Kevin Wayne Williams wrote:
> Ken wrote:
> 
>> Kevin Gowen wrote:
>>
>>> If you fix your chat machine you will be able to...
>>
>>
>>
>> I wonder what makes you think I have control over this particular
>> "chat" machine...
>> It would be a bit uncivil of me to install an IME on a system I don't
>> own.  Temporarily pointing a X11 server to a net-accessible font server,
>> on the other hand, doesn't leave any customizations behind when I leave.
>> Having no IME available makes inputting e.g. japanese a quite tedious
>> copy and paste process, but one sometimes doesn't have a choice.
>> Anyway, these concepts are probably beyond the intellectual grasp
>> of a person who has never used anything more advanced than a small
>> personal computer -- sorry, "chat" machine...
>>
>>
>>
>>> ...post in hanzis [sic] as easily as most of the rest of us do.
>>
>>
>>
>> Interesting, this "[sic]".  It seems you hasn't been able to figure
>> out how to copy the two text lines with the HTML "&xxx;" entities
>> into a clipboard and paste them between <html> </html> tags and open
>> the resulting text file in a web browser.  Why am I not surprised.
> 
> 
> Why on earth would anyone bother to cut and paste your post? What did 
> you say around it that make it so compelling that anyone would go to 
> that effort? Using a bizarre plural of "hanzi"...


The transmogrification was absolutely involuntary and was presumably
caused by some mismatch and interplay between the character set
specification in Gowen's original post and the reply I was posting
and the character set configuration of the non-asian IME web client I
was using and DejaNews' front-end language settings.  I don't care
enough about the problem to analyze it further, and would rather post
in romaji.

Anyway, I originally wrote:
"[...] but the message contents sometimes *requires* "hanzis"..."

Grammatically speaking, KWW, after "requires" one usually expects a
substantive.  Now, as you seem to be ignorant of that fact, "hanzi"
is a compound word which literally means chinese CHARACTERS.

Which version would make more grammatical sense, then?

"[...] but the message contents sometimes *requires* chinese character"

"[...] but the message contents sometimes *requires* chinese characters"

"[...] but the message contents sometimes *requires* greek character"

"[...] but the message contents sometimes *requires* greek characters"


OTOH, when Gowen writes "post in hanzis [sic]", he uses "hanzis" as if
designated the chinese alphabet.  In that case, he should preferably
have written "post in hanzi", but semi-literate people like him are
not really aware of the semantics of the terms they use...
Had I elected to use "hanzi" as meaning the "chinese alphabet", I would
have written:

"[...] but the message contents sometimes *requires* writing in hanzi"

Notice the difference?


> when I am pretty sure you 
> are referring to Japanese text (I'm not sure ... I didn't go through the 
> cut and paste tango), where the word "kanji" would be more appropriate, 
> didn't do anything to make me want to go to the effort.

Let me summarize this for you:

 - you don't even know whether the post was actually in Japanese,
   but are happy second-guessing -- confident in your probably oh
   so impressive knowledge of asian languages -- its author and
   *assuming* that the word "kanji" would have been more appropriate

 - based on that ignorant assumption, you then proceed to try to
   "logically" deduce that Gowen is probably right

To put it mildly, this looks like the pretty shallow thinking, the
kind of which one expects only from an airhead :-)


> KGII is proof of an old axiom: just because someone is an asshole 
> doesn't mean he's wrong.

I resent the implication that my own asshole credentials might not
cut it.