Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 16 Sep
Written Language

Recently, I’ve started learning Mandarin Chinese. Like most people, I came in thinking the complex writing system would be the hardest part, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn how intuitive it actually is. Unlike most writing systems, Chinese hanzi do not provide any direct information about how to pronounce them and only represent meaning. At first, this seems very difficult and unintuitive as you would have to either look up the character in a dictionary of some kind or ask a native speaker (or even use a TTS) to know how it sounds and even after that, you still need to remember how it’s pronounced and even how to say the tones (which is hard for people unfamiliar with tonal languages) to be able to read it aloud again. However, as I started to use the language more (which, as of me starting this article, has only been a week), I found a beauty in the separation of the written language from the spoken language.

See, one of the first things I learned about hanzi is that they can mostly be read in any language that uses them whether it be Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, etc. since they just contain meanings, not phonetic information (obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but I won’t get into that here). This means that the same characters can be pronounced differently by different languages or dialects but still have mostly the same meaning. I didn’t fully appreciate this until I started to actually use hanzi to text my Chinese friends (btw, typing in Chinese is wonderful and I’ll talk more about that later) and found that even if I had forgotten how to pronounce a character, I could still remember what it means and sometimes just read it in English in my head. Of course, I still look up the pinyin to remember how to pronounce it so I can actually speak it, but I really appreciated how I could just look at a character and know what it’s supposed to mean before knowing how to say it. With alphabet-based languages like English, reading works the same way as over time, you eventually become familiar with the shape of the word, not the individual letters and they have the advantage of still having phonetic information to pronounce them, but as I learned more about Chinese, I started to appreciate just how much meaning can be put into each character.

Now, I am going to butcher this explanation as I am not yet an expert on Chinese characters, but I hope I can still make you appreciate how it works. Basically, hanzi are typically made up of multiple smaller characters squished together into one character. For example, 好, meaning “good” is made up of 女(woman) and 子(child). 我(meaning I or me) is made up of 手(hand) and 戈(meaning spear, halberd, etc.). Even then, those simpler characters can sometimes be broken down further, or you can even go the other way around and form more complex characters with new meanings. Most of the time, there is no logical coherence to how these characters are formed, mainly due to the language itself evolving naturally over several thousands of years of people using it, but it does mean that new characters can be created. I think the best way to show this is with the Chinese periodic table of elements. The video I embedded below best explains it, but I will try my best to give a brief summary. Basically, each hanzi has a specific smaller character within in called its “radical” which helps to identify it (think of it like the first letter in a word so you can look it up in a dictionary). With the periodic table, each element’s hanzi is given a radical to represent its state of matter at room temperature, so gasses like oxygen (氧) would have the radical 气 to indicate that they are normally gasses, while Mercury (汞) has the radical 水(water) to indicate that it’s a liquid at room temperature. The video explains much better the brilliance of how the rest of the character is formed, but my point is that every single one of the elements in the periodic table gets its own unique character that tells you a basic property of that element and also makes it so that they can be pronounced with a single syllable!

Before I continue to my next point, I’d like to talk a bit about typing in Chinese because it is perhaps my favourite thing about the language. There are obviously many different ways to input Chinese characters into a computer due to the complexity of the writing system, but the way that I and many other people type is using the pinyin keyboard. For those unaware, pinyin is the official and most common system for romanizing Chinese characters (i.e. turning them into Latin alphabet letters). This means that you get to use the same keyboard you’d use for typing in English to type in the pinyin for the words you want and then you get a text prediction like on your phone keyboard that shows a list of hanzi that are pronounced that way. Now, at first it just seems like the same as typing any other language since you’re just typing in the letters as you’d pronounced them, but I found that the text prediction is smart enough that most of the time, you can type a whole sentence with a few key presses! For example, say I wanted to type 我是快乐 (I am happy). I could just type the pinyin “Wo shi kuaile” (idk how to type the tones); however, I could also hit the keys “W S 1 K L 1” and get the same result (btw, the “1” means that I chose the first prediction that showed up). That’s 6 total key presses compared to the 13 I would have done if I typed the whole pinyin. Unfortunately, I still have to use a handwriting input to type less common characters like some people’s names, but in every day use, the pinyin keyboard is extremely fast at inputting information. I’m normally not that fast at typing in English (even with text prediction) and I’m not fluent enough in Chinese yet to know how much faster I am typing in it, but I’ve found that when I switch back to texting in English, it feels so much more clunky than when I type in Chinese, and it made me really appreciate the language so much more.

