The quick or short Language Questions Thread (not grammar)

Japanese Language Questions
2753

The above patterns do cause some order → meaning nice connections here and there.

For example:
温室 and 室温 both fall on “first kanji modifies the second”, so while 温室 means warm room, 室温 means room temperature.
王国 and 国王 the same, with 王国 meaning a country that is ruled by a king (a monarchy) and 国王 the country’s king.

I would say that knowing “verb + complement”, which is very common despite not being so intuitive, can save you a couple dictionary searches on the long run. The rest are usually rather self-evident, so I wouldn’t worry that much.

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2754

Is there any way I could dive down into this topic? Like a book or article to read?

2755

If you are ok with reading in Japanese, you can just search for 熟語の構成 and you will find plenty of info since it is a standard middle school topic in Japan.

https://manab-juku.me/japanese/jukugo-kosei/#outline__1_1

I don’t have any English URL at hand right now, tho.

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2756

Japanese is fine. Thanks a lot!!!

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2757

Just in case anyone else is looking for it, I found an English article on it: Kanji Compound Words or Jukugo - SakuraMani

But honestly, I didn’t find it specially comprehensive or easy to understand. Just… “better than nothing” level.

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2758

And an interesting thing is that sometimes the same word exist in kunyomi with the kanji reversed (and usually a lower registry).
Like 切腹セップクand 腹切はらきり (there are a lot more, but right now I don’t recall any other)

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2759

躊躇う and 躊躇 show up a lot. Not reversed, but the kun’yomi and on’yomi part at least.

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2760

Screenshot from 2021-10-09 17-32-24

What is this kana?

2761

な

but very low-res

2762

read

Would this have been less readable? I feel it represents the kana much better

2763

I’d say both are equally readable to me. But I’m not a font designer so I have no idea what design choices went into that な

I think considering that font is considerably wider for vertical strokes than for horizontal ones though, that might actually make things worse. You’re getting hung up on the gap in the right part of な I think, which is just not always visibly there depending on font or handwriting. I’ve definitely seen it before, where it looks like just one continuous horizontal line, especially in low-res fonts.

2764

I think in cases like this it probably makes sense to read the whole word so the individual kana make sense.

I think it says なかまをつくる - make friends/companions

EDIT: Out of curiosity, what game is it? I got interested as well :smiley:

2765

Black Onyx, the first ever dungeon crawler with team creation in japan and main inspiration for dragon quest apparently

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2766

It looks to me like in that version (the SG-1000 version?) of Black Onyx, They wanted the font to match that thick line style, like how in the English the P, A etc. have that one thick line giving it sort of a marquee/arcade look, and they sacrificed quite a bit of readability for it. (Or system requirements necessitated it in some way - it seems like an underpowered system that wouldn’t have built-in fonts after all. The way the line width varies seems stylistic to me but there could always be some arcane reason for it)

Usually in old games I see a font more like this one in the MSX version, which is more like your example:
image
But I don’t know that it would be possible to reproduce that in the space required and keep the bolder strokes.

Honestly – still probably a lot more readable than the original solution on the PC-88!
image

Edit to add: this is going a little overboard at this point, but I flipped through the catalogue I have of old Sega games, and hilariously, I think this might be one of only two games for the SG-1000 to have hiragana in them*, the other being this Sherlock Holmes game (ロレッタの肖像) that looks like it uses the same font:

image
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All the other games catalogued are either arcade-style games that seem like they just have assorted English words, or a mahjong game that looks like it only has katakana and a few oversized kanji.

By the time the Mk.III/Master System rolls around though, the な’s look normal and all the fonts are thin-line in the screenshots I can see, so maybe that thick-line font is just a weird quirk of Sega’s first home console.

_* there’s at least one game I missed - a shogi game! I think… I think they only implemented を, お, せ, か, and し though… and the font looks… sloppy. Albeit thin! (actually looks definitely less like a real font and more like… one asset that says to move the cursor and then press the button)

Anyway, sorry for all the irrelevant detail, apparently comparing fonts in old games is one topic to get me interested…

PPS: I found a clearer thick-lined take on な in a Game Gear game about McDonalds…
image

That honestly looks very similar to the SG-1000 font, but a bit clearer and more refined in some ways. It’s several years older but still published by Sega for Sega hardware so who knows, maybe there’s even a direct lineage… (I suppose probably not)

In any case I’m leaning towards the answer being “yes, the な could probably have been made more readable without sacrificing the font style, but there was probably a lot left to be refined at this point in time…”

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2767

correct

just because it’s all katakana? I think it’s plenty readable

That font was pusposefuly assigned by the devs of the games. It was a design choice.

Nope. The GG game was made by treasure, whilst the SG1000 game was made by sega (well, ported by sega actually), and I believe it was made by AM1 but I might be wrong

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2768

I didn’t mean to imply it was necessarily a hardware quirk - I just figure if a noticeable font only exists on the only two text-heavy games for the system, and not on other systems, then coincidentally or not you could call it particular to the SG-1000. Even though it’s intentionally designed for (one of) those games, since it’s likely the first Japanese font designed for sega home consoles, I could see there being a learning process when it comes to what works best under those constraints, leading to it being not brought forward when text-heavy Mk. 3 games started coming out within the same year.

I’d also be curious what dev environments would have been like, and if transferring fonts meant for a SG-1000 game elsewhere or vice-versa would have been easy. Presumably it would have been possible to tweak pixel-by-pixel, but I wonder if the font got used for the Black Onyx port just because they had it sitting around from the Sherlock Holmes game and it was easiest to transfer in that environment. (just speculation of course though).

I should have specified the specific Mcdonalds game - I was thinking of “マクドナルド ドナルドのマジカルワールド” which as far as I can tell was developed by SIMS, which had Sega as a parent company at the time. (not that it matters - the fonts don’t look quite as similar as they did to me at first glance)

I was thinking of the katakana yeah - personally I’d take a weird な over katakana, but true it’s not too bad, and it is at least nice and crisp!

2769

From what I understand, it’s hard to think of old fonts like that as real fonts, because they had no scaling and filtering, and were probably just one texture atlas with evenly sized NxM cells. You load the atlas once and then just point to the cells by ID, later converted to the actual coordinates from half of the values being stored as const values (hard-coded), because math is cheap :slight_smile:

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2770

google told me this one was made by treasure
afaik the only treasure mcdonalds game is the mega drive one so youre probably right

apparently it didnt use 15khz, but 26

2771

Weird way of saying the font was tile based

2772

My premise here though is wrong! A random youtube tab I left open had some Mark III 北斗の拳, and wouldn’t you know it:

image
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I wonder if the original motivation for the look of the font was something evoking Victorian penmanship for the Sherlock Holmes game, and then it ended up in fantasy games after that since the look fits relatively well there too. (although it looks like Fist of the North Star actually came out before the Sherlock Holmes game despite being on later hardware, so who even knows with development being what it is)

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