In the 80-90's, the most popular destination for Australians was the UK: Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Lisa Gerrard (of Dead Can Dance fame) and many others moved up there.
There are historical and cultural reasons for that.
Even though hiragana can be traced back to the 5th century, the educated and elites continued to use kanji exclusively until the 20th century, whereas hiragana was relegated to unofficial writing and it first became popular amongst women, hence gaining the condescending status of «female writing». Drawing parallels with hangul (as some have noticed) is not entirely correct as hangul entered the official use in the 15th century and has been in the extensive use for writing since then, even though the use of hanja has ceased only relatively recently. Hiragana entered the stage approximately four centuries later.
Katakana, on the other hand, was developed by Buddhist monks in the 9th century to translate texts from India and later to represent borrowed words. The Empire of Japan used kanji and katakana in official documents.
Then there is a distinction between the syllabary and vocabulary.
Chinese vocabulary and pronunciation has entered Japanese in three distinct waves: go-on, kan-on and tō-on. The Tang dynasty kan-on wave was particularly and enormously important as it has supplied Japanese with a major new pronunciation system, vocabulary, administrative culture and literary.
The earlier go-on wave is associated with Buddhist terminology that prefers the go-on readings, and the tō-on wave readings occur particularly in vocabulary brought through medieval and early-modern contact with China.
Therefore, the same character can therefore contain several historical layers, for example: 明 has go-on myō, kan-on mei and tō-on min as in:
明王 /myōō/ historical layer: go-on, meaning: a Buddhist «Wisdom King» (such as 不動明王 Fudō Myōō)
明王 /meiō/ historical layer: kan-on, meaning «a wise, enlightened or excellent ruler».
Even the pronunciation alone partly tells the reader which historical layer is being invoked.
明朝 is even more interesting as the reading of /myōchō/, being an older myō reading, indicates «tomorrow morning» whereas the /minchō/ reading, being a tō-on, indicates «the Ming dynasty» or related to the Ming dynasty.
Neither hiragana nor katakana can preserve such details, and, depending on whom one asks, it may or may not acceptable to a Japanese national. Perhaps the younger generation cares less but it is not all that clear cut.
> Japanese could be written with the Latin alphabet very well, if a set of kanji radicals were retained and inserted before a part of the words, to disambiguate their meaning.
Sort of. The adoption of a Latin script would risk severing cultural continuity – a likely deal breaker in a society such as Japan, where history, tradition, and inherited form are not decorative artefacts but active components of cultural identity.
Consider the following two Japanese surnames that – today – are spelled as Kanō and Gotō (I happen to have a close Japanese friend with this surname).
They can be rendered as:
Kanō: 狩野 and 加納
Gotō: 後藤 and 五島
Leaving the historical pronunciation aside, the issue that we have here is that each Kanji rendition represents a distinct lineage (or a medieval family/clan).
The medieval 狩野氏[0] of Izu was an established warrior lineage. Its members occur in the Azuma Kagami, and the family was active by 1180. It belonged to a Fujiwara-derived lineage.
加納[1] is explicitly recorded with historical kana カナフ. A separate 加納氏 belonged to the Miura–Sawara grouping that divided control of Aizu after Yoritomo's Ōshū campaign. The official history of Kitakata lists 加納氏 separately amongst these medieval families.
後藤[2] The 後藤 lineage is attested in the twelfth century. 後藤基清, born in 1155, was the adopted son of 後藤実基 and served as a Kamakura-period warrior.
五島[3] This is the most interesting example as 五島 came from the unrelated medieval 宇久氏. The 宇久 had already been established by the Kamakura period and later controlled the Gotō islands. After Ukuji was promoted to Bunroku's service, he changed his surname from Uku to Gotō, and developed into the Gotō clan, a daimyo of the early-modern times.
None of that historical lineage can be faithfully preserved through the use of a Latin script. The characters themselves carry continuity – visual (radicals), literary and civilisational – that transliteration can approximate only by discarding precisely what made the tradition contiguous in the first place and compressing them into a neutered phonetic contraption.
Then there is the separate issue that Chinese characters, their readings and the vocabulary associated with them entered Japanese through several successive waves of cultural import, with one particularly important layer having been introduced during the Tang dynasty, when Japan extensively adopted Chinese literary, administrative and cultural models. Different readings, compounds and usages consequently preserve historical or cultural nuances associated with particular periods of Japanese contact with China.
Not numerous but specifically Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – all four countries speak Turkic languages, and they chose to do so to align themselves with Turkey. The adoption has been rather slow, and previous Cyrillic based scripts remain in wide use, though.
