An odd request, but I’m making a quiz to submit to a web show. The quiz is about real or fictional flags (as in flags from fictional universes). Do you guys have any suggestions for fictional flags, particularly from anime?
The Flag of Britannia from Code Geass
Kamina’s Flag from Gurren Lagann
Every flag ever from One Piece
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Flag of Britannia is a good suggestion. The others kind of not. Kamina’s flag is too obviously made up, and most flags in One Piece feature skulls and crossbones which are kind of hard to believe to be flags of government bodies or other proper entities from the real life. I considered using the flag of the World Government in One Piece, but unfortunately it says “World GOVT.” on the bottom of it.
What I am looking for are fake flags that appear to be real, and real ones that seem fake. Though another one I am sure to include is the Flag of Zeon.
I saw that bit on LRR live. It’s a good bit.
Earth alliance flag from Gundam seed.
Also, flag of Wales for real flags
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Candidates for Real Flags
Flag of Wales
Flag of Amsterdam
Flag of River Gee County
Flag of Fukuoka
The old Flag of Pocatello, Idaho
Flag of Kiribati
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Cagliostro from The Castle of Cagliostro had it’s own flag but google is addling my memory with some fake ones that fans have made.
I know you didn’t ask but ya want a real flag that looks made up. Check out the flag of Sicily
Fun history because that’s my flag, in some sense. The 3 legs symbolize the 3 corners of the (roughly) triangular island. Medusa is because that’s where she supposedly was when she was killed. We’re proud of our mythological tales.
Also there’s shit tonnes of fictional flags out there. The flag of the Republic of Gilead from handmaids tale. There was a fake African country in Coming to America with it’s own flag
There are lists of these things. I found one here and another here. There are plenty others, Take a look in the vexillology subreddit for some plausibly real, but fake flags. They do a load of like… flag mashups and what if this country conquered that country flags there.
Can Japanese Twitter get more meaning into each tweet since each character can represent a word?
One character can, but does not often represent a word in Japanese. I’d wager that Japanese is actually less information dense than, say English.
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That’s surprising to me, knowing nothing about Japanese. It looks so dense relative to the English alphabet, is it really redundant?
Written density and spoken density are not the same.
For example:
I like fish (3 syllables, 9 characters)
私は魚が好き (10 syllables, 6 characters)
For Lizzy’s original question - on Twitter, probably; when spoken aloud, probably not.
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Oh, sure. I think I remember reading a study saying the average spoken-information-per-second is pretty consistent across languages.
If anything I’d wager Taiwanese Twitter should be pretty close to the most efficient use of a tweet.
But I’d also wager that typing it out should take longer than the equivalent information transmission via multiple tweets in English.
Yes
But most japanese speakers would simply write “魚が好き” as them talking about themselves in implied, cutting out two characters and 4 syllables.
In response to a question, yes, that would be an appropriate response, but not in isolation.
That doesn’t change the answer to Lizzy’s question. If one were to tweet about the effects of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, for example, the Japanese tweet would probably contain fewer characters than the English tweet, but if they were to be read aloud, the English tweet would probably be longer.
Actually, this reminds me of reading an article (or watching one of the bundled video documentaries) about Working Designs’ Japanese video game translation process way back in the day. In many cases, they’d often have to recode the entire text storage/display engine of their games, especially text-heavy RPGs, because the English text used up so much more space than the Japanese text. While this may not be a problem for media storage, given how most of them were on CD-ROM, it was an issue with when they had to store any of that textual data in memory.
The last time this topic came up I wondered if there was maybe some way to use compression to fit more text in there. Text compresses really well. Was the problem that these games were made before appropriate compression algorithms were invented? Where the CPUs in the game consoles just too weak to decompress the text in a reasonable amount of time? With modern programming techniques could we re-code the game to include a better translation using the same hardware?
I think this is the main reason that Japanese Twitter can be much denser. In English if you leave out grammar structures you sound like a caveman. In Japanese you can sound unnatural in many situations if you leave them in.
I think in this particular case the original code may have assumed no compression at all for the Japanese text, so the localization team had to find some way to stick the compression code (along with text rendering code for the Latin alphabet and such) into the program and still get everything to work within the confines of the systems, which in these cases were the Sega CD and original PlayStation.
Briefly, I can say I definitely leave out grammar structures in my futile attempts to make my written voice as close to my spoken voice as possible.
Sometimes this leads to me being harder to understand when writing, but just pointing out we can have a fair amount of grammar structures implied in English though maybe not quite as many as one could in Japanese.
For instance, in the above sentence I left out “I’m” between the words but and just. I don’t think it made me sound like a caveman, just made the sentence a tiny bit harder to parse.