I’ve been hyping up written Chinese for this whole article so far. Does that mean I think it’s the greatest system in the world and that everyone should switch to it so we can all experience its greatness and 中国永远? No, not all all. But learning all this about the language made me really appreciate the diversity of languages around the world and why we should make an effort to study and preserve languages as much as we can. It’s especially important to preserve both the written and spoken forms of languages because it’s the relationship between both parts that make up the whole language. With Chinese, there is a massively interdependent relationship between the spoken form and written form as there are some things that can be conveyed in the written language but not the spoken language and the same thing in the opposite direction. One cannot be fully understood without the other and if suddenly all Chinese speakers (and computer TTS programs) disappeared and we only had the written texts or conversely if we lost all records of written Chinese and all Chinese speakers had to only speak the language or write with a different system, then there would be so much of the language lost. It would basically be dead. And this interdependent relationship between the spoken and written language made me think about how other languages have a similar thing going on. Maybe not as much, but let me explain.

I think the first thing that made me think about all this is capital letters. Grammatically, capital letters signify the beginning of a sentence or a proper noun, and other languages that don’t have an uppercase set of letters usually have their own way of signifying these or don’t even need to at all. However, from a cultural perspective, capital letters provide some things that can’t be truly represented in other languages. For example, TYPING IN ALL CAPS LIKE THIS CAN SIGNIFY YELLING WHICH NORMALLY CAN ONLY BE CONVEYED THROUGH SPOKEN LANGUAGE BUT WITH ALPHABETS LIKE LATIN OR CYRILLIC WHICH HAVE UPPERCASE LETTERS, YOU CAN CONVEY YELLING THROUGH TEXT ALONE. Also, sarcasm and mockery often are difficult to convey outside of spoken language, but iF yOu aLtErNaTe BeTwEeN cApiTaL aNd LoWeRcAsE LeTtErS LiKe tHiS, yOu cAn MaKe iT oBviOuS tHaT yOu DoN’t iNtEnD tO bE tAkEn sEriOuSLy. Some people online have started to use what they call tone indicators to indicate things like sarcasm, mainly to help neurodivergent people who normally can’t pick up on that, but for the most part, I think my point still stands that capital letters are an example of a feature of written language that adds a whole new layer of self-expression to a language.

As I thought on this further, I started to see a lot more examples of things even in English that show the interdependence of written and spoken language. The most obvious thing I could think of are jokes and puns. Some puns and jokes only make sense when spoken aloud, some only when written down, and some require the cultural context of both the spoken and written language. I can’t name any specific ones in English off the top of my head, but there is a joke I will mention later that only makes sense spoken aloud, but that has more to do with my later point about interdependence between completely different languages. Anyway, I digress. With written English, you can also see examples of how the written form of a word doesn’t always represent the spoken form, almost like with what I mentioned earlier about written Chinese being separate from the spoken form. With English, it’s mainly due to the inconsistent spelling rules, but the concept is still there. For example, “there”, “their”, and “they’re” are pronounced exactly the same in spoken English and cannot be differentiated on their own without context, but their written forms can be instantly distinguished at a glance. On the other end, you have words like “live” which are always written the same way but have a different meaning or even pronunciation and are only differentiated by context or from spoken word. For the most part, there’s not as much of a disparity between the spoken and written language in English as with Chinese, but you can start to see my point that basically every language only really makes sense with both parts.

A lot of my points really just boil down to cultural context because every natural language arises from groups of people communicating each other. That’s why spoken Mandarin can still be understood even though almost all the words sound like another word. The words themselves don’t necessarily convey the meaning, it’s their interaction and placement with other words that do. And of course, no natural language exists within a vacuum as they are spoken by people who speak with other groups of people who may speak other language. This means that every language is influenced by other languages as well. And sometimes, the interaction between two or more different languages can provide new cultural context that can’t be conveyed by either language alone.

If you’re reading this, unless you’ve translated it to your own language, it means you know English and therefore would know that almost all English words are either borrowed or evolved from other languages (to be fair, that’s most languages, but modern English is a relatively young language and unlike most languages, doesn’t really have direct roots to an older language like how Spanish and French stem from Latin). But yeah, like the text in parentheses says, most languages also borrow from other languages. Usually, this happens between neighboring groups of people, like how the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system into Kanji while also adopting some of their words and at the same time some words in Chinese are borrowed from Japanese. Other times, it happens from huge migrations of people to other lands, like how most Filipino languages have a lot of words from the Spanish language due to the conquistadors settling there or the English word “boondock” coming from the Tagalog word for mountain due to the Philippine-American war. You can even find some huge examples of a bunch of languages mixing together into a unique one like Hawaiian Pidgin which is a mix of a ton of different languages from different groups of immigrants working together. I’m running out of examples that I can name off the top of my head, but hopefully you get my point. Anyway, I mentioned earlier about a joke that can only be spoken aloud to make sense. It’s a joke my dad used to tell when I was a kid, but it only makes sense if you speak both English and Tagalog. It’s a knock-knock joke that goes something like this: “Knock-knock” “Who’s there?” “Ako maba” “Ako maba who?” and it ends there because the recipient of the joke is supposed to realise they just said “I smell bad” in Tagalog and it doesn’t work for someone who doesn’t speak the language because for one, they likely wouldn’t be able to repeat the “Ako maba” line and also, it doesn’t follow the usual “knock-knock” joke structure where the person telling the joke says the punch line. There must be more examples out there to further drive my point, but I think it’s enough to illustrate that these cultural differences are what make the interactions between different groups so beautiful.

