On 6/13/2011 8:39 PM, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
At Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:16:10 -0400,
C. Scott Ananian wrote:
given that most non-Chinese can't read Chinese writing, despite that many of
these characters do actually resemble crude line-art drawings of various
things and ideas.
It is a common linguistic misperception that there is some one-to-one
correspondence between an ideogram and the idea it represents. The
english letter "A" was originally a drawing of an ox-head.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A). It is as accurate to say that
English letters resemble "crude line-art drawings" as to say that
Chinese ideograms do.
except that in the case of the Latin alphabet, all association with the
original idea has long since gone away, and alphabetic characters have
no real meaning in themselves, besides a loose association with a
particular sound.
the pictographs generally have meanings more closely associated with
particular things and idea.
like, a tree sort of resembles a tree, ...
and meanwhile, many Asian countries either have shifted to, or are in the
process of shifting to, the use of phonetic writing systems (Koreans created
Hangul, Kanji gradually erodes in favor of Hiragana, ...). even in some
places in China (such as Canton) the traditional writing system is
degrading, with many elements of their spoken dialect being incorporated
into the written language.
This is also playing fast and loose with linguistics. Let's be wary
of drawing analogies to fields where we are not expert.
Yup. Such as this:
http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/10/our-paroqial-fermament-one-tide-on-another.html
is mainly in the context of # of characters, but also illustrates the
area it requires to convey the same amount of information.
(And yup, I can tell you Japanese aren't erodes in favor of
Hiragana...)
sorry...
just I thought it was that originally nearly all of the writing was
using Kanji, but over a long time (many centuries), the use of Kanji has
lessened some, and Hiragana has become a larger portion of the text.
admittedly, I don't really know Japanese either though... (besides what
I can gain from watching lots of anime...).
I have had some (limited) amount of personal experience interacting with
Chinese people, but don't know Chinese either (can't really
read/write/speak it, but can recognize a few of the basic characters...).
by complaining about "density" previously, I wasn't thinking like
traditional pictographs though, so much as people doing similar with
icons, say 64x64 pixels or so (like, more like Windows icons), and so
would lead to a larger portion of the screen being needed than with
words, or with the tradition of assigning meaning to particular globs of
ASCII characters (say, "->", "<=", "<=>", "++", ...).
or, people using UML diagrams and flow charts, which use large amounts
of screen or paper space, and often express less than could be stated
with a few lines of text.
and also, that I don't personally believe a pictographic system to be
inherently more "intuitive" than an equivalent word-based system, and
maybe less so, given the general "tool tips" experience (like, hover
mouse to try to figure out just what a given icon on the toolbar is
supposed to do...).
or such...
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