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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • The lack of phonetic information is a challenge. If you see an unfamiliar English word, you can guess the pronunciation, and usually be pretty close (sometimes you’ll get a phoneme wrong or stress the wrong syllable, but listeners will be able to infer what you meant). With kanji, as well as not knowing what it means, you have no information of how it’s pronounced. It is theoretically possible for kanji to exist which not only lack meaning but also have no pronunciation, and indeed, there are about a dozen meaningless, soundless “ghost kanji”that ended up in Unicode due to bureaucratic errors at the Japanese standards agency.





  • It’s tempting to wish that the Iranians succeeded in assassinating him, though we know that if they did, he’d be instantly beatified into a global centrist Charlie Kirk: a statesman of peace and liberalism ruthlessly murdered by evil terrorist fanatics. There’d be statues of him alongside Mandela and Gandhi, Berlin would rename one of its central squares to Netanjahuplatz, and the next year’s Oscars would be swept by the biopic Bibi. The gaslighting would be incessant.