I don’t know how to continue without rambling and repeating most of my points, so I’ll end it with this thought I had about forcing everyone in the world to have the same language. There are some people out there who genuinely think that we should all speak the same language or that we should switch to a universal writing system like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I mean, I think what I’ve mentioned throughout this are enough to illustrate why that’s a terrible idea, but even then, I don’t think these people realise just how much you limit humanity as a whole by having only one language. Even with computer programming languages, we embrace a huge variety of them because even though they are all Turing complete and can mostly do the same things, there are things in some languages that you just can’t do in others. And since language is our way of communicating with other humans, it affects our way of thinking and therefore allows people of different backgrounds have different systems of thought. Sure, English is pretty much a universal language at this point since it’s the language of the internet which spans the whole globe, but having it be the only one severely limits the human experience. And before I end this post, I’d like to rant about the concept of universal translators in science fiction. Most of the time, they’re just used as a plot device so the writers don’t have to come up with new languages or even explain why everyone speaks the same language as humans, but I think what bothers me about them is that they often imply that every thought can be directly translated to another language which simply isn’t true. I get not wanting to come up with new languages, but when they don’t show any cultural differences between alien races, it breaks a lot of the immersion for me. I think an example of where this is done brilliantly is in Star Trek, specifically in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise where they’re having dinner with an alien race (I don’t remember which one lol it’s been a long time) and the aliens storm off as they are offended by something, but the crew’s translator can’t figure out what because what they’re saying can’t be directly translated to English. To be fair, this isn’t really an example of the universal translator trope as they did have the aliens speaking a different language, but my point is that they put in a little extra effort to show that some things cannot be translated perfectly to other languages and I get that a lot of writers want to keep things simple, but surely it wouldn’t hurt to have a few small details to show cultural differences between us and the alien races. Also, another fun example I just remembered was in Godzilla: Final Wars where one of the Xiliens is asked for his name and he simply tells them to call him X since his name cannot be pronounced by humans. It’s such a small detail, but it just adds so much intrigue to this alien race because it tells us that the way they normally communicate with each other is something that humans can’t do. It’s like how bees communicate with dance moves but probably won’t be able to understand us if we do the same moves since we don’t have the same body parts (unless it’s just the motion of their entire body, but you get my point). My point is that we need to be more aware of our cultural and linguistic differences to really appreciate the human experience. Yeah, I think that’s good enough for now. Okay, back to work.

Author Image Posted By : liamjtolentino 24 Apr
Warp Technology

Before I begin this discussion, I would like to note that I am not a physicist and any of the science I explain here comes from my own understanding of these topics. This entire blog is meant to be a creative output for myself, so there is little need for properly cited research.

Anyone who grew up with Star Trek would be undoubtedly familiar with the concept of a warp engine. For those unaware, a warp engine bends space around it to allow a spaceship to travel across the universe faster than light. When I was pondering on this concept on a drive home, I thought about how a lot of other miraculous technologies ended up becoming widely available to the general public. The very computer I am using to type this and the one you are using to read this was built upon many decades of research around a technology that was originally used for massive operations like sending a rocket to the moon. Now obviously warp engines would be far more complex than any computer, but it is inevitable that a society that develops them would eventually be able to compact the technology down to something that an average person could use, not just for space travel.

This got me thinking about possible concepts for commercially available warp technology. The obvious ones would involve transport, and not just the intergalactic kind. With advanced enough warp technology, you could build a whole city in which people can get to where they need in an instant by warping the space between them and their destination. Train lines that travel across the country could get to their destinations in seconds with warp technology.

Then I thought about how it could be used to simply compact things. Entire apartment complexes that take up city blocks could be compressed into a pocket dimension that people could simply walk into. Your closet full of junk could become as spacious as the TARDIS from Doctor Who. Space becomes essentially irrelevant when you have a technology that can change it very easily.

