as well implement in computers (fonts, etc). I.e. Words could still be built up of logic word roots , similar to current system but more consistent/logical. More advanced words could be built of simpler words. Some of my favorite examples are words like "skull" that are in Chinese 骨头 (literally "head bone"). These sorts of constructions for me as a foreigner learning Chinese are amazing. I'm able to memorize so many Chinese technical/science terms that are a pain even for natives in English.
I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. Sort of like the word2vec generations, but using images as the input and the output would be a sort of viewable "character". I also imagine "hyper-intelligent" beings developing languages like this, only with higher dimensionality of input and not only images.
> I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)
Improvement or not? I argue that it depends. Once in an international situation, Mr. Xi wanted to speak a seldom-used and very old idiom in his draft, which was "通商宽农", roughly standing for the meaning that farmers (农) can live much better (宽) if economy is getting good. However, he spoke it as "通商宽衣"， which is not a established phrase but can still be reasoned as "get economy better and get undressed (宽衣)"。
As a reference, the traditional version of this idiom is "通商寬農"。"農" (farmer, agriculture) has a very different shape compared to "衣" (cloth, surface) in traditional Chinese, but obviously they looks similar when you become a important but nervous guy.
If we regard the Chinese language/writing system as a huge project, I would say that simplified Chinese was a hard fork without much testing but soon widely adopted, and its design was based on some novel but destructive compression algorithm without any peer review process.
> I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. ...
Cool idea! Sounds like some kind of esoteric language. Looking forward to it.
Haha that’s a great example. Those are definitely areas where the written language has room for improvement. I could also imagine myself making a similar mistake.
Regardless, I’ve always been impressed that the Chinese can make such a bold change as their written language yet here in the United States, I’m still arguing with people who don’t know how many feet are in a mile as to why we should switch to metric. :)
If I ever get around to making my “hyper language”, I’ll be sure to post or let you know. I imagine it will likely be “not-very-user-friendly”. haha
About the neural network part, not exactly what you're looking for but you might enjoy this blog post[1] by David Ha with a neural network "dreaming" fake kanjis.
I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :)
I agree with you that there must be a newer/better way to construct a Chinese-like writing system that isn't quite a burden to both learn as well implement in computers (fonts, etc). I.e. Words could still be built up of logic word roots , similar to current system but more consistent/logical. More advanced words could be built of simpler words. Some of my favorite examples are words like "skull" that are in Chinese 骨头 (literally "head bone"). These sorts of constructions for me as a foreigner learning Chinese are amazing. I'm able to memorize so many Chinese technical/science terms that are a pain even for natives in English.
I sometimes have imagined training a neural network to generate "word vectors" that are actually just small 32x32 colored images, just to see what they would look like. Sort of like the word2vec generations, but using images as the input and the output would be a sort of viewable "character". I also imagine "hyper-intelligent" beings developing languages like this, only with higher dimensionality of input and not only images.