Metrolingua

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7.09.2007

Erroneous characters


Somebody sent me a link to an article that's no longer new news, but some people may not know about it: the wrong Japanese on the Wikipedia logo. What's funny is that it's written in katakana, which is a script that even people who can't read Japanese well usually learn quite decently because it is usually used for foreign (non-Japanese) words, and people learn at least how to write their names with it.

I can't believe with all the people who use and write Wikipedia, they couldn't get such a simple thing right. As the image says, the correct characters spell "wi" but the ones that Wikipedia originally used spell "kwi". And that's something else I'm wondering about: why didn't the New York Times, which published the story and the image, say what Wikipedia used? All they said is that it "contains two erroneous characters."

WRONG.

It contains ONE erroneous character because "wi" and "kwi" use the SAME second character イ which is "i".

Update: komfo pointed out that the second erroneous character is the Devanagari one--I was just focusing on the Japanese ones.

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5 Comments:

At 10:05 AM, Anonymous komfo,amonan said...

Looks to me that the Devanagari is considered the second erroneous character.

 
At 10:32 AM, Blogger mj said...

Oh yeah--I didn't even think about the Devanagari as the second erroneous character--whoops :)

 
At 11:25 AM, Blogger Lilly said...

Human error. The world is full of human errors....

I like what you write "no longer new news" -- that's a wonderful oxymoron, is it not? :-)

 
At 10:27 PM, Blogger mj said...

Wow--I didn't think that "new news" is an oxymoron. But yeah, the inherent meaning of "news" is new :D

 
At 4:25 AM, Blogger Lilly said...

Hehe...that's what I thought :-D

 

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