It seems that ???? [1] is a more close analogue in that this exact four-letter form is always used. The Korean version is substantially different too, it's ???? (???? Chojiilgwan).
Well, this is a pretty niche question, but ?? and ?? are pretty much indistinguishable. Do you know how Chinese people tend to write it? In my mind it's ??.
> Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.
North Korea in particular has gone to great lengths to de-Sino (and de-foreign) their version of Korean. So much so that they've introduced many, often cumbersome description words to replace more elegant Chinese (Korean pronounced) or other loan words like ?? ??? (Mechanical Calculating Device) instead of ??? (Computer).
Most south Koreans can likewise tell you immediately if a word is of Chinese origin (usually because they know the Hanja for it) vs. of purely Korean origin. Like ?? (Dinosaur) which is pronounced almost the same as ?? vs. ? (Blood) instead of ?.
I am not a native speaker and terrible at googling this, but I've once heard that ?? was originally the Taiwanese way of saying it and ??? the Chinese way, in the same way that 'program' is still called ?? on one side of the strait and ?? on the other, or 'internet' is either ?? or ??. The names of movies and video games are also generally different (PRC, HK, TW).
While 'naive' translates to ??, ?? doesn't just mean naive. Baidu Baike [1] lists three meanings. Going by the cited references, <<??·??>> is the oldest and my guess is "??,?????,??????????????,????" is the etymology of ??.
Oh you might be right about it being slang. My Chinese isn't great. I just like to pretend it is on the internet haha! Their website uses the characters ??? (haogege) and I don't see ?? (bisai) written anywhere. Maybe they changed it after getting the domain.
> For example ???(real estate), comes from the Japanese kanji word, ???, which in Chinese means ?(not)?(moving)?(assets). Does this inferential aspect of Chinese still apply in certain cases once it is written in Hangul?
It depends. For this particular example, I think most Koreans will treat ??? as a single word meaning "real estate", because it's not a very productive combination: the alternative ?? (moveable properties?) is a legal term which is much less common, and ?(?) as "property" isn't common either.
On the other hand, a word like ????(???? - densification) is transparently decomposable to ?(? high) + ??(?? density) + ?(? -ify). Few people can write it down in hanja (I just copy-pasted from dictionary), but most people will immediately recognize its meaning, even if they've never seen the word before.
That's certainly an alternative possibility; more likely, IMHO, than sellers copying one-another perfectly. However...
> You'll see that it has the "niche" punctuation you mentioned
It does, but there are only two examples of it on the page right now. (It is a thing common to Chinese text generally, but it's not the first thing you'd reach for.)??gets used on this page as a sort of "tag" or "section" for a story. In Amazon product descriptions, meanwhile, it's being used to form a sort of two-tier "?title?body" text; as if compressing a slide-deck slide onto a single line. That's not what those characters are "for", in Chinese. It's a misuse. A Chinese reader would be confused.
> lots of point form descriptions with emoji bullets,
There are no emoji bullets on Baidu; there are styled bullets. But also, when I say "emoji bullets", I don't mean that they use emoji as bullets; I mean that they use regular bullets, and then use emojis as additional "decorations" for each point. Like this: https://i.imgur.com/xW3uPEP.png . AFAIK, nobody does this, anywhere on the Internet, Chinese or otherwise, other than on these brands' Amazon product pages. Because it's silly.
Consider also: if this was just "the way Chinese people write product descriptions on marketplace websites", then you'd expect to see it happening on e.g. AliExpress, or among Chinese sellers on Wish.com. But you don't. On both of those sites, product listings (from Chinese sellers) just use regular, random+inconsistent styling, with a diffusion of different stylistic techniques spreading via natural selection of sellers; with none of these particular techniques being among them. It's only a certain implicit web of a few thousand Amazon product brands, that have this extremely-consistent style.
It should be "?? (??)" or "?? (??)" for the traditional Chinese, not just "??". I'm confused a little bit since it has "?? (??)" (Chinese (simplified)).
Anybody know what this is supposed to be called in Chinese? The article just shows four question marks. (I thought it was an encoding error at first, but after curling the page and inspecting the character byte sequences, it looks like they're really just question marks.)
At least Google Translate is a bit better than Baidu Translate which at some point decided that my name is the English translation of ?? (grilled rice).
The translation is almost same, however, the meaning is quite different.
Chinese ???? means that it is not too late to fix the cowshed after lost. Korean, however, shows the useless of the fixing activity. Later connotes the regret.
[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9F%A2%E5%BF%97%E4%B8%8D%E6%...
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