On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 13:15, Doug Ewell <[email protected]> wrote: > Your handwritten A and mine may look different, and both may differ from a > typewritten A, but they have something in common that allows us to identify > them with each other.
I have problems with this argument too. For example, consider the following text: YOURHANDWRITTENAANDMINEMAYLOOKDIFFERENTANDBOTHM AYDIFFERFROMATYPEWRITTENABUTTHEYHAVESOMETHINGIN COMMONTHATALLOWSUSTOIDENTIFYTHEMWITHEACHOTHER. This is written in a similar manner as texts were written in the past, before spacing, punctuation and lowercase came into being. Now it certainly has “something in common that allows us to identify” it with your original text. E.g., for most uses (but not all), we don’t mind adding modern punctuation and casing to ancient texts and saying it’s the “same” text. Nonetheless, by transforming your text I clearly lost some information. We don’t want to remove spacing and punctuation from plain text, even though the historic examples show that they’re not “strictly necessary”. (As you know, our plain text can even mark _different_ kinds of spacing, as you’re seeing if you’re reading this plain-text sentence in a variable-width font.) There’s some information lost when we render our “plain text” as ancient text. Similarly, there’s some information lost when we render handwritten text, typeset text, or computer “rich text” to plain text. It seems to me these two losses are different only in degree, not in kind. To run with your example, my handwriting certainly can go well beyond just “looking different” than a typewriter; it can actually encode significant linguistic information that the typewriter cannot. I have a letter whose author, in a moment of emotional distress, wrote the sentence “to hurt myself” several times, and in each time the words get larger and more slanted, with more irregular forms. This graphic resource is a representation of features of speak intensity, speed, intonation &c., which is to say, it has pretty much the same role as punctuation. If you encode her text in plain text, and even in rich text, you lose this linguistic information. The only way to keep something I’m willing to call “the same text”, in this case, would be an image. It’s all a matter of intended use. > The whole premise of reading and writing is that we > look below the surface to the identity of the letters and the meaning of the > words. No, the whole premise of reading and writing is to represent language, which is spoken, in a visual manner. Nothing to do with letters; letters are just tools for representing language. You cannot read without re-creating sound images in your head. Only after the sound image is recreated is that you reach the “meaning” (even, contrary to popular myth, in the case of so-called “ideographs”). Plain text can encode some features of the spoken language, but (obviously) not all. Some of the features left out might be considered important for some texts, in some uses. Nietzsche prose employs a lot of italics (which are typographic marks of something like emphatic stress in speak); if you take away the italics, the resulting text simply isn’t “the same” —everyone who uses Nietzsche texts (philosophy students, &c.) is interested in keeping the italics. The question here is what’s the cutoff point; where do we draw the line about what information goes into plain text, and why. In my humble opinion there seems to be no clear “why”; the line seems an entirely arbitrary technological artifact, a remnant of intuitions developed due to limitations of the typewriter, the teletypes, and early tty-style computer terminals. This is not a bad thing. I’m not dissing plain-text or saying we should abolish it or encode italics or anything like that. But by the same token I don’t consider it some special, unique representation of “true meaning”. Plain text is to me simply yet another attempt to represent language, and like all similar tools, has its strengths and weaknesses—in particular, like all language representation tools, it can encode some kinds of “meanings” and not others. -- Leonardo Boiko
