> they mention furigana, characters that aid in reading Kanji characters ... There are many examples of similar use
TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar features?
Tones in non tonal languages do this, which can make tonal languages very difficult because instinctively you aren't used to tones being used for in-band communication.
Every language has various out-of-band features (gestures, etc). I was asking if any of them are similar to the (written) furigana usage described in TFA.
As others have said, this is common in Chinese writing. The unique thing about furigana is that it's typeset above/beside the kanji for the second meaning.
Perhaps the more interesting thing is how even songs will often use kanji for a concept but the sung lyrics are expressed in furigana, but IIRC Chinese culture has this too.
How is that common in Chinese writing? I haven't seen anything similar to gikun in Chinese. Outside of graded readers, I've not seen the pronunciation written above a character and in the case of graded readers, it would always be the expected pronunciation not a different pronunciation that carries a different sense. That's something I agree with the writer as being unique.
It is not common at all, but in Taiwan there is bopomofo, which is used the same way as furigana in Japanese – to indicate the pronunciation of Chinese characters. In fact, children in Taiwanese schools learn bopomofo first and only later proceed with learning the traditional Chinese characters.
Yeah, most of my son's children books are from Taiwan (we're in Hong Kong so use traditional characters too) and I do see bopomofo sometimes. But it's mostly the normal use of furigana, doesn't seem to be used to give another alternate meaning/pronunciation to the word.
Writing the pronunciation above a character is normal when the character is rare or has an unexpected pronunciation. For example recently 龘 was often written with the pinyin above.
Writing a different pronunciation with a different sense is also often seen on WeChat or in adverts. Often with a positive meaning in characters and a negative meaning in pinyin.
That felt to me to play the same role as "local footnotes" (those footnotes that sometimes appear not at the end of the page, but at the end of a short section or paragraph)?!
The nuance is a bit different. With what TFA is talking about with furigana, the implication is that whoever is speaking has said one word but pronounced it like another. That doesn't really make sense in English but with JP and kanji having lots of readings it's kind of a normal way to think.
So in some cases it's really no different from a footnote - e.g. in the JP version of Neuromancer there are bits where dialogue has the word for "immerse" with the furigana "jack in", and the effect is that the character has said the in-universe slang, and the base word is giving the reader a sense for what the slang means.
But if a character says "She's my friend" and "friend" has the furigana for "lover", or vice-versa, the effect becomes very different. You can think of it as one word being in the speaker's mind and another coming out of their mouth, or maybe as the character saying one thing and the author telling us another.
I'm not a native speaker, just fluent, but anyway that's how it works in my mind.
I think the way the author calls it "reading in stereo" is a very good picture. It's not a footnote or a liner note that explains the meaning of a word. Those live outside the text. It _is_ the word and it lives within the text. It's the inherent meaning of the characters painted on to another word.
No, that isn't a language feature. Japanese doesn't have that feature either. Note that a written text displaying this feature has no spoken equivalent.
Other writing systems do have similar features; it's common in Chinese internet culture.
Yeah the Chinese language simply uses parentheses for that purpose. The convention is that each Chinese character is placed into its own parenthesis unlike a regular parenthetical remark. For example, if the one thing being said is ABCD but the other meaning, most likely an ironic one, is WXYZ, the author simply writes A(W)B(X)C(Y)D(Z). Of course this requires the two to have the same number of characters, which is reasonably easy to do.
TFA's main point about uniqueness with furigana was how it's occasionally used for out-of-band communication, like an author having a character say one thing while conveying to the reader that they mean something else. Do other languages have similar features?