On: Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess

[stickfigure]

> In English “thing”, “a”, and “ma” are already words, and “jibber” would presumably be the first character in “gibberish”. So you could write that made-up word by combining those four characters.

Nonsense. There is zero chance in hell that if you combine the pictographs for "thing", "a", "ma", and "gibberish", that someone reading that is going to reproduce the sound thingamajibber. It just does not work. The meme does not replicate.

There may be other virtues of pictographic written language, but reproducing sounds is not one of them. And - as any Shakespeare fan will tell you - tweaking the sounds of English cleverly is rather important. If you can't reproduce this behavior, you're losing something in translation. So to speak.

[umanwizard → stickfigure]

Chinese characters aren't pictographs, so whether English could be written with pictographs is irrelevant to this discussion.

Each Chinese character represents a syllable (in Chinese languages) or a small set of possible sequences of syllables (in Japanese).

And yes, in Chinese languages, new words are created from characters that sound like the parts of the new word, all the time.