Of course, anyone familiar with the concept of relativity would know that bending space inadvertently affects time as the universe’s way of making sure the speed of light stays constant in any frame of reference. Warp technology could take advantage of this effect by creating spaces where time is slowed down or sped up to meet certain needs. For example, one could use this technology in a server room to speed up the calculations of the computers. It could also be used recreationally by having time move in a certain way at home such that people can spend a lot more time resting while time moves normally in the outside world. There are obviously a lot of negative effects that would result in messing with time like this, but I can imagine that a society that reached this point would have figure out ways around those problems.

One really interesting use that I thought about only recently is the use of warp technology to create extremely accurate color displays. I’ll try not to get too deep into quantum mechanics here, but basically, when electrons emit light, they only do so at very specific frequencies due to energy levels being at fixed quantities. Because of this, color displays, no matter the technology, cannot produce the exact wavelengths of every color in the visible spectrum and only get around that with an illusion on our eyes by mixing specific amounts of red, green, and blue light, the colors our eyes are sensitive to. Because of this, most of the colors we see on a display, such as the color yellow, are not the actual wavelengths of light. The effect is still more than convincing enough, of course, but with warp technology, it may be possible to accurately produce light of any frequency in the visible spectrum.

Essentially, you make use of the Doppler effect which is often associated with the sound of something approaching you, but it is also seen with the further edges of the universe where light gets shifted to longer wavelengths due to space expanding between galaxies. With warp technology, you could take advantage of this effect and have something that produces a fixed wavelength of light and bend the space around it such that the color we end up seeing is different. You could then use this to make a beam of light that aims at different pixels on a screen, somewhat like an old CRT television, but instead of electrons hitting phosphors on a screen, they’re the actual photons of the exact colors we want. With how advanced displays are now, I can’t imagine how much of a difference this would make, but you can imagine a company would market the hell out of this and make people think this is the future of color displays.

Continuing on the concept of bending light, there is a concept in physics known as gravitational lensing where objects in space have such strong gravitational fields that light bends around them, much like a lens. With warp technology, it may be possible to build powerful telescopes that simply bend space to create lenses. Since the light is not passing through a physical medium like glass, we end up reducing a lot of the light data lost with physical telescopes. For more everyday uses, this could also be used for cameras. Instead of having to buy a bunch of different lenses for different purposes, maybe there could be a product that uses small warp engines to create any lens you want with gravitational lensing.

Those are the everyday uses I can think of right now, but now I want to shift the focus to perhaps the more obvious alternative use of warp technology: weaponry. A lot of technologies started out as tools of war, so it should be no surprise that warp technology would first be used as a weapon. Surprisingly, I can only name two sci-fi franchises that cover the concept of weaponized warp technology, that being Star Wars and Titanfall (there likely was a Star Trek episode that covered it too, but I can’t remember at the moment). Star Wars technically uses hyperspace technology which is a bit different from warp technology, but since they serve similar purposes, I’ll consider them basically the same here. In The Last Jedi, there is an infamous scene where a character uses a ship’s hyperdrive to destroy an entire fleet of ships in an instant. In Titanfall 2, the enemies use a weapon called the Fold weapon to bend space-time to destroy an entire planet from a distance. Both of these cases make use of space travel technology to create weapons of mass destruction, but I want to cover a bit of the small-scale weapon applications because there’s only so much you can say about planet-destroying weapons.

The first thought I could think of was something similar to the AR-2 from Half-Life 2 which fires pulses of dark energy instead of bullets. Dark energy, in the context of theoretical physics, is basically what causes the space between galaxies to expand rapidly, essentially bending space-time like our warp engines. One could use this to create untraceable weapons as they would not be firing physical bullets but instead small ruptures in space-time to kill enemies.

Another possible application would be some kind of gravity grenade as seen in some futuristic shooter games where instead of a normal explosion, the grenade changes gravity to either pull enemies into it or launch them upwards. With warp technology, this would not only be possible but also could have various other applications like maybe have it push enemies outward like a normal explosion or even freeze the enemies in time like with the time-manipulation I mentioned in the earlier section. This could even be applied to a missile for more destructive purposes and if used as a nuke, it could avoid a lot of the radioactive side effects from nuclear weapons.

A really interesting application would be to use warp technology to curve bullets. If you ever played Angry Birds: Space, you may remember that a lot of the levels made use of gravity zones or whatever they were called to change the trajectory of the birds mid-flight. This could be used to fire bullets at enemies behind cover by bending space to curve the bullet’s trajectory around the cover. If any game developers are reading this, please make a game mechanic in a shooter where you can curve bullets with gravity.

I might expand on this topic a bit more sometime, but for now, these are my thoughts.