Moldova switched for a similar reason as Moldovans speak Romanian, and they did so to align themselves with Romania.
That is a total of five countries.
The actual history is rather more nuanced, as after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks – intent, at least in principle, upon eradicating Great-Russian chauvinism and weakening the Russian cultural dominance – introduced the policy of «korenizatsiia», or «nativisation».
The new policy encouraged non-Russian populations to cultivate distinct national identities, use their own languages in administration and education and, where indigenous languages had previously lacked established writing systems, develop scripts and literary standards of their own:
«Politically and culturally, the nativization policy aimed to eliminate Russian domination and culture in Soviet republics where ethnic Russians did not constitute a majority. This policy was implemented even in areas with large Russian-speaking populations; for instance, all children in Ukraine were taught in the Ukrainian language in school. The policies of korenizatsiia facilitated the Communist Party's establishment of the local languages in government and education, in publishing, in culture, and in public life. In that manner, the cadre of the local Communist Party were promoted to every level of government, and ethnic Russians working in said governments were required to learn the local language and culture of the given Soviet republic»[0].
For that reason, nearly all new writing scripts developed between 1920's and mid-1930's were Latin based.
Joseph Stalin, a Georgian himself, ended and reversed the policy in the mid-1930's and instructed the Latin-based scripts to be replaced with the Cyrillic-based ones.
This somewhat counter-intuitive bolshevist policy of regionalization and decentralisation starts making sense if Richard Poe is right, who says they (them being mostly Jews) were working for the British.
How the British invented Communism (and blamed it on the Jews) • Richard Poe @ RTF (Matthew Ehret) • 2h01 • https://youtu.be/Cxen-IzX-Gw
For me, the lightbulb cartel comes to mind in which leading manufacturers at the time agreed to limit the longevity of incandescent lightbulbs. (This is often cited as an egregious case of planned obsolescence, but Technology Connections has a great video on this that explains there's more to it and it potentially reduced overall load on the electric grid.)
At least in NZ around when they closed 2G the govt created a group of some kind which went around and put up a bunch of 4G towers in more remote areas, the key thing was the towers went owned on xyz company, so everyone who visits the area regardless of the telco they use get the same great signal.
*having said that, it's still sad 2G was closed, it had truly impressive coverage, with few cell towered required.
Is how it should be country wide in my opinion. Way too many towers up everywhere just so xyz company can get coverage there. Leaving no 1 company to have the "best" coverage.
I deliberately stopped short of invoking golden parachutes and the numerous other escape hatches available at that altitude, as I am perfectly aware they exist. I am equally aware of chief executives who have departed with remarkable agility from organisations they themselves had first steered off the cliff.
My point, however, remains the same: as the letter of the law presently stands, AI can't be made accountable – at least not today.
LLCs and other corporate structures only (mostly) protect employees and shareholders from civil judgments. CEOs and other executives are also at risk of criminal penalties for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) violations and similar. Actual criminal prosecutions of CEOs have been few, but not zero.
The GCC assembly syntax is not a monstrosity, it was a necessity given how GCC represented the intermediate representation of the code. Historical GCC docs actually explain the rationale of the design pretty well.
Moreover, since GCC was one of the very few C compilers that targeted a large number of very diverse ISA's at the time, they wanted to have a uniform way of injecting the assembly code across wildly varying ISA's.
The correct assembly syntax is a matter of convention and personal preference – not a category error.
Historically, some ISA's have adopted the «src, dst» convention, whilst others have preferred «dst, src». We should be grateful that no engineer, in a moment of excessive creativity, attempted boustrophedon – a conceptual device solely appropriate to the likes of INTERCAL. Then we have 3 operand RISC instructions.
As with so many technical orthodoxies, the first convention one encounters tends thereafter to acquire the status of natural law.
The consistent application of the same convention is useful nevertheless. It reduces the unnecessary cognitive overload once one starts jumping across multiple hardware architectures.
Firefox has also adopted and supports Manifest v3, but Mozilla did not adopt all of Chrome/Chromium’s Manifest v3 restrictions.
In Chrome/Chromium, Manifest v3 largely replaces extension-controlled network blocking with a more restrictive «declarativeNetRequest», whereas Firefox, by contrast, has deliberately kept support for blocking «webRequest» functionality.
Importantly, the full uBlock Origin is a Manifest V2 extension. The Manifest v3-compatible version is uBlock Origin Lite, which has fewer capabilities.
In the 80-90's, the most popular destination for Australians was the UK: Nick Cave, Kylie Minogue, Lisa Gerrard (of Dead Can Dance fame) and many others moved up there.
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