LibreOffice Calc has an option to force English function names regardless of the current localization. I guess Excel should have something similar, too¹.

Fun fact: in European and Brazilian Portuguese, the same function names can refer to different things. European SUBSTITUIR² is REPLACE (Brazilian MUDAR), Brazilian SUBSTITUIR³ is SUBSTITUTE (European SUBST).

¹ I've found this solution https://superuser.com/questions/1908516/how-to-change-the-la... but I haven't tested it since I don't have MS Excel at hand to check

² https://support.microsoft.com/pt-pt/office/fun%C3%A7%C3%A3o-...

³ https://support.microsoft.com/pt-br/office/substituir-fun%C3...

It kinda is? Most Classical Chinese and Egyptian words follow the principle "deficient phonetic + semantic part", it's just that Chinese characters are split into neat squares because most Classical Chinese words are exactly one syllable long. But the general principle is similar enough.

Rhyme dictionaries describe Middle Chinese, not Old Chinese. Old Chinese involves much more guesswork.

Some modern adaptations of his transcription do, however. E.g. Modern Japanese Grammar: A Practical Guide uses the transcription “sensee” (they consistently don’t use macrons in this book: e.g. they use oo for ō, etc.).

Hepburn didn’t write “sensē” himself because it 1880s it was still pronounced “ei”, not “ē”. If it were pronounced like it’s pronounced nowadays, you can bet he’d spell it with ē.

sugē

> Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners

It depends on the learner’s (and textbook author’s) goals. Sometimes, having a phonetic transcription of the more common pronunciation is a more important consideration.

Historically, Hepburn’s transcription pre-dates Japanese orthographic reform. He was writing “kyō” back when it was spelled けふ. Having one-to-one correspondence to kana was not a goal.

So writing sensē is kinda on-brand (even if Hepburn didn’t write like this, because in his times it still wasn’t pronounced with long e).

I think most learners probably only pick up maybe 50 words before switching from romaji to kana anyway, so in the grand scheme of things the romanization's correspondence to the kana orthography isn't that important.

Also, forbid apostrophes, quotation marks and non-cp1252 characters in the message text, like my bank's website does. Apparently to prevent SQL injections.

Russian writer Leonid Kaganov had this idea back in 2021, with an added twist that he also put the printer in his bathroom: https://lleo.me/dnevnik/2021/11/30

Doesn't know his 3 shells

But the capitalisation is unexpected.

While sometimes people use all-caps for family names (I think it’s French tradition?), I think it looks quite out-of-place and confusing in this case.

We usually only do that in stuff like records, on envelopes, on forms, etc.

Pretty rare to do it in media.

It treats any of my clicks as an attempt to select text, and draws everything with blue selection overlay (Firefox on Windows).

Otherwise, looks cool!

I thought the same, but it's actually just the default Color Palette being applied. You can change it in the preferences.

> English regularly violates its own rules

That's true for any human language. E.g. in Russian, adjectives use the gender, case and plurality of a noun, until they suddenly don't.

> English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history.

That's not unique to English. E.g. Japanese has even borrowed numerals, and some of its pronouns are borrowings. Russian has borrowed verb forms.

Having a lot of Latin borrowings is quite common in most European languages. Even in Romance languages, there are a lot of Latin borrowings (e.g. minuto is Latin borrowing, miúdo is a native Portuguese word).

> You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.

That's similar to how e.g. Romanian has Latin-based and Slavic-based vocabulary. This is not that unique.

> but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects

Many languages have or had patois and creoles